The 6 train at 7am is not a place you expect to feel anything except mildly resentful.
It was packed. My tote strap was digging into my shoulder, my coffee was already lukewarm, and someone's backpack was living rent-free in my spine. Standard Thursday.
And then I smelled it. Methi. Ajwain. That specific warm-oil smell that means someone, somewhere, made thepla this morning.
An uncle near the door had a steel dabba open on his lap, eating quietly, newspaper folded under it like a placemat. He caught me staring — because of course I was staring, I have no manners when food from home is involved — and he just held one out to me. "Beta, lo."
Reader, I took it. On the 6 train. From a stranger. My mother would be horrified and also would have done the exact same thing.
It was perfect. A little spicy, a little dry the way good thepla is, the kind you eat rolled up with your thumb pushing the edge in. For four stops between 51st and Grand Central I was not in New York. I was in my nani's kitchen in Ahmedabad watching her stack them warm.
We didn't talk much. He was going to Canal Street, some wholesale thing. I told him I worked in fashion and he nodded like every uncle nods, politely unconvinced it's a real job.
He got off. I didn't get his name. The 6 train swallowed him back into the morning and I stood there holding a napkin, weirdly close to crying over a snack.
This is the thing nobody tells you about the 6 train at 7am, or any train, any morning. The city is enormous and indifferent and then someone opens a dabba and hands you a piece of your childhood and asks for nothing back.
I've lived here long enough to be suspicious of strangers. But I'm still Gujarati enough to accept thepla from one.
Some mornings the commute feeds you back.
Love,