The 6 train at 7am is its own kind of prayer. Everyone silent, everyone tired, everyone holding a coffee like it's the only warm thing left in the world.
I was somewhere between 33rd and Grand Central when the voice note came. My mother. Two minutes and eleven seconds.
She wasn't saying anything important. That's the thing. She was telling me the gulmohar tree outside our flat in Ahmedabad had flowered early this year, and that Papa keeps forgetting his reading glasses on the fridge, and had I eaten dinner, beta, properly, not just cereal.
I stood there holding the pole and I could smell our kitchen. The whole 6 train dissolved. For a second I was eleven years old again, doing homework at the dining table while she stirred something on the stove.
Then the doors opened at Grand Central and four hundred people needed me to move.
This is the strange math of living far from home. A voice note from your mother can undo you completely on the 6 train at 7am, and you still have to make your transfer, still have to be at your desk by nine, still have to pretend your eyes are wet because of the wind on the platform.
I didn't reply right away. I couldn't. I walked up to Lexington and stood by the terminal clock and I let myself miss her for exactly one honest minute.
Then I typed: haan Mummy, I ate. Tell the gulmohar I said hi.
She sent back three flower emojis and one that made no sense, which is how I know she's really her.
Some mornings the commute is just a commute. Some mornings the 6 train carries a whole ocean inside it.
Call your mother back. She's waiting.
Love,