My best friend here, Ananya, told me over dinner in Astoria that she's moving back to Mumbai in August. She's known for a while. She told me last, which is either the biggest compliment or the biggest crime, and I haven't decided.
We were at that Greek place off the N/W at Broadway, the one with the lemon potatoes we always over-order. She said it plainly, between bites. "I got the job in Mumbai. I'm going home."
Home. That word did something to my chest.
Here is what nobody tells you about immigrant friendship. When you find another Indian girl in this city who gets it — who understands the phone calls to your mother, the code-switching, the specific loneliness of being the only brown person in the room at work — she becomes more than a friend. She becomes a piece of the home you left behind. Ananya was my Ahmedabad in New York. My Gujarati jokes landed. My silences were understood.
And now she's leaving, and I am genuinely happy for her, and also I want to lie down on the floor of the Astoria subway platform.
The grief of a friend moving back to India is a specific one. It's not a fight, not a falling out. It's timezones. It's the eleven-hour gap that will eat our late-night calls. It's knowing our friendship is about to become voice notes sent into the void, heard nine hours later.
I told her I was happy for her. I meant it. Then I cried a little into the lemon potatoes and she laughed and cried too and the waiter very kindly pretended not to see.
We walked to the N together after. She hugged me under the elevated tracks and said, "You'll come to Mumbai. And I'll come back to visit." We both know how that usually goes.
Love the people who make this city home. Even the ones who leave it.
Love,