I took the 7 train to Jackson Heights on Saturday because I missed home so hard it felt physical, like a low ache behind my ribs.
Being homesick in Jackson Heights is a specific kind of medicine. You walk down 74th Street and suddenly it's all gold shops and sari stores and aunties negotiating prices in Gujarati, and for one second you forget you're a thirteen-hour flight away from your mother's kitchen.
I found dhokla. Soft, yellow, steaming, with that little pop of mustard seed. I ate it standing on the sidewalk like a barbarian and I nearly cried.
Here's the strange part about homesickness that nobody tells you. I'm not homesick for a place. I'm homesick for a time.
My Ahmedabad is changing without me. My cousin got married and I saw it on a shaky video call. There's a new flyover near our house I've never driven under. My dadi moves slower now. The city I picture when I close my eyes doesn't fully exist anymore — it's a photograph, and photographs don't update.
So being homesick in Jackson Heights is a little bit of a trick I play on myself. The dhokla tastes right. The Hindi film songs playing from a phone speaker are right. But it's a stitched-together version of home, held in Queens, made by people who are also missing something.
I bought fafda I didn't need. I bought a box of soan papdi that everyone jokes about but secretly loves. The uncle at the counter asked where I was from and when I said Ahmedabad his whole face changed. "Amdavadi!" he said, like we were family. Maybe we were, for those two minutes.
I rode the 7 train back to Manhattan holding my sweets in my lap, watching the skyline appear over the river. And I felt both things at once — proud of the life I'm building here, and quietly grieving the girl I was there.
You can love a new city and still leave the porch light on in your heart for an old one.
Call your grandmother this week. I mean it.
Love,