She FaceTimed me at 8am my time, which is evening theirs, and the first thing I saw was the courtyard of our building strung with lights.
My mother called during Navratri just to show me. No reason. She just wanted me to see the garba circle forming, the dhol starting up, the aunties in their mirror-work chaniya cholis that catch every bit of light.
I was on the 2 train. Somewhere under Harlem, pressed between a man eating a bacon-egg-and-cheese and a kid with a cello bigger than him. And there's my mother, holding the phone out so I can hear the music, saying, "Beta, see, see, your cousins are dancing."
I watched the whole thing on a cracked screen with one earbud in. And then I cried. Quietly, the New York way, where you just let it happen and nobody asks because everyone's got their own thing going on.
This is the part nobody tells you about moving away. It's not the big holidays you miss most. It's the ordinary grandness of them. Nine nights of dancing in a courtyard you grew up in, and you're on a subway going to a job in a city that doesn't know Navratri is happening.
When my mother called during Navratri last year, I told her I'd find a garba here. There are plenty — in Jersey, in Queens, big ones. I keep meaning to go. I keep not going. Because I'm scared it won't feel like ours.
I got off at 14th Street. Wiped my face. Walked up into the daylight.
I texted her: next year I'm coming home for Navratri. I don't know if it's true. But I meant it when I sent it.
Some homesickness you dance through. Some you just carry up the subway stairs.
Love,