I have a Sunday habit I'm not proud of and also would not give up for anything. I climb out onto my fire escape in Astoria with a cup of chai and I call my mother in Ahmedabad.
It's late there, past her bedtime, but she always picks up. She always pretends she wasn't asleep.
Calling mummy from the fire escape is the closest I get to sitting in our kitchen back home. She props the phone against the fruit bowl and I watch the ceiling fan I grew up under. She tells me about the neighbors, the wedding she's being dragged to, the price of everything.
This week she asked if I'm eating properly and I lied and said yes while holding a half-eaten bag of Takis.
The thing nobody tells you about homesickness is that it doesn't hit when things go wrong. It hits in the ordinary moments. This week it hit when I smelled someone cooking tadka somewhere in my building, that sharp crackle of jeera in hot ghee, and for one second I was eight years old again waiting for dinner.
I almost cried on the 30th Avenue platform. Over tadka. In public. Very dignified.
My mother and I don't say I love you much. We're not that kind of family. Instead she says have you worn something warm, and I say yes mummy, and that is the same thing. That has always been the same thing.
Calling mummy from the fire escape means I get to keep both my lives at once. The girl from Gujarat and the woman freezing on a metal ledge above Astoria, watching the N train rumble past in the distance.
Before we hung up she sang two lines of an old Lata Mangeshkar song, the one she used to hum while braiding my hair. Badly. Beautifully. Then she said go to sleep, beta, and I did.
Some distances you don't cross. You just call across them, every Sunday, until it feels like home.
Love,