Here I was, getting ready for my journey to America—Berea, Kentucky, specifically. I knew very little about America. America wasn’t really the attraction. It was the education. After years of an international education, I had found Indian college surprisingly difficult to adjust to. There was an oddness to that. I was Indian, back in India, among people who looked like me, food that tasted like home, languages that needed no translation—and yet the classroom felt foreign.
Then came the admission to Berea College. Before Kentucky, though, there was the small matter of an American visa. Mum and I set off for Bombay. We left behind Pune’s crisp early-morning air and, three hours later, stepped into Bombay’s sweltering May heat. The city seemed to have gathered more people onto its streets than Pune could possibly tolerate. People poured around us, horns protested from every direction, black-and-yellow taxis darted through openings with their own understanding of geometry, and somewhere among the heat and exhaust came the smell of wada- pav. We stayed at the Methodist Guest House, Mum and me, while I made my first attempt at the U.S. Embassy.
At the Embassy, the line of applicants was long. They let us in possibly ten at a time. Mum could only wait outside, while I went in for the interview. The first time around and came back out rejected. There were tears. Plenty of them. And then, rather quickly, my teenage despair acquired an attitude. Fine. I wouldn’t go to America. Mum gently encouraged me to try again the next day.
The next morning, I walked back through those Embassy doors. This time I came out with a visa. Only then did America begin to acquire some shape in my imagination, mostly through the fun-loving Berea College brochures scattered in front of me. Green lawns, smiling students, college life unfolding across glossy pages. After my difficult adjustment to college in India, this was what excited me. I could return to an educational system I understood.
My mother understood something else. She knew the distance between India and America was measured in more than miles. She knew the American value system I was entering was very different from the one she and my father had raised me with. I wasn’t thinking about any of that.I was eighteen. I was going to college.
Going away to school wasn’t new to me anyway. My brothers and I had traveled from Zaire to boarding school in India. We knew the rituals of leaving—suitcases, airports, parents left behind. But there had always been three of us. This time I would be the only one leaving.
When departure day finally came, Bombay airport was heaving with people. Somewhere in that great human jumble, my family nestled together—my two brothers and my parents. Four faces I had known all my life. I wonder now what my parents saw when they looked back at me. Perhaps Mum, who had stood outside that Embassy while I fought for the visa, felt the weight of its success rather differently now that it was actually taking me away. I wasn’t thinking of their trepidation. I wasn’t wondering what the journey home without me would feel like.
I was lost in my own teenage, self-centered adventure. I waved. They waved. And somehow, even that final wave didn’t feel final. I boarded the Pan Am plane and went off to college. It was Chicago that began to teach me about distance. A delay interrupted my journey and left me with an unexpected motel stay. For the first time since leaving India, everything stopped. No airport crowd carrying me forward. No next plane to catch just yet. No brothers sharing this adventure with me. Just a strange motel room in Chicago and the quiet of being completely alone. Suitcases against the door, as my mother did anywhere we traveled in foreign countries. TV with shows streaming all night, different from India. Next morning, blurry-eyed and now nervous back to the Chicago airport to take my flight to Lexington, Kentucky.
India was no longer outside the door. It was on the other side of the world. And Berea, Kentucky, was still somewhere ahead of me. I had come for an education. I just didn’t know yet how far and different this classroom would be.
