I went to Jackson Heights on Saturday to buy fake jhumkas for a styling shoot. That's all. A simple errand on the 7 train, in and out, back home by two.
Instead I stood outside a banquet hall on 74th Street and cried into a samosa.
Here is what happened. I was walking down Roosevelt Avenue, dodging the aunties and the gold-shop windows and the man selling cut mango with chili, and I heard the dhol. That specific thump. And then the shehnai over a speaker, slightly distorted, the way it always is at real weddings and never in movies.
A baraat was assembling. The groom looked nervous in his sherwani. His friends were already sweating through their kurtas in the June heat, dancing anyway, badly, joyfully.
And I wasn't invited. Of course I wasn't. I don't know these people. But homesickness in Jackson Heights doesn't ask permission. It just walks up and sits beside you.
Because Jackson Heights is the closest thing I have to Ahmedabad in this city. The smell of frying onions and incense. Hindi and Gujarati and Punjabi crossing each other on the sidewalk. The 7 train rattling overhead like it has somewhere better to be.
I thought I had made my peace with being far from home. I have a good apartment, good friends, a job people back home brag about. But a stranger's wedding undid me in roughly forty seconds.
I think it's because at home, you don't choose to belong. You just do. Here I am always choosing, always translating, always a little bit performing. And then the dhol plays and your body remembers a version of you that never had to try.
I bought my jhumkas. The shopkeeper, a Gujarati uncle, heard my accent and gave me ten percent off for being a 'ghar ki ladki.' I cried a little more in the shop. He pretended not to notice and offered me chai.
Homesickness in Jackson Heights isn't sadness, exactly. It's love with nowhere to land.
Some days the whole city is a wedding you weren't invited to. Crash it anyway.
Love,