It happened at the Harlem farmers market on 125th Street, near the Metro-North viaduct, on a Sunday so bright it hurt.
I was standing at a produce stall squeezing tomatoes. Really squeezing them, thumb pressing for give, holding each one to the light, putting three back before I found the fourth worthy of me.
And I froze. Because that is my mother. That is her exact hand, her exact suspicion, her exact refusal to accept the first tomato the universe offers.
When I was a kid in Ahmedabad, I'd die of embarrassment watching her interrogate vegetable vendors. The haggling. The theater of walking away only to be called back. I swore I'd never. I swore I'd be breezy, American, grab-and-go.
Reader, I haggled with a man over okra in Harlem last Sunday. Gently. With love. But I did it.
Becoming your mother happens like this, I think. Not all at once. In tomatoes. In the way I now rinse rice three times without thinking. In how I've started keeping a little steel dabba of spices even though I order takeout more than I'll admit. In the voice notes I send that are getting longer, more worried, more her.
For years I thought moving to New York was about becoming someone new. Someone who took the 2 train and knew the good coffee and shed the old self like a heavy coat. And I did become someone. But turns out I also just... carried her with me. She's in my hands.
I called my mummy from the market, standing there with my ridiculous tote of vetted tomatoes, and told her what happened. She laughed so hard. "Now you understand," she said. "The first tomato is never the best one."
I walked home up Frederick Douglass Boulevard feeling less alone than I had all week. Because if I'm becoming her, then she's here, in some way. Seven thousand miles collapses into the space between thumb and tomato.
We spend our twenties running from our parents and our thirties, I suspect, running back.
I'm not far from home. I'm just carrying it in my hands.
Love,