I went to Jackson Heights on Saturday because I needed to be around brown people who weren't on a video call, and I ended up crying quietly on the 7 train holding a box of kaju katli.
Let me back up.
Homesickness had been building all week. It's sneaky like that. It doesn't come when you'd expect, like Diwali or a birthday. It comes on a random Wednesday because someone on the street was wearing the exact shade of turmeric yellow my nani wore.
So I took the 7 out to 74th Street, which if you've never been, is the closest thing to being dropped into a lane in Ahmedabad without leaving the city. The sweet shop windows. The aunties bargaining. The smell of frying somewhere, always.
I bought kaju katli from a place near 37th Road, and the man behind the counter wrapped it the exact way they do back home, that quick fold with the string. I hadn't seen that in three years. My throat did the thing.
Homesickness is strange because I chose this. I fought to be in New York. Nobody exiled me. And still, standing in that shop, I wanted to be small again, sitting on the kitchen floor while my grandmother pressed silver varak onto the sweets with her thumb.
I ate one on the platform. It was good. It wasn't hers. Almost, but almost is a whole language when you're far from home.
On the ride back, somewhere around Queensboro Plaza, I let myself cry a little. Not the pretty kind. The kind where you pretend it's allergies. A woman across from me offered me a tissue without a word, and that small New York kindness cracked me open more than the mithai did.
I FaceTimed my mom from the train. She was in the middle of cooking. She held the phone up to the dal like I could smell it. I almost could.
Jackson Heights didn't cure the homesickness. It just held it for a while, which is maybe all any place can do.
Some days you're a New Yorker. Some days you're just your grandmother's girl, far from the kitchen floor.
Love,