I called my mother from the Astoria ferry dock on Sunday evening, when the light goes gold and Manhattan across the water looks like something you'd never actually live in.
It was morning for her. It's always the wrong time for one of us. Eleven and a half hours — that odd half-hour that India insists on keeping, like a small stubborn dignity.
She answered on WhatsApp mid-chore, phone propped somewhere, her voice moving in and out as she stirred something. "Beta, you're eating properly?" She always asks this first. She's been asking it for two years and I still lie a little.
I told her about the ferry, about how I sometimes come to the Astoria dock just to watch the water when the apartment feels too small. She said something about how the Sabarmati looks in the mornings now. I couldn't picture it exactly anymore and that scared me more than I let on.
Homesickness is not one big wave. That's the thing nobody tells you. It's small — it's the shape of your mother's voice cutting out mid-sentence, it's the way she says your name with two extra syllables of love that English can't hold.
A guy near me was doing pull-ups on the railing. Kids were fighting over an ice cream. The N train hummed somewhere behind me toward Ditmars. And I sat there on the Astoria ferry dock crying a very small, dignified amount, the kind you can pass off as the wind.
Before she hung up she said, "Come home when you can." Not a demand. A door left open.
I stayed until the sky turned that bruised purple and the ferry lights came on. I thought about how I chose this — the distance, the ferry docks, the whole beautiful lonely thing. Nobody made me. That's the part that's hardest and softest at once.
Love, it turns out, is mostly just calling at the wrong time anyway.
Love,