There's a specific loneliness to being two people at once. In New York I am one version of myself, fast and funny and fully in English. Back home I am softer, slower, all my Gujarati rushing back. For a long time nobody here met both.
This week, over dinner in Jackson Heights, I think I finally found the friend who gets both versions of me.
Her name is Reena and we work in different corners of the fashion world and we've been circling a real friendship for months. This week we took the 7 train out to Roosevelt Avenue, that beautiful chaotic stretch where the whole subcontinent lives on one street, and we ate until we couldn't.
Momos first. Then chaat so good I nearly cried, the kind that tastes like the street carts back home. And somewhere between the pani puri and the kulfi, it happened.
She switched. Mid-sentence, she slipped from English into Hindi into that little Gujarati-Hindi blend we both grew up code-switching through, and I switched right back without thinking, and we just kept going. Two languages, one conversation, nobody translating for anyone.
That's the whole thing, isn't it. The friend who gets both versions of me is someone I don't have to narrate myself to. No explaining why I called my mom from a fire escape. No softening the Bollywood references. She just laughed and finished my sentence with the next line of the song.
We talked about how hard it is to date here when you're carrying two cultures. How our parents worry. How we moved across the whole planet to find ourselves and somehow found a little piece of home on Roosevelt Avenue instead.
I walked her to the 74th Street station and we hugged for too long on the platform, that unselfconscious desi hug, and I got on the train feeling full in a way that had nothing to do with the momos.
It took me four years in this city to find her. The friend who gets both versions of me. Worth every lonely dinner it took to get here.
Find the people who let you be all of yourself at once.
Love,