My best friend flew back to India for good this week, and I stood at JFK and let her go with a smile I did not mean.
Her name is Sneha. We came to New York the same year, two Gujarati girls pretending we knew how to work the OMNY reader. She lived in Jackson Heights, I am up in Harlem, and the 7 train and the internet held our whole friendship together for four years.
We did everything here. Cried in a bathroom at a rooftop party in LES. Split one dosa in Jackson Heights when we were broke. Sat on the DUMBO cobblestones under the bridge taking photos we swore we would print and never did.
And this week I helped her drag two overweight suitcases to the AirTrain and I told myself I would not cry and then I absolutely did, right there at Terminal 4, in a way that made a stranger offer me a tissue.
Here is the part nobody tells you about immigrant friendships. Half of us are always leaving. India pulls people back. Parents get older. Marriages get arranged. The dream expires or gets fulfilled and either way, someone goes home.
Sneha is home now. She landed and sent me a voice note from her mother's kitchen in Vadodara and I could hear the pressure cooker in the background and I had to sit down.
The hard truth about your best friend flying back to India is that the friendship does not end, it just changes shape. It becomes eleven and a half hours of time difference. It becomes good morning to her goodnight.
We made a promise before she left. Every Sunday, one video call, both of us with a cup of chai, no matter what.
We did it today. She held her cup up to the camera. I held up mine.
Some people move across an ocean and stay in your kitchen anyway.
Love,