My friend Reema has a rooftop in Astoria — the illegal kind, where you climb out a window and pretend the landlord doesn't exist — and last night I called my mother from up there.
It was 8PM in Queens, which is 5:30AM in Ahmedabad, and my mother answered in her nightie with her hair in the braid she's worn since before I was born. She was already up. She is always already up.
"Why are you outside," she said, squinting. "Where is the roof."
I showed her. The Manhattan skyline doing its showoff thing in the distance, the Hell Gate Bridge, the N train crawling across the elevated tracks like a beetle. The whole sky over Queens going that bruised pink-orange that makes you forgive the city everything.
She was quiet. Then she said the building across from theirs got a new coat of paint and the neighbor's daughter got engaged and did I want to see the mango tree, it had fruit this year.
And that's when I cried a little. Quietly, so she wouldn't fuss. Because being homesick isn't always the big dramatic thing. Sometimes it's a mango tree you can't stand under.
The strange math of living here is this: I am exactly where I wanted to be. I fought to be on this rooftop in Astoria with the N train and the skyline and a degree I worked for. And I still want to be standing under that tree in the morning while my mother yells that the chai is getting cold.
Both things. At the same time. Nobody warns you that you can be heartbroken and grateful in the same breath.
Reema came out with two cups of chai, the real kind, boiled-down and over-sugared the way we don't apologize for, and she didn't ask why my eyes were red. She just sat. That's friendship, I think — sitting next to your homesickness without trying to fix it.
My mother said, before she hung up, "You are far, but you are not lost." And then she told me to wear a jacket because she could see I was cold even through a phone in another time zone.
How do they always know.
If you're far from your mother tonight, call her. The chai will keep.
Love,