I cried on a video call with my mother on Sunday and I still don't fully know why.
She was in the kitchen in Ahmedabad, phone propped against the atta dabba, showing me the dhokla she'd steamed. Steam fogged the camera. She kept saying beta, come closer, I can't see you, and I kept leaning into a screen that couldn't bring her closer at all.
The homesickness didn't build. It ambushed me. One second I was fine on my fire escape in Astoria watching the 7 train rattle past, and the next my throat closed like a fist.
Here is the embarrassing part. What set me off was a saree. Earlier that day I'd tried to fold one of her old ones — a green Bandhani she'd sent with me — and I couldn't get the pleats right. My hands don't remember what hers know without thinking.
I came to New York wanting to be a person who could handle everything. Fashion degree, big city, no chai served in bed. I built a life on the J train and thrifted furniture and a rooftop in Astoria that faces the wrong way for sunsets but the right way for the skyline.
And still. Homesickness doesn't care about your resume.
My mother saw my face crumple and she didn't panic. She just kept cooking, kept talking, told me about the neighbor's wedding and the price of tomatoes, letting her ordinary voice be a rope I could climb back up.
That's the thing nobody tells you about homesickness. It isn't always about a place. It's about being known so completely that you don't have to explain yourself. In New York I am always, gently, explaining myself.
Before we hung up she made me hold the phone up to my green saree. She talked me through the pleats, one by one, from six thousand miles away. Tuck. Fold. Tuck.
It came out crooked. She said it was perfect.
Some love travels the whole way across an ocean and still fits in your hands.
Love,