Being homesick for Ahmedabad during Navratri is a very particular flavor of missing home, and it arrived right on schedule this week.
Back home, Navratri isn't an event, it's the air. For nine nights the whole city of Ahmedabad spills into the streets and the grounds, everyone in chaniya cholis and mirror work, dandiya sticks clacking, the dhol so loud it lives in your chest. You dance until your feet hurt and your voice is gone and then you do it again the next night.
Here, Navratri looks different. A friend took me to a garba in a rented gym in Edison, New Jersey. We took the PATH and then someone's cousin drove us the rest of the way. The floor was basketball-court lines and the acoustics were terrible and honestly? It still made me cry a little, in a good way.
Because there they were — aunties who could out-dance anyone a third their age, kids in tiny cholis, a whole diaspora refusing to let the thing go even 7,000 miles from where it belongs. Being homesick for Ahmedabad during Navratri hurts most in these moments, when it's almost home but not quite.
The steps came back to my body instantly. That's the thing about garba, your feet remember what your head forgot. For three songs I wasn't in a Jersey gym, I wasn't a tired girl who commutes on the J train and worries about rent. I was fifteen and laughing on a ground in Ahmedabad with my cousins, dizzy and alive.
Then the song ended and the fluorescent lights came back and someone's phone was playing the next track off a laptop and I remembered where I was.
I called my mother from the parking lot. In Ahmedabad it was morning already, the real Navratri still going, and I could hear it faintly behind her voice. She held the phone up to the window so I could hear the city. I stood in a New Jersey parking lot and listened to home.
This is the deal I made when I moved here. You get the whole wide world and you give up the nine nights. Most days it's worth it. During Navratri I'm not so sure.
Next year, maybe, I dance on the actual streets again.
Until then, the Jersey gym will do, and I'll be grateful for it.
Love,