DEPARTED FROM
Kolkata, India
ARRIVED IN
Lexington, Kentucky
YEAR
1997
AGE
22
TRANSCRIPT
It was an evening. I think it was the 6th of August 1997 that I arrived in the U.S. This was the little airport of Lexington, Kentucky. My brother lived there at the time and I was flying in with my family, my parents were with me. So my brother and a friend of his received us at airport. It was quite small, the place we flew into and there weren't too many people. The first thing that struck me about everything when I came to the U.S. was that there seemed to be so fewer people around having flown in from this huge metropolis of Calcutta. Everything from airport lounges to streets are just bustling with people round round the clock.
I remember that we sort of piled on our luggage into two cars and we were driving... I don't think my brother was driving very fast... it was one of the roads that circle the city from the airport getting into the center of Lexington. He was probably driving at 50 miles per hour, but that felt very fast. Cars in Calcutta don't usually get to drive that fast. (Laughs) That's one of the odd things that I remember very clearly. It just felt that the car was going very very fast.
It was pretty late at night and I don't remember much beyond us chatting a bit with this Bengali friend of my brother's who stayed with us for a while and through the evening. And then, I guess we ate and fell asleep fairly early. But, I remember the next day... so, my brother's house was in the suburbs and you'd hardly see a soul around. It was some sort of a subdivision in Lexington. And, it was quite a lovely day. I think it got a bit clouded towards the afternoon. I remember it reminded me of home and the monsoons in Calcutta.
