I took the 7 train all the way out to Jackson Heights on Sunday, because heartbreak makes you do two things: lie in bed, or go find your people. I did both. Bed first, obviously.
74th Street in Jackson Heights is the closest thing to home I've found in this entire country. The smell hits you before you even climb the subway stairs, jasmine and frying samosa and exhaust and incense, all at once. My whole nervous system exhales.
I went for groceries. Toor dal, curry leaves, a tin of the right ghee, the small things that make my Manhattan kitchen feel less like a stranger's. But what I actually found, on a fruit cart on 74th Street, was the best mango of my life.
Alphonso. Kesar's prettier cousin. The man at the cart let me smell one before buying, the way you're supposed to, and it smelled like Ahmedabad in May, like summer afternoons under the ceiling fan, like Ma slicing fruit and feeding me pieces straight off the knife.
I bought a whole box. Twelve dollars. Carried it on the 7 train like a newborn.
I ate the first one standing up at my kitchen counter that night, leaning over the sink the way you have to with a real mango, juice down my wrists, no dignity, total joy. The best mango of my life. I'm not being dramatic. Okay, I'm a little dramatic. But it was.
There's a particular loneliness to being far from home, and there's a particular cure for it, and sometimes the cure costs twelve dollars and requires the 7 train and a lot of napkins.
Jackson Heights doesn't fix everything. I still came home to an apartment that's mine alone now. But I came home with mangoes and curry leaves and the feeling of having been, for one afternoon, completely understood by a neighborhood.
The city is enormous and indifferent and then it hands you a mango that tastes like your mother's kitchen.
Go to 74th Street. Smell the mango first. That part isn't optional.
Love,