There's a fruit stand on Steinway Street in Astoria that stacks Alphonso mangoes in little cardboard flats, six to a box, and every August I stand there like I'm meeting an old friend at the airport.
Today I bought a box and immediately called my mother.
"They're eight dollars for six," I told her, in the specific outraged tone of an Indian daughter reporting a crime.
She laughed. She told me the ones from our vendor in Ahmedabad were sweeter, riper, that I was eating mangoes that had traveled too far and forgotten themselves. She's not wrong. NYC mangoes are always a little jet-lagged.
But here's the thing about homesickness — it doesn't announce itself. It ambushes you at a fruit stand in Astoria between the guy selling phone chargers and the halal cart. One minute you're haggling in your head, the next your throat is tight and you're pretending the sun is in your eyes.
My mother kept talking. About the monsoon finally breaking. About my cousin's engagement. About how the terrace plants are thriving in the rain. And I stood there on Steinway with a box of imperfect mangoes, nodding at a woman eight thousand miles away, feeling the whole width of the ocean.
Homesickness is strange because I chose this. I fought for this. I wanted New York so badly I could taste it, and now I'm here, and I still cry at a fruit stand in Astoria over mangoes that aren't quite right.
Both things are true. You can love your life and grieve the one you left. Nobody tells you that the ache doesn't mean you made a mistake. It just means you loved two places.
I took the mangoes home on the N. Cut one open at my kitchen counter. It wasn't Ahmedabad-sweet. But it was sweet enough, and I ate it over the sink like my grandmother taught me, letting the juice run down my wrist, not caring.
My mother texted after: "Eat it, don't just describe it to me."
So I did.
Some love is a phone call and a mango and a mess in the sink.
Love,