The heat and filth of India ensure that unless you come from the sort of money that can completely insulate you against them, you always carry around the sheen of poverty on your person. Unless every environment you subsist in is completely air-conditioned, you’re probably going to be spending a good nine months of the year wallowing in and smelling like a pool of your own sweat. The hideous pair of tennis shoes I wore in the infancy of my affair with America served as an endless source of fascination for me during those first few months. I would gaze at the soles of the shoes, repeatedly amazed that they looked so very clean—unsoiled, really—despite my having traversed up and down campus and the nearby roads in them. Back home, the streets would have deposited enough dirt and mud to strip the newness off any footwear in a single outing.

But even money can’t buy effortlessness, cannot guarantee the kind of innate confidence that comes of being born into the gamine, fair-skinned global ideal of beauty. Sure, the PYTs combing the shops in the newly built malls and plazas in New Delhi can spray on all the Givenchy and plaster themselves with all the make-up that they want, but there is no achieving that enchanting scent of cleanliness and soap, that clear-skinned radiance that seems to belong exclusively to American girls. I remember a professor in London joking, as we gathered for a group photograph on the final day of a college study-abroad programme, ‘All you Americans with your healthy complexions and beautiful white smiles gather around the front while we British hide our sagging skin and rotting teeth in the back.’

We all laughed, but it was true. American girls have a beauty all their own, attractive in a way that even Italian elegance and Parisian charm cannot compete with. There is a palpable joyousness to them, the way they throw their heads back and laugh, showing off an ease of existence in their own skin.

The unicorns shone right in front of me now, within touching distance of my fingertips. I couldn’t imitate their looks, but everything else was fair game. Over time, my wardrobe, representative up till then of an Indian aesthetic with a profusion of colours and prints, turned into a smorgasbord of blacks and greys, of layered shirts, and leggings and cardigans embedded with distressed crochet. I invested a small fortune (money and time) to tame my hair. In class, I would watch the way the unicorns wrote and imitate the rounded, speculative movements their brightly polished hands made, so different from the scurried note-taking by grade-crazed students in India. I learned how to infuse a sense of purpose into my gait, adopted a near-perfect Midwestern accent, and listened to The Shins.