Some days the office is too much and I disappear into the fire stairwell on the 14th floor to breathe. This week I did that and, without deciding to, I called Mummy.
It was 7pm in Ahmedabad. She picked up on the second ring, mid-sentence, already scolding Papa about something in the background. That's the thing nobody tells you about calling home. You don't just reach a person, you reach an entire ongoing life you're no longer inside of.
Calling Mummy from a stairwell in Midtown is a specific kind of loneliness. Concrete steps, a flickering exit sign, the muffled hum of a city that does not know you're crying a little.
She asked if I was eating. She always asks if I'm eating. I said yes, which was a lie, because a bodega bagel is technically food but not the food she means.
Then she started telling me about the Ganpati visarjan back home, how the whole society got together, how Sharmila aunty made too much modak again. And I could see it so clearly it hurt. The marigolds. The drums. The particular gold of the evening light on our balcony.
Here I was in a gray stairwell off Sixth Avenue, and there she was inside all that color.
The homesickness isn't loud usually. It lives quietly, folded into my day like a note in a coat pocket. But calling Mummy from a stairwell in Midtown pulls it out into the open. Makes me feel twenty-four and very small.
She didn't say she missed me. We don't do that outright, our family. Instead she said, "When you come in December, I'll make sabudana khichdi first thing." Which is the same thing. Which is everything.
Before we hung up she said, "Beta, sit up straight, you're always slouching in these calls." She can't even see me. She just knows.
I went back to my desk with red eyes and finished the deck.
Love, for us, is a menu of dishes waiting on the other side of a plane ticket.
Love,