I called Mummy from a bench in DUMBO on Tuesday evening, right under the Manhattan Bridge, where the tourists line up to take that one photo everyone takes.
It was 8PM here, which meant it was some ungodly hour in Ahmedabad, but she picked up anyway. She always picks up.
The video kept freezing. Her face would go still mid-sentence, mouth open, and I'd say Mummy? Mummy, you froze. And then she'd unfreeze and I'd lost whatever she said.
Somewhere in the freezing and unfreezing she asked if I was eating properly. I said yes. This was a lie. I'd had a bagel and half a bag of Haldiram's for dinner.
Homesickness doesn't hit me the way I expect it to. It's not the big festivals. Diwali I can handle, I make it a whole event with the girls.
It's the small things. It's wanting to hand my phone to someone and say look, look at this bridge, isn't it beautiful, and having no one there to hand it to.
So I called Mummy. And I held the phone up so she could see the water and the lights coming on and a boat going by, and she went beta it looks like a film.
And then I started crying, quietly, on a bench in DUMBO, while a couple beside me argued about where to get pizza.
Mummy couldn't see the tears because the connection was too grainy, which was almost a mercy. She just kept talking. About the neighbor's daughter's wedding, about the mango season being good this year, about how Papa still can't work the new TV remote.
Ordinary things. The soundtrack of a home that keeps going without me in it.
That's the part of homesickness nobody warns you about. Not that you miss them. That life there doesn't pause for your absence. The mangoes ripen whether you're there to eat them or not.
I told her I loved her. She told me to wear a jacket, in July, because mothers don't believe in New York summers.
We hung up. I sat there a little longer.
Some nights the whole ocean fits inside a phone screen.
Love,