I called Amma on Sunday from the fire escape because my apartment had no good light and she likes to see my face properly. She squints at the screen otherwise and says, beta, you look tired, are you eating, in a tone that is half love and half accusation.
The fire escape faces the back of the building in Bed-Stuy, where someone three floors down grows tomatoes in buckets and someone else has wind chimes that sound exactly like nothing in particular. I sat on the metal grate with a cup of chai and we talked for forty minutes about nothing.
She showed me the new curtains. She told me Mrs. Shah's daughter is getting married. She held the phone up to the kitchen so I could see the pressure cooker hissing, and I swear I could almost smell the dal through the screen, which is impossible, and yet.
Homesickness is strange when you're 24 and chose this. I am not stranded. I have a flight I could book. We text every day. But there is a kind of missing that lives in the small things, the way she tucks the phone under her chin while chopping, the exact pitch of her laugh, the way the late Ahmedabad afternoon turns everything gold behind her.
The call ended and that's when it hit. The fire escape suddenly felt very far from that kitchen. Eight thousand miles is a number until you feel it sitting on your chest.
I thought about how in Bollywood the homesickness is always so cinematic, the heroine staring out of a window with violins swelling. Mine is just me on a fire escape in Brooklyn, slightly damp, watching a neighbor's tomatoes, missing a woman who is perfectly fine and probably already forwarding me good morning WhatsApp flowers.
That's the part nobody warns you about. You can miss someone who isn't gone. You can be homesick for a place that's still there, waiting, the same.
I texted her good night. She replied with three flower emojis and a sun. I held the phone a second longer than I needed to.
Distance is just love with bad timing.
Love,