I called my mother at 11PM my time, which is her morning, from a stoop on 31st Avenue in Astoria. I wasn't even supposed to be there — I'd gone to a friend's for dinner and left too full and too raw and couldn't face the N train yet.
So I sat on a stranger's stoop and dialed home.
She answered on the second ring like she always does, like she's just sitting by the phone waiting, which she probably is. "Beta, you ate something?" First question. Always the first question. As if food is the only proof that I'm okay over here.
The homesick call is a genre of its own. You don't say you're homesick. You ask about the neighbors. You ask if Papa took his medicine. You let her tell you which cousin is getting married and pretend you have opinions.
Across the street a Greek bakery was closing up, that warm bread smell drifting over, and it smelled like nothing from home and everything like comfort anyway. Astoria does that. It's so full of other people's grandmothers that you can almost borrow the feeling.
I told her New York was good. I told her work was good. I did not tell her that I'd cried on the L train on Tuesday for no reason a therapist would accept.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about the homesick call: you chose to leave. Nobody made me get on that plane. I wanted this city so badly I could taste it, and I still do, and I can want it and grieve Ahmedabad in the exact same breath.
We stayed on the phone until her chai went cold. She kept talking just to keep me on the line. I kept listening just to keep her voice in my ear a little longer.
Missing someone is just love with nowhere to sit down.
Love,