I called my mother from the fire escape last night. Midnight here, which is nine-thirty in the morning in Ahmedabad. She was already three cups of chai deep and organizing the kitchen.
I hadn't planned to call. But I'd had a hard week — Reha leaving, the sudden cold, a general sense of being far from everything soft. So I climbed out my window in Crown Heights and sat on the fire escape with the phone against my ear.
She knew immediately. Mothers always know. "Beta, what happened," she said, not as a question. I said nothing happened. She waited. I cracked in about forty seconds.
Calling my mother when I'm homesick is a specific kind of medicine. It doesn't cure anything. It just reminds me I belong to someone.
She walked me through her morning like she does. The neighbor's new grandchild. My father's blood pressure. The mangoes are almost done for the season, so sad. She held up the phone so I could see the terrace, the same terrace where I learned to fly kites, wobbly and stubborn.
Below me, Brooklyn did its late-night thing. A car with the bass too loud. Someone laughing on Nostrand. The fire escape metal cold against my legs already, autumn arriving even here in this metal cage.
"Are you eating properly," she asked, which is her way of saying I love you and I worry about you constantly. I lied and said yes. She knew that too.
When I'm homesick, I used to fight it. Now I let it come. It just means I have two homes and my heart is stretched thin across an ocean. That's not a wound. That's the price of a big life.
We talked for an hour. She hummed an old Lata song while looking for something in a drawer, forgetting I was still there.
I didn't hang up. I just listened to her look for it.
Some nights the fire escape is the closest I can get to home.
Love,