Summer cracked open this week and I went looking for a mango.
Not any mango. The Alphonso. Kesar, if I'm being honest, is the one that tastes like my childhood — that orange flesh so soft you eat it over the sink like an animal, juice down your wrist, your nani yelling that you're wasting it.
So I took the 7 to Jackson Heights, because if anywhere in this city has it, it's the stretch of 74th Street where the world smells like cumin and fresh coriander and somebody's frying something perfect.
I found the boxes. Patel Brothers, stacked like treasure. Twenty-eight dollars. I bought them anyway.
And here's the embarrassing part of being homesick in New York City — I cut one open in my Astoria kitchen that night, fully expecting to time-travel, and it was good. It was really good. But it wasn't the mango from the tree behind our building in Ahmedabad. It couldn't be. That mango doesn't exist anymore. That tree, that me, that summer with no rent and no visa anxiety and a mother three rooms away.
Homesickness is sneaky like that. You think it's about the food. It's never about the food.
I stood at my counter, twenty-four years old, in a city of eight million, crying a little over a perfectly fine mango. And I let myself. That's the growth, I think. I used to swallow it. Now I let the missing move through me like weather.
I texted my mom a photo. She wrote back, "Eat it slowly, beta. Don't waste." The exact thing my nani said. The line just gets passed down, mouth to mouth, across an ocean and a 7 train.
Homesickness in New York City is not a problem to be solved. It's the price of building a life somewhere your bones don't recognize. I pay it gladly, mostly. Some nights it just comes due all at once.
I ate the second mango the next morning. Over the sink. Juice down my wrist.
Nobody yelled at me. So I yelled at myself, fondly, in my mother's voice.
Some homes you carry. Some you just visit on the 7.
Love,