good morning

Amma's voice crackles through the phone at dawn, just like it has for twenty years. She's in Chennai, I'm in Toronto, but this ritual binds us. I transfer money through the app, watch it arrive instantly in her account. She'll buy jasmine flowers from the market, press them into my sister's hair during the temple visit. My mother laughs about the old days, when remittances took weeks. Now connection is immediate, though distance remains vast. I taste her sambhar through memory, feel the weight of tradition in every transaction. This is how we persist.