I made a friend this year who gets the Indian me, and I didn't realize how much I'd been missing that until I had it.
Her name is Reshma and we met through work, and last week we took the 7 train out to Jackson Heights to eat biryani like our ancestors intended. Jackson Heights on a Friday evening is the closest thing to home I've found in this whole country.
The thing about making friends in New York as an immigrant is that you spend so much energy translating yourself. Explaining the references. Softening the accent you didn't know you had until someone pointed it out. Being the fun fact about India at every dinner party.
With Reshma I don't translate. I made a Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham joke and she finished it. I said I was feeling homesick and she didn't try to fix it, she just ordered more food, which is the correct and only response.
We walked down 74th Street past the sari shops lit up gold, past the sweet shops, past aunties haggling, and I felt something in my body unclench. I didn't have to be the ambassador of a country of 1.4 billion people. I could just be Pooja.
I love my American friends. I do. But there's a specific loneliness in being the only one at the table who knows what your Sunday mornings smelled like growing up. Who knows the weight of what you left behind to be here.
Making friends in New York is supposedly hard, and it is, but the harder thing is making friends who see all of you. The NYC version and the Ahmedabad version and all the confused versions in between.
We ate too much. We complained about men. We talked about our mothers with that specific mix of love and exasperation that only daughters understand. We split the bill badly and didn't care.
On the 7 train home she fell asleep on my shoulder and I didn't move for forty minutes.
Some people you don't have to explain yourself to. Hold onto those ones.
Love,