My cousin sent me a video tonight. Forty-two seconds of our whole family doing garba in the society compound, the dandiya sticks clicking, my mother's chaniya choli the exact shade of marigold I would kill to find in New York.
I watched it four times sitting on my kitchen floor in Harlem with a bowl of cold Maggi.
This is my third year missing Navratri. You'd think it gets easier. It does not get easier. It just gets quieter, which people mistake for the same thing.
Missing Navratri from New York is a very specific loneliness. It's not that I don't have Indian friends here — I do, we did a tiny garba thing in a friend's Jackson Heights living room last weekend, four of us and a Bluetooth speaker. It was lovely. It was also not it.
Because home garba isn't the dancing. It's the aunties criticizing your form. It's the boy you had a crush on at 16 showing up and ruining your whole year. It's your Ba fixing your dupatta without asking.
You cannot recreate aunties. I've tried.
I walked up to the roof of my building after the Maggi. You can see a sliver of the city from there, the water towers, somebody's string lights two buildings over. The 125th Street noise coming up soft.
I did two slow garba turns up there by myself. Felt insane. Felt necessary.
I think homesickness is just love with nowhere to go. It builds up and you have to do something with your hands, so you dance badly on a Harlem rooftop at 11pm and you let your eyes do the thing they do.
I called my mother. She picked up mid-garba, breathless, phone sideways. "Beta, dance with us," she said, and turned the camera to the compound.
So I did. Through a screen. Forty-two seconds times a hundred.
Next year I'm booking the ticket. I keep saying that. But I mean it a little more each time.
If you're far from home this season too — go dance anyway.
Love,