I called Mumma from a stoop in Harlem tonight because my apartment felt too small to hold both me and how much I missed her.
It's a good stoop. On a quiet block off Frederick Douglass, brownstone the color of jaggery, a planter of marigolds someone actually keeps alive. I sat on the second step and dialed and the phone rang the way it only rings across an ocean — that hollow, patient ring.
She picked up mid-sentence, already scolding me. Had I eaten. Why do I look thin. Am I drinking enough water in this heat. It was 4:30 in the morning her time. She'd woken up and couldn't sleep and I'd known, somehow, that she'd be awake.
Homesickness in New York doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come when you'd expect, on Diwali or your birthday. It ambushes you on a Thursday in July when you smell someone else's dinner from an open window and it isn't your mother's.
We didn't say anything important. She told me about the neighbor's daughter's wedding, the sari she's saving for me, the monsoon that came early. I told her about work in the smallest possible words because the fashion industry sounds absurd when you explain it to a woman who has darned the same three saris for twenty years.
The streetlight came on above me. A kid rode past on a scooter. Somewhere a radio played something old, something Kishore Kumar would have approved of, and I closed my eyes.
Here is the thing about calling your mother from a stoop in Harlem. You are held by two places at once. The stone under you is New York. The voice in your ear is home. And for nineteen minutes you don't have to choose.
She said, before hanging up, beta, the city is not going anywhere, but I am getting old, so call more.
I'm calling more. I promise I'm calling more.
Some distances you can only close one ring at a time.
Love,