From the memoir: How an Indian writer-poet carved out a path to a top arts college in New York

None of your friends know where Iowa is, just as no one knows what exactly biomedical engineering entails. The plan is simple: study something that sounds cool. No, it’s even simpler – the urge to get out. The book you use to research colleges abroad mentions something about a top-ranking English department at Iowa, but nothing about the famed Writers’ Workshop, where many of America’s greatest have studied. You wonder what it would be like to take a course in literature, though studying anything remotely literary is not even an option. No chance. Boys like you are raised to become doctors or engineers, not writers or teachers.

Moreover, education outside the country is only a luxury for the very privileged, especially in a small town like Cuttack. The daughters of movie stars study abroad. We expect the rest to slug it out until they score a seat in one of the many engineering or medical colleges here – it doesn’t matter which one. But America is slowly beginning to creep into the collective consciousness; undergraduates in engineering colleges all over India plot and plan late into the night. Everyone wants to take the GRE, but leaving the country right after high school is unheard of. “Why the foreign craze?” asks another aunt. Your friends contemplate the many luxuries of living in America – sex, alcohol, hamburgers – giggling at your prospects.

Soon enough, you will discover that Iowa is the Odisha of America. An agricultural state that is hard to find on a map; even Americans do not know where it is, just as Indians do not know where Odisha is. Nothing spectacular happens in Iowa, or at least hasn’t since The Bridges of Madison County, a book you read to get some insight into this place that will be your new home. And you will watch the movie repeatedly, Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood fawning over each other in anguish as they sweat out the summer nights. Is that how life will look? There will never be enough written about the romantic notions that cinema perpetuates in the minds of teenagers from small towns in India. Now travelling abroad seems necessary if you are to find the kind of love that makes you write letters all your life. As if a love like that could only be found on a sweltering farm in Iowa.

Your aunt isn’t in the wrong at all – no one you know has travelled this far at such a young age. At least you are used to living alone. Ever since your father started working in Saudi Arabia, your mother visited him regularly, leaving you behind for months at a time in your two-bedroom government quarters with a maid and a cook, in the care of uncles and aunts who came to check on you. Though these were difficult times for her (she won’t confess this until much later), you enjoyed the independence. Not that your mother ever stopped you from doing anything. Suddenly, you were in charge. Did what you wanted all day long without having to answer to anyone? There were sleepovers every night; boys came over three times a day. Later you wondered how your parents ever let you out of their sight, let alone to live abroad, considering the trouble you got into during this time – cousins tattled to your mother, uncles complained of excessive expenditure, the cook apparently kept a list of all those friends who spent afternoons at your house, listening to cassette tapes in your damp pink room after elaborate lunches. But that’s all in the past. Now you are here in Delhi for a final goodbye. Your mother clutches her purse, nervous. Your father stands, his jaws clenched, flanked by his sister and her husband, looking at the two of you from a distance. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. This is the moment you’ve been dreading.

Do you know where everything is? Don’t go rummaging through all those bags at once. Be patient. Use what you must. Leave the rest till you settle into a place, find an apartment of your own. The things you will need for your first few days are in the smaller bag; open that first. Clearly, there is a system, a science, to her organisation.

You are on your own now.

These are words that seep into your skin and change the direction of the future. They remain within your body, compelling it to act in surprising ways for years to come.

It’s your last day in the country, and you don’t know when you will come back. Here at the airport, all the questions raised over the last few months about the future miraculously vanish. You are my brave son – your mother reminds you. Now your father steps in to lay a claim to this bravery. Now your mother contradicts.

You reach down to touch their feet, seeking blessings. Then look at your mother, who smiles at you. Perhaps you smile too. But no one speaks. You hug. You never hug. You peel yourself away from her and walk into this new life, accompanied by your father and uncle, who’ve pulled some strings to stay with you all the way till the final security checks. Years later, the same uncle will claim that on that day, you never looked back; you walked into the airport, completed security and went your way, clutching a book in one hand and carry-on baggage in the other.

It’s the sound of the mandolin that repeats in your head each time you enter an airport. It’s an old refrain—a fragment of a famous song from the longest-running film in the history of Indian cinema. DDLJ, they say. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. In the movie, the actress just wants to see a part of the world that she’s never been to but only heard of. Europe. In an iconic, emotional scene, she begs her father to grant her permission to go on a European tour with her friends, to give her just one month out of her own life. They live in London. After a bit of soul-searching, the father says yes and she embarks for Europe, crossing paths with a boy, whom she doesn’t meet repeatedly. And when they do, it is on a train, which is how their story begins. In fact, they are never in an airport. The possibility implicit in travel. How far will you go to find a little love? You find something to call your own so far away from home. The only way to find love is to leave what you love behind. The possibility implicit in the foreign. In DDLJ, they find love in a foreign country. And follow that love to come back home. The children of immigrants, in their ridiculous outfits, all over the Alps. It’s a utopia, a non-place. He sings—I didn’t know what love was till I looked at you. And sings still, on most channels, on most nights. For songs are spaces of deterritorialization. Songs, if you let them, can go on forever.

Excerpted with permission from Hundred Greatest Love Songs: Soundtrack to an Immigrant Life, Biswamit Dwibedy, Penguin India.