I recorded a voice note to my mother last night and did not send it.
It was two minutes long. I was walking home from the 1 train at Christopher Street, past the little block that always smells like garlic and somebody's dinner, and I just started talking to her in my phone like she was there.
I told her about the cold. I told her I made dal but it wasn't right, it never comes out like hers, mine tastes like a photocopy of a photocopy. I told her I saw a woman in a yellow saree in the West Village and had to stop walking.
Then I listened back to it and heard my own voice crack on the word saree and I could not send it.
Because here is the thing about this kind of homesickness. If I send it, she worries. She calls my father in. She tells my chachi. Suddenly the whole of Ahmedabad knows Pooja is sad in America, and there's a family meeting about whether I should come home, and I have to spend a week convincing everyone I'm fine.
Sometimes the homesickness is just mine. I don't want to hand it to the people who caused it, gently, by loving me and letting me leave.
My mother did this thing when I was small. When I cried, she wouldn't ask why immediately. She'd just sit next to me until I was ready. No questions. Just presence.
I wanted that last night. Presence without the follow-up call. And you can't get that in a voice note across eleven and a half hours of time difference.
So I saved it in my drafts, this little audio ghost of a girl missing her ma, and I sent a normal one instead. Cheerful. Filtered. Everything's good, khaana khaya, work is busy.
The unfiltered one lives in my phone. There are now four of them in there. A small archive of things I felt but decided not to make her hold.
Maybe one day I'll play them all for her when I'm home, sitting on her bed the way I used to. Maybe she already knows. Mothers usually do.
Call your mother. Or don't, if you're like me tonight. She feels you anyway.
Love,