My mum sent me a voice note on Tuesday and I've replayed it maybe twelve times since. It's ninety seconds long. Nothing happens in it.
She's in the kitchen in Ahmedabad. You can hear the pressure cooker, the specific whistle of it, a sound built so deep into me that hearing it on the J train made my chest do something complicated. She's telling me she burnt a roti because she was talking to my dad. She laughs. She asks if I'm eating properly. She says the weather there is finally turning. Then, at the end, quiet: "Beta, don't work too hard. Come home for a while, na."
That's it. That's the whole voice note. And I cannot stop listening to it.
Homesickness doesn't hit me the way people expect. It's not the festivals or the big obvious things, though Navratri is coming and I already feel that gap widening. It's the small stuff. The pressure cooker. The way she says "beta" like it's a full sentence. The burnt roti I wasn't there to eat.
When you move this far from home, love arrives in these strange compressed formats. A voice note. A blurry photo. A "did you eat" text at what is, for her, almost midnight because she stayed up to catch my morning. The distance is real but so is the reaching across it.
I listened to the voice note on the J over the Williamsburg Bridge, the city spreading out below all gold and indifferent, and I thought about how homesickness isn't wanting to leave here. I love it here. It's wanting to be in two places, fully, at once. To be on the bridge and in the kitchen. That's not possible and nobody warns you.
I recorded one back. Told her about Meera leaving, about the cold coming in, about the bougatsa. Told her I'd try to come home in the winter, which I mean, this time, I think.
Then I sent it and put my phone away and watched Manhattan come closer.
Homesickness is just love with a bad Wi-Fi connection.
Call your mum. Even if nothing happens in it.
Love,