A Newcomer to New York City
It was the evening of May 25, 2009. Dinner had just been served on the table. All of us sat in our seats and were ready to eat. My Dad’s phone rang. It was a call from one of his colleague, who delivered some news to him, hearing which, his face lit up brightly. He had been posted to the Bank of Baroda branch in New York City. It was an extremely prestigious posting and an exceptional boost to his career.
Amidst the celebration of the news, a thought struck me due to which my happiness instantly vanished. Dad’s deputation was only for three years. That made it very tricky for me to decide whether to move to New York with him or stay back in India. I was to leave for a boarding school on June 7, 2009. It was a specialized school, which offered training, to crack entrance exams for colleges in India. That was the plan prior to the news that was delivered that night. However, now that this news was out, there was a dilemma about ‘my future’.
Dad wanted me to experience living in a city outside India. It was a rare opportunity and he wanted me to utilize it. I wanted to as well, but there were too many thoughts running in my head. If I moved to New York with my family, I would be ineligible to appear for the entrance exams in India, and affording a college in United States is not easy. Being an International student, I would be ineligible to apply for most of the scholarships and grants. Moreover, my parents, being their own over-protective self, were not sure about leaving me alone after Dad’s deputation got over, that too in a foreign land.
In the meantime, we got to know that the documentation for this posting could take anytime from 3 months to a year. So we stuck to the original plan. I left for my boarding school. The documents were being processed, but our lives were routine.
Fortunately for Dad, the documentation did not take very long. Only obtaining the Visa was left by the end of August 2009. Somehow taking an enormous risk, I left my school on September 9, 2009 to avail the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and move to ‘The City of the Cities’. I returned to my home in Mumbai.
We had our Visa interview on September 16, 2009. Our Visa got approved and we were to board our flight at midnight on the 28th of September. Those twelve days in between passed away in a jiffy. My brother, Samved, was still sent to school those days to keep him away from home. Meanwhile, Mom and me were packing the necessary, disposing the unnecessary things at home and getting ready to go. I remember Dad was all over the place, handling his office work and also managing our moving.
It was finally the 27th of September and we were going to take off to New York that midnight. It would take fourteen hours to reach John F. Kennedy airport from the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminal in Mumbai. I had butterflies in my stomach and did not know what to do. It was just ten o’clock in the morning. There were still eight hours before we actually started our journey. My house was entirely empty. All of our furniture was either sold or sent back to my native town. So I was just listening to music and feeling impassive, yet anxious.
Those eight hours were the slowest hours of my life, but they finally passed. We locked the door. Eight huge suitcases, four tiny ones, Dad, Mom, Samved and me went eighteen floors down the elevator, into a huge black taxi that we had hired and off to the International Airport. We checked in. The flight was a delayed about an hour from the scheduled time and so when we took off, it was around one o’clock in the morning.
When we reached New York, it was the morning of 28th September here, around seven in the morning. I was hyped up and excited that we finally reached. I looked out of the window and was surprised. New York looked exactly like Mumbai from high up in the skies, which was really unexpected. We got off the flight and were greeted by my father’s colleagues. They had already called for a cab and we were ready to go to our new Home.
I was really enthusiastic. The way from the airport to my house was just as imagined; huge, clean roads, only cars on them and a little bit of greenery, the way one wouldn’t find roads even in big cities in India. So it was extremely pleasant, until I reached my new Home.
The locality I was living in, Flushing, looked exactly like Mumbai. I felt absolutely at home. The diversity of the place and especially the presence of so many Indians and other Asians around the area made me feel as if I had not moved at all. It felt like I was in a parallel universe. Everyone around looked familiar but were complete strangers. It was not expected, and hence a bit disappointing. Then again, it was good in essence that it became easier to adapt to the environment.
Adjusting to the diversity of this place was never a problem. Mumbai was a metropolis too. We tended to ask the question “Which state you belong to?”, while acquainting ourselves to a new person there, as India is extremely diverse culturally. In New York, the question was replaced with “Which country do you belong to?”. Getting acclimatized, however, was an entirely different scenario. New York City’s truly bipolar weather was really irksome. Also, it was during the fall that we moved here and it was getting colder. None of us were used to so much cold, Mumbai was on the coast and barely had winters. So, all four of us, suffered from cold the first week we moved here, accompanied by thick jetlag. Dad got accustomed to it soon as he had started going to his office from the first day itself, but for me it took nearly two weeks.
What really had and still has an impact on me is how most things here are the other way around. From the turning of the doorknob to driving of a car, everything is opposite. Anything that turned clockwise in India was anticlockwise here. The only exception to that was the clock, thankfully. It took me quite a while to get used to the left hand side driving, especially when there were drivers who had their pets sit in the front seat. The list of things that are upside-down from a perspective in India is endless.
Even today, two and a half years after moving into New York City, I have a trouble writing the date in the MM-DD-YY format as opposed to DD-MM-YY format. And spelling words in the American way as opposed to the British way, still confuses the autocorrect of the MS-Word of my computer. Nevertheless, my life and journey in New York City has been a very exciting one. I am now looking forward to the more thrilling time I will have in about less than a year’s time, as Mom, Dad and Samved return to India and I turn independent. I now feel elated, thankful and contented.
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