I called my mother from a stoop on 129th Street this week, a little past midnight my time, which made it mid-morning for her in Ahmedabad.
The heat had finally broken. Someone down the block was playing music and the whole street felt soft, the kind of Harlem night where everyone's out on their steps because inside is too small for July.
My mother answered on the second ring. She always does. She keeps her phone the way some people keep a rosary.
She asked if I was eating. I said yes, Mummy. She asked if I was eating properly. I said no, and she laughed, and then there was that pause where I could hear the pressure cooker whistling behind her and my whole childhood came flooding into my throat.
Homesickness is a strange animal. It doesn't come when you expect it, on Diwali or your birthday or when it's cold. It comes on a warm stoop in Harlem when your mother mentions she made dhokla and there was nobody to eat the extra piece.
We stayed on the phone for forty minutes. Half of it was silence. The connection kept cutting, her voice folding in on itself, and I'd say hello, hello, are you there, and she'd say haan haan I'm here, I'm always here.
That's the thing about being loved from six thousand miles away. It doesn't get smaller. It just gets quieter. It waits.
A guy walked past with his dog and nodded at me the way people do here when they see you crying but respect you enough to pretend you're not.
My mother told me the neighbor's daughter is getting married. She told me the mango season was good this year. She told me she saw a girl on TV who reminded her of me and she'd cried a little, and could I please just come home for two weeks, just two.
I said I'd try. We both knew what that meant.
When we hung up I sat on that stoop a while longer, letting the night hold me. The music kept playing. New York kept being New York, indifferent and enormous and mine.
Some nights the whole city is just a very long hallway back to my mother's kitchen.
Love,