It was almost midnight and I couldn't sleep, so I sat on the stoop of my friend Renu's building on 129th and Lenox and called my mother.
Ahmedabad is nine and a half hours ahead. It's the half hour that gets me. Even our clocks refuse to fully line up.
So it was mid-morning for her. I could hear the pressure cooker. That whistle. Three times, and then she'll turn off the gas — I know the rhythm the way I know my own heartbeat.
"Have you eaten?" she asked. She always asks this first. Before hello, before how are you, before anything. Have you eaten. It is the most Indian mother question in existence and it always makes my throat tight.
I lied. I said yes. I'd had a bodega bacon-egg-and-cheese at 4pm and nothing since.
Homesickness in New York is a funny thing. It doesn't hit you during the loud parts — the parties in Bushwick, the rooftop in LES, the deadline days. It waits. It waits for the quiet stoop at midnight when the only sound is a distant siren and a cat somewhere judging you.
On the phone she told me about my cousin's engagement, about the mango season back home, about how the gulmohar tree on our street is flowering again. And I sat on a Harlem stoop, 7,000 miles away, watching a raccoon assess a trash bag like a food critic.
Two worlds. One phone call.
She said, "Beta, you sound tired." And I said no, and then I cried a little, quietly, so she wouldn't hear. But mothers hear everything. She just started humming an old Lata song, the one she used to hum when I had fever as a kid, and let me sit in it.
That's the thing nobody tells you about moving across the world. You don't stop being someone's child. You just do it long-distance now, over patchy WiFi, on a stoop, in the dark.
I went back up when the raccoon won.
Call your mother. She's probably already asking if you've eaten.
Love,