My little sister Riya got engaged this week. I found out on a rooftop in Astoria, off the 30th Avenue stop, watching the N train crawl across the bridge in that pink dusk light New York does in late June.
She called me at 9PM my time, which is 6:30AM hers, her voice all sleepless and shining. She held the phone up to show the ring and the henna and our cousins screaming in the background of a Ahmedabad living room I could draw from memory.
And I was so happy. I was. I cried the good kind.
But after we hung up, I sat on that Astoria rooftop alone with my warm beer and felt the other thing. The thing nobody warns you about when you move away. You miss the big moments by exactly twelve hours and seven thousand miles, and you experience all of them through a six-inch screen.
I should have been there to fix her dupatta. To fight with the caterer. To be the annoying older sister hiding her engagement gift badly.
Instead I was on a rooftop in Queens, where the air smelled like somebody's barbecue and the call to nobody-in-particular of a city that doesn't know my sister exists.
Missing my sister from an Astoria rooftop is its own genre of homesickness. It's not loud. It doesn't make you book a flight. It just sits next to you and watches the train go by.
I texted her later: I'm flying home for the wedding even if I have to sell a kidney. She sent back forty heart emojis and a voice note where she just laughed.
That laugh. I'd cross any number of oceans for that laugh.
The N train went by again, all lit up, full of strangers. And I let myself feel both things at once. Joy and distance. They live on the same rooftop now.
Sometimes love is just being thrilled for someone from very far away.
Love,