Some days I feel the sadness build. Other days it blindsides me. It is different from what I felt in America – that large, one-size-fits-all American loneliness.

When my new friends ask about my life there, I tell them about those first months. The fall of 1996. Those North Carolina skies. Walking up Selwyn Avenue to the A&P to buy microwavable Uncle Ben’s Rice. Heaps of yellow and orange leaves clustered along the streets as if it were a movie set. The lines all clean and straight. The houses, gigantic and gateless.

America fills you out, exerts her homogeneous hunger upon you, making it so that no matter how much you have, you always want more. I grew stout in America on a diet of French fries, Budweisers, brownies and ranch dressing. Within a year I went from being a raw-boned teenager to a chunky amoeba of an adult with a muffin top and endangered clavicles.

I tell them about my job at the cafeteria, and about Ms Betty, the cafeteria supervisor – a pint-sized black lady with the heart of a Cadillac. It was Ms Betty who saved me on those never-ending North Carolina evenings when the skies grew ragged with pink, and everything that was young and flourishing seemed to be outside, just out of reach – under the shade of dogwood and sugarberries, in the quad where sorority sisters exchanged whispers and lacrosse players stretched out like cheetahs on waterproof blankets spread upon grass of such perfect height and prickle, it made me untenably sad.

‘You ain’t gonna find what you is looking for out there,’ Ms Betty used to say, every time she caught me gaping through the glass doors of the Students’ Centre.

‘You ain’t gonna find it in your friends nor your fine boyfriend neither. You blind, is what.’

She was right. After all, what kind of crazy person moves from one country’s deep south to another country’s deeper south?

North Carolina. North Dakota. None of it had conjured up any particular picture as I sat in my bay window in Mahalakshmi with college forms and SAT tutorials, dreaming my getaway. It was where Blake Henderson was going and where I would follow. Perhaps I’d been inducted long before meeting Blake. Back in Madras, with Moses Paul and his American-anthem-singing car penetrating every early-morning dream. Perhaps it was the reason why I went with Blake in the first place, because I knew that America would be big enough and lonely enough to accommodate me.

When I finally arrived in America I had not been prepared to feel so poor. I had not understood how it would make me cling to Blake, who visited me in Charlotte every weekend from Chapel Hill, taking me out to Burger King for big Whoppers – the two of us chewing on that cheap food, bristling in the glee of our independence. And later, gliding through the shiny corridors of South Park Mall, dragging our greasy fingers through all those racks of beautiful clothes. I hadn’t realised there had been so much want in me.