I take the 7 to Jackson Heights when I'm homesick, which I tell myself is a treat but is honestly a coping mechanism with extra steps.
The walk down 74th Street is the closest thing New York has to the lanes back home. Sari shops blazing with gold. The man selling marigold garlands. Aunties bargaining like it's an Olympic sport. The smell of frying everything.
I bought a bag of jalebi from the place near the corner, the orange spirals still warm and dripping, and I ate one standing on the sidewalk and immediately wanted to cry.
Because here's the homesick math nobody warns you about. You come to Jackson Heights to feel close to home, and it works, and that's exactly the problem. The closer you get, the wider the gap feels. The jalebi is perfect. It's just not my Nani's jalebi, made in a kitchen I can no longer walk into without a fourteen-hour flight.
I sat in Diversity Plaza for a while watching uncles play chess and a little girl in a frilly dress refusing to hold her father's hand. The homesickness sat next to me like an old friend who overstays.
I used to think homesickness would fade with time, like a callus. It doesn't. It just gets more specific. Today it was the exact way Nani would say my full name when she was pretending to be annoyed. Pooja-beta, with the long disappointed vowel.
I called her from the plaza. The connection was bad. She still asked if I was eating. I said I was eating jalebi right now, on the street, like a vagabond, and she laughed so hard she coughed.
Maybe that's what Jackson Heights is for. Not to cure the homesickness, but to give it somewhere to sit for an afternoon.
I took the 7 back with sticky fingers and a fuller, sadder, better heart.
Some distances you don't close. You just learn to wave across them.
Love,