The most peaceful hour of my week happens at a laundromat on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn.
I know how that sounds.
But hear me out. I take the 2 down, drag my sad blue IKEA bag of clothes, and I claim my usual chair by the window where the light comes in slanted and warm in the late afternoon.
The Nostrand Avenue laundromat is not fancy. The change machine eats dollars and gives nothing back roughly one time in five. There is a cat that belongs to no one and everyone. An auntie always beats me to the good dryer.
But here is my ritual. While my clothes tumble, I put in my headphones and play my Ma's old Hindi songs. Lata, Kishore, the ones that used to drift out of our kitchen radio in Ahmedabad on Sunday mornings while she made theplas.
I fold warm clothes on Nostrand Avenue to Lag Ja Gale and I am, for ten minutes, both places at once. Brooklyn and Gujarat. Twenty-four and eight.
There is something about warm laundry that undoes the whole hard shell of being a young woman surviving New York. The clothes come out of the dryer smelling clean and holding heat, and I press a t-shirt to my face like a total lunatic and nobody at the Nostrand Avenue laundromat judges me because they have all done it too.
We are all just folding our small lives into neat squares and trying to smell home in the steam.
The auntie left me the good dryer today. She smiled at me. I do not know her name.
New York gives you these strangers who feel like family for exactly one wash cycle.
Some cathedrals have stained glass. Mine has a broken change machine.
Love,