When my mother got sick, and I had to leave town for a month, I didn’t have to talk him into why it was a good idea for me to go. “It’s your mom,” he said. “What else is there to do but go home?” He texted me every few days, asking about aunty. I wish I had better language to explain the ease with which everything came, purely because our backgrounds had commonalities. Is there a word, in Kashmiri or Hindi or anything else, that describes the immediate comfort of spending time among a community similar to yours? I spent night after night with The Trainer, sometimes feeling like I was being
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