I went to Jackson Heights to buy a birthday gift for a friend and left having a full emotional breakdown in front of a display case. Classic Friday.
If you don't know, Jackson Heights on the 7 train is basically Little India stitched into Queens. 74th Street smells like jasmine and frying and diesel and it is the closest thing to home I have found in six years here.
I popped into a sweet shop just to grab a box of mithai. The uncle behind the counter, without asking, handed me a piece of kaju katli. "Try, fresh today." I put it in my mouth and I was gone. Not in New York. Not 24. I was eight years old in my Nani's kitchen in Ahmedabad, the fan clicking overhead, her telling me to stop eating before dinner.
And then I was just crying. In public. Over a diamond of cashew fudge.
Homesickness doesn't come when you plan for it. It comes sideways. It doesn't hit me on Diwali when I'm ready, dressed up, video-calling home. It hits me on a random Friday over free mithai from a stranger who reminds me of every uncle I've ever known.
The uncle didn't make it weird. He just slid the tissue box across the counter — the actual reason those exist in every desi shop, I'm now convinced — and said, "First time away from home is hardest, beta. It gets softer." How did he know. They always know.
I've built a real life here. Astoria apartment, good friends, a career my parents brag about. But homesickness lives in my body like a second heartbeat, quiet most days, deafening some. Jackson Heights is where I go to feel it on purpose, to let it out instead of swallowing it with the F train and my deadlines.
I bought two boxes. One for my friend, one for the ache. Ate half of mine on the 7 train home, ugly-crying softly behind my sunglasses like a woman in the third act of a Karan Johar film.
Homesickness isn't a wound. It's just love with nowhere to sit down.
Love,