My First Journey Outside India
My first trip outside India was in the winter of 1998. I was travelling to America, and Frankfurt was my first stop. While waiting at the airport, I decided to have some coffee and asked the lady at the counter for filter coffee. The lady did not understand what filter coffee was, and I did not understand what espresso was. The result of this miscommunication was that she handed me a single shot of espresso.
For me, drinking coffee had always meant one full tumbler. But here I was, looking at a very small cup containing an even smaller quantity of dark black liquid, trying to understand whether this was really what I had asked for. I took one sip, recoiled immediately and went back to ask her for some milk. She looked at me as if I had just insulted the coffee personally. That was my first cultural lesson, and I had not even reached America.
My port of entry was Chicago. After landing, I went through immigration and customs, collected my luggage and then walked out of the gate without realising that I had to check in my luggage again for the onward flight to Denver. By the time I understood what I had done, it was too late. I now had to take all my luggage on the airport train to the domestic terminal, negotiating several escalators along the way. Each escalator could take only one piece of my luggage at a time, so I kept going up and down, moving the bags one by one. There were lifts, of course, but I did not know about them and did not even think of looking for one. When I think about it now, I can only laugh at what a dumbass I was, struggling with five bags on escalators while a much easier option was sitting somewhere nearby.
This was my first time in America, and I was already overwhelmed. During that train journey, I saw several African American men who, in my frightened imagination, appeared to be seven feet tall. All the mugging stories I had heard before leaving India suddenly started running through my mind. They had done absolutely nothing, of course, and probably had not even noticed me. But I was in a completely unfamiliar country, carrying half my possessions with me, and feeling like a minion standing among giants.
To make matters worse, I had stepped outside the airport wearing only a thin sweater. It was November in Chicago, and I remember being told that the temperature was somewhere around minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit. I had come from a place where even 20 degrees Celsius felt very cold, so I was completely unprepared for what Chicago had in store for me.
Somehow, I managed the luggage, found the terminal, checked everything in again and finally boarded my flight to Denver. On board, the flight attendant gave me a packet of pretzels. I had never seen pretzels before, so the first thing I asked her was whether they were vegetarian. Pretzels—vegetarian? What sort of question was that? She must have gone back to the other crew members and had a hearty laugh about it.
When I tasted them, I did not like them one bit. I came from a land of spicy food, and here I was being given something that seemed unbelievably bland. I found myself looking around for ketchup so that I could somehow make the pretzels more interesting. This was well before the pancake incident, so clearly my instinct to solve unfamiliar American food with ketchup had started quite early.
A City I Had Never Heard Of
Denver was the first American city in which I lived. While growing up in India, I had heard plenty about California and New York through Hollywood movies. But Denver? I had never even heard of the place. I had no idea that this unknown city was about to become such a large part of my life.
From the moment I arrived, I was mesmerised by America. The roads were huge, the cars were huge, and even the parking lots seemed enormous. Stores such as Best Buy and Walmart fascinated me. I could spend hours walking around inside them, looking at things I had never seen before and occasionally buying things I probably did not need.
The weather in Denver was beautiful, and the sky seemed unusually large and blue. The mountains were always there somewhere in the distance, forming a backdrop to everyday life. Our office was on the eleventh floor of a building in downtown Denver, and from there we could see the Rockies. I would sometimes stand near the window and simply look at them over a cup of coffee. For a young man who had recently arrived from India and who had not seen snow capped mountains, it was a magical view.
We were a bunch of youngsters from the same company, all in our twenties. We had come there to work, but we were also eager to see and experience everything around us. Most things were new to us, and that probably made even ordinary experiences memorable. We were curious about America, and America kept giving us new things to be curious about.
Learning America, One Misunderstanding at a Time
During my first week in America, I bought an AIWA music system and was extremely proud of it. Soon afterwards, our apartment was burgled and the music system was stolen. When the police arrived, their cautious questioning somehow made me feel as though we were also being treated as possible suspects. We had just lost our belongings, and I was beginning to wonder whether I had to prove that I had not stolen my own music system. But none of this reduced my enthusiasm for America. I simply went out and bought another AIWA music system.
Our American manager, Steve Anderson, made a special effort to help us settle in. One day, he took us to Denny’s for breakfast and suggested that we order pancakes. None of us knew what pancakes were. When they arrived, we examined them carefully and, after some discussion, asked for ketchup.
The expression on Steve’s face was unforgettable. He looked at us as though we had landed from another planet. He simply could not comprehend how an entire table of grown adults had reached America without knowing what a pancake was. We, on the other hand, could not understand what was so shocking. The pancakes were sweet, while our taste buds were looking for something spicy. What else could we use other than ketchup or Tabasco sauce? To us, the request seemed perfectly reasonable.
Eating outside was always an investigation in those days, especially for vegetarians. We would ask whether a dish contained beef-based sauce, and then whether it had been fried in the same oil as chicken. Sometimes the person serving us became more confused than us! We only wanted to make sure that the innocent-looking brown sauce did not have some beef stock inside it.
Learning to drive was another adventure. None of us knew how to drive before we arrived in Denver; we all learnt there from scratch. And we did not learn under easy conditions either. We learnt during winter, on snowy and icy roads, while also becoming familiar with American cars and traffic rules. When I look back now, I genuinely wonder where we found the courage. Perhaps that is how we were in our twenties—the decision came first, and the reasoning followed much later. We had decided that we needed to drive, so we simply went ahead and learnt.
Some of my colleagues once jumped a traffic light. A police vehicle came behind them with its lights flashing, but they did not realise that this meant they had to pull over. They continued driving for miles, and the police continued following them. Our friends eventually drove all the way back to our apartment complex, unknowingly leading the police directly home. By the time they stopped, four or five police vehicles had surrounded them.
Those of us watching from the apartment could not understand what major crime they had committed during their short trip outside. The police, in turn, probably could not understand why anyone would lead an entire police convoy to their own home. The misunderstanding was eventually sorted out, but for a short while our apartment complex had more police vehicles than residents.
Once the Roads Opened Up
Once we got our driving licences, the roads opened up for us. Our first major road trip was to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. After that, we drove from Denver to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. We went to Yellowstone National Park by road and took many shorter trips in and around Colorado.
The mountains became a regular part of our lives. We drove several times on the hilly roads between Denver and Aspen, saw Aspen in its fall colours, travelled through Independence Pass and drove along Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. We went to Durango and explored many places whose names I had not known a few months earlier. Some roads were covered with snow, some were surrounded by golden trees, and on many of them we would stop simply because the view was too beautiful to drive past.
There were also many beautiful bicycle trails. I became so fascinated with cycling that I bought a bicycle and fitted a cycle rack to my car. Today, this may sound quite ordinary, but in my circle at that time, only a few people had a cycle rack on their car. I would sometimes cycle to the office, which took roughly forty minutes. Part of the trail ran parallel to a stream. Can you imagine cycling to work beside a stream? It felt magical.
A friend from those days now works in the same building as me. Just last week, he told me, “Anand, we were all thinking that you would leave our company then and become a full American because of the way you lived your life.” Perhaps they had some reason to think that. I started dressing like Americans, would eat like them, travel around like them! I was living life king size!
The Life We Made There
Downtown Denver had its own charm, and we spent a lot of time around the 16th Street Mall. Christmas felt exactly as it did in many Hollywood movies—quite romantic and beautiful. There were lights everywhere, people walking around in winter clothes and that special festive feeling in the air. During Christmas, there was also the eggnog latte from Starbucks, which somehow became part of that whole American Christmas experience for me. We watched the New Year fireworks and enjoyed all these moments without thinking that we were creating memories we would still be discussing decades later.
Our apartment life produced its own set of memories. One of our friends came to stay with us and brought along his 55-inch television. For us, a television of that size was something we had never seen before, and having it at home transformed the apartment into a theatre. Naturally, we watched movies at a volume suitable for a theatre as well.
The apartment had wooden floors, and sound travelled easily to the people living downstairs. Along with the television, we also had our pressure cooker, which regularly made its presence known. One day, the downstairs neighbour complained that we were “running a train every night.”
For some time, we honestly could not understand what he meant. How could anyone run a train inside an apartment? Where will we hide it? How did we take it to the top floor? What are these guys thinking about?
Eventually, we realised that the loud movies, the sound travelling through the wooden floor and the pressure cooker had combined to create what sounded like a railway operation downstairs. Without realising it, we had apparently become engine drivers and were comfortably running a train inside our apartment every night.
Keep a Good Thought
Years later, after I got married, I travelled from Tampa to Denver with my wife because I wanted to introduce her to Steve. He and his family had welcomed us so warmly during our early days in America that they had made me feel completely at home. That was why it mattered to me that he meet my wife. During those years, I had often told him that he should visit India and that I would host him for as many days as he wanted.
Thinking of Steve and Denver always brings a wide smile to my face. These memories also bring back the same curious small-town boy attitude I had then—fascinated by everything and eager to experience all of it. I was carefree, I was fearless, and I was so, so, so happy. That was probably the main reason those years remain so close to my heart.
I do not remember every conversation from those days, every road we travelled or every place where we stopped. But I remember how those years felt. And whenever I think about them, I can still hear something Steve used to tell me:
“Anand, keep a good thought.”
All these years later, I still do.