There is a small Indian grocer near 77th Street, a few blocks from where the 6 train spits you out onto Lexington. I wasn't even looking. I was there for lentils and left with a box of Alphonso mangoes because the smell hit me before I saw the sign.
Alphonso mangoes are a very specific kind of heartbreak. Golden, small, the exact shade of the sarees my nani folds into her steel almirah in Ahmedabad. The vendor charged me an amount that would make my mother faint.
I carried them home like they were made of glass.
And then I couldn't eat them. They sat on my counter in Astoria for four days, ripening into a perfume that filled the whole apartment. Every time I picked one up I put it back down.
Because in my house, mango season was a whole event. My nani would peel them over the sink, standing, never sitting, feeding slices to whoever walked past. She'd suck the seed clean and hand it to me like a trophy. Alphonso mangoes were never a thing you bought alone in a Queens kitchen at 9pm.
Eating one felt like admitting she wasn't in the next room.
I finally cut one last night. Stood at my sink, exactly the way she does. Made a mess. Let the juice run down my wrist to my elbow like a child. And I cried, honestly, a little, over the cutting board.
Homesickness is strange. It doesn't come when you expect it, at Diwali or on your birthday. It comes through a box of Alphonso mangoes near the 6 train on a Tuesday, when your guard is completely down.
I called her after. It was very early morning in Gujarat. She picked up on the second ring like she'd been waiting, which she probably had. I told her about the mangoes. She laughed and said I was paying tourist prices and getting robbed.
Some distances a phone call can't close. But a mango, apparently, gets you close enough.
Love,