I couldn't sleep, so I did the dangerous thing. I opened the suitcase.
There's a soft-sided suitcase under my bed in my Harlem apartment that holds my mother's old dupattas. She packed them for me two years ago when I moved, stuffing silk into corners like she was smuggling pieces of herself into my new life. Which, of course, she was.
Sorting through my mother's old dupattas at 2am is not a hobby I recommend if you want to stay emotionally stable. The red one still smells faintly of the steel almirah in our Ahmedabad flat. That particular smell — camphor and old cotton and something I can't name — undid me completely.
It's Navratri right now. Back home the whole city is spinning. My cousins are posting videos of garba circles, chaniya cholis flaring, dandiya sticks clicking like the whole state found its heartbeat. And I'm in New York, alone at 2am, holding a dupatta against my face like a child.
I didn't plan to get homesick this year. I thought I'd gotten good at it, the way you get good at a chronic ache — you stop noticing it until suddenly you can't notice anything else.
The thing nobody tells you about leaving is that homesickness isn't about place. I don't miss Ahmedabad the city. I miss my mother tucking a dupatta a certain way over my shoulder. I miss being the daughter in the room instead of the woman who has to cook her own dinner and fix her own problems and be brave on the J train at night.
Sorting through my mother's old dupattas at 2am, I found one I didn't recognize. Deep green with a gold border, clearly worn, clearly loved. I called her — morning for her, the audacity of time zones — and she laughed and said it was the one she wore to her own first Navratri after marriage, when she'd moved away from her mother too.
So it's a inheritance, this leaving. This missing. Generations of women folding their homes into fabric and carrying them somewhere new.
I'm wearing the green one tomorrow. Not for an occasion. Just to feel held.
Some nights home is a suitcase you can almost close.
Love,