The 2 train at 7am is its own kind of meditation. Nobody talks. Everybody pretends to read but is really just staring at the middle distance, willing the day to start later.
I got on at 135th Street, half-asleep, my tote already cutting into my shoulder. The car was that specific summer-morning warm where the AC is trying its best and losing.
And then an aunty sitting across from me — saree, sensible sandals, a Trader Joe's bag — leaned over and held out a mango. Just like that. "Beta, take. Too many. My son won't eat."
It was an Alphonso. The real kind. The kind my Nani used to cut into a grid and hand me on the back steps in Ahmedabad, the kind that stains your fingers and your memory.
I ate it somewhere around Chambers Street, no napkin, juice down my wrist, not caring. The 2 train does not care about your dignity and neither, apparently, do I.
This is the thing nobody tells you about the 2 train, or about any train here. You ride it for the destination but the city keeps slipping you these little gifts in between. A mango. A busker doing an okay Lata Mangeshkar. A stranger's small kindness at an hour when kindness feels impossible.
I thought about that aunty all day. I hope her son knows what he's missing.
The 2 train carried me down to Park Place and I walked into work with sticky hands and a fuller heart than I'd had in weeks.
Some mornings the commute is just a commute. And some mornings it's a mango from a stranger who saw the homesick on your face.
If an aunty offers you fruit on the train, you take it. Every time.
Love,