I called my mother from the Astoria promenade on Tuesday evening, that stretch of Astoria Park by the water where you can see the Hell Gate Bridge arching over the river like something out of a dream.
It was golden hour. The N train had carried me up here after work because I didn't want to go home to my apartment yet. Some evenings the quiet of my own room feels louder than the whole city.
She picked up on the second ring, which in India was the middle of the night, which meant she'd been waiting.
We talked for twenty minutes about absolutely nothing. The price of tomatoes. My cousin's engagement. Whether I was eating properly, which, no, I had a bodega bacon-egg-and-cheese for dinner, but I told her dal.
Here's the thing I didn't say while calling my mother from the Astoria promenade: I've been homesick in a way that doesn't have a name. Not the kind where you cry. The kind where you're fine, genuinely fine, and then you see a grandmother braiding a little girl's hair on the J train and your chest just caves in.
I didn't say it because what would she do? She'd worry across nine thousand miles and I'd feel guilty for making her carry it.
So instead I described the river to her. The runners, the Hell Gate Bridge, the lights starting to come on across the water. She said it sounded like the Sabarmati at night. I said it did, a little, if you squinted and forgot everything else.
There's a thing that happens when you call home. You become both the person who left and the person who stayed, holding both at once, and it's heavy and it's beautiful.
Before we hung up she said, in Gujarati, go home and eat something real. And I laughed and said I would.
Calling my mother from the Astoria promenade didn't fix the nameless thing. But her voice in my ear and the river in front of me felt, for a minute, like being in two places I loved at the same time.
Sometimes love is just talking about tomatoes and meaning everything else.
Love,