There is a fruit cart outside the 96th Street stop on the 6 train that I pretend I don't visit as often as I do.
The uncle who runs it isn't Gujarati but he calls me beta anyway, and this week he had mangoes. Real ones. Small and bruised and honest, not the perfect waxy ones at Whole Foods that cost four dollars and taste like a rumor.
I bought one. I ate it standing on the corner of 96th and Lexington like a raccoon, juice down my wrist, the 6 train rumbling underneath the grate and my white linen top absolutely doomed.
And for exactly one bite I wasn't in the Upper East Side. I was nine, on the floor of my Nani's kitchen in Ahmedabad, mango pulp up to my elbows, being told to eat over the steel plate and not the tiles.
That's the thing nobody warns you about the 6 train and the whole tidy grid of Manhattan. You can be very fine, very busy, very grown, and then a mango from a cart ambushes you.
I walked the rest of the way to work slow. Let myself miss it. The heat that made you nap. The way summer at home was loud and everyone was in everyone's business.
The 6 train mango did not fix my homesickness. It just held it for a second, the way you hold a stranger's baby on the subway when the mom needs both hands.
Then I got on the train and went to work with a stained shirt and a full heart.
Go find your cart. You already know the corner.
Love,