My mother sent me a video last night. The society courtyard back in Ahmedabad, strung with lights, everyone in chaniya cholis, the dandiya sticks clacking in that rhythm my body still remembers without asking.
Being homesick during Navratri in New York is a specific flavor of missing. It's not just missing people. It's missing being a small part of something enormous. Hundreds of people moving in a circle, and you're one of them, and for nine nights nobody is lonely.
I watched the video three times in my studio in Queens, sitting cross-legged on my bed, and I didn't dance. I just felt it in my shoulders.
Here's the thing nobody warns you about leaving home. The homesickness doesn't get worse. It gets more specific. In my first year I missed everything, vaguely. Now I miss exact things. The particular off-key uncle who does the microphone announcements. The smell of the ground after they hose it down.
Being homesick during Navratri in New York made me do something I avoid. I went to a garba event in Jackson Heights. Took the 7 train, nervous, half-expecting it to make the missing worse.
It was smaller. A community hall, folding chairs along the walls, a sound system doing its best. But then the music started and this auntie I'd never met grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the circle, and my feet just knew.
I danced badly. I danced anyway. Some girl from Rajkot taught me a turn I'd forgotten.
It wasn't Ahmedabad. It will never be Ahmedabad. But it was enough to remind me the circle exists wherever we are. We just have to be brave enough to walk into it.
I cried a little on the 7 train home. The good kind.
Some ache you don't cure. You just dance with it.
Love,