Navratri started this week and I felt it before I checked the calendar. There's a specific ache that arrives on schedule, like my body keeps Gujarati time even when my life doesn't.
Back in Ahmedabad, Navratri isn't a night. It's a season. Nine nights of garba until 2am, feet destroyed, borrowed chaniya cholis, the whole city humming. My cousins would drag me out even when I said I was tired, because you were never actually tired during Navratri. That was a myth you told your parents.
Being homesick during Navratri in a studio apartment on the Upper East Side is its own particular flavor. I put on music. I did two sad little dandiya moves with chopsticks in my kitchen. My downstairs neighbor probably thought I was assembling furniture badly.
So I fixed it. Sort of. A friend told me about a garba night across the river in Edison, New Jersey, and I took the PATH out on Thursday like a woman on a pilgrimage.
And there it was. Hundreds of people, the dhol, the twirling, aunties who adopted me within four minutes and asked which family I was from. I danced until my feet hurt in the good way. For two hours I wasn't homesick. I was just home, temporarily, in a rented community hall in Jersey.
Then I got back on the PATH and cried a little between stations, which is the New York way of processing joy.
Here's the thing about being homesick during Navratri: it doesn't mean you made the wrong choice moving here. It means you loved something real enough to miss it. That's not a wound. That's proof.
I'll go back to Edison next week. My feet have already forgiven me.
Some homes you leave. Some you just carry.
Love,