Before I Knew America

I knew the Statue of Liberty before I knew America.

I must have been very young because I cannot remember which grade I was in. What I do remember is an old social studies book in Nepal, open to a black-and-white photograph of a woman holding a torch.

I did not know her name yet. I did not know where she stood or what she meant. I certainly did not know about New York City. Still, I kept looking at her.

Some childhood memories disappear so completely that you wonder if they were ever yours. That photograph stayed.

Later, I learned that the woman was the Statue of Liberty and that she stood in New York. Only after that did I learn about the country around the city, the United States of America.

My geography arrived in reverse. First came the statue, then the city, then the country.

New York slowly collected meaning as I grew up. It was the Empire State Building and Times Square. It was Captain Sully landing an airplane on the Hudson River. It was the World Trade Center and the terrible morning my parents had heard about from all the way across the world, when I was only one year old.

It was a place I knew through textbook pages, news stories, movies, and Google Street View. A place where everything seemed to happen, always very far away from me.

My younger sister, Rasika, moved to the United States before I did. After her first year here, she came home to Nepal for a vacation.

I had missed her more than I knew how to say. Rasika is my younger sister, but she has always been my best friend too. Having her home again made everything feel normal. Watching her leave again did the opposite.

Before she left, we gave the goodbye something to look forward to.

The next time we meet, we will have pizza together in New York City.

It sounded casual when we said it. Just pizza. Just New York. But after she left, I held on to that promise.

New York had lived in my imagination for years. Rasika lived on the other side of the world. The thought of finding both of them in the same place felt almost too good to trust.

On December 31, 2023, we boarded a bus at Boston's South Station.

Our plan was wonderfully bad. We would arrive before midnight, see the Times Square ball drop, explore the city all night because New York never sleeps, and return to Boston the next day. No hotel. Barely any money. Plenty of confidence.

I wanted to be in New York so badly that every obvious problem felt like something future Rasil could deal with.

I kept the map open on my phone for almost the entire bus ride.

Massachusetts. Connecticut. New York.

The little blue dot moved south while I watched as if looking away might somehow delay us. We were getting closer, and I could not make the feeling settle inside me. I had imagined this city for so long. What was I supposed to do when it stopped being imaginary?

At around 11:10 p.m., the bus entered the Bronx and began driving beside the Hudson River. The water outside was almost completely black. Every few seconds, city lights broke across its surface.

I got goosebumps.

That was the Hudson. The real Hudson. As someone who loves aviation, I immediately thought of Captain Sully and US Airways Flight 1549. All those stories I had carried from Nepal suddenly had a location outside the bus window.

I searched desperately for the skyline, catching pieces of buildings whenever the road allowed it. One tower shone above the others. I remember thinking, damn, this is New York.

My eyes kept looking for the Empire State Building. I never found it.

The bus reached Port Authority at 11:40 p.m. We opened the map.

Times Square: six minutes away.

Twenty minutes remained in 2023. We genuinely believed we were going to make it.

The doors to Eighth Avenue opened, and New York hit me all at once.

Light. Noise. Logos. People everywhere. More people than I had ever seen together in my life. The air smelled like burnt meat from food carts, smoke, and something I could not name.

So this is what New York smells like, I thought.

"Is this Times Square?" I asked Rasika.

I knew it was not. I had seen Times Square too many times on screens. Tom Cruise had sprinted through it. Captain America had woken up there completely lost. Somewhere ahead of me was a place I remembered from movies better than places I had actually visited.

"It's just a block away," Rasika said. "We are almost there."

Almost there.

Those words did something to me. The boy staring at the black-and-white photograph felt almost there too.

Within seconds, our walk became a tiptoe through bodies. Police barricades blocked the streets. Every direction seemed full. The crowd could carry you without asking where you wanted to go.

Someone told us people had arrived a day early for the ball drop and were wearing diapers so they would not lose their spots.

Diapers?

That was the first moment I understood how badly we had planned this.

Rasika and I held hands tightly. Losing sight of each other in that crowd felt frighteningly easy. We tried to move closer, but there was nowhere to move.

With two minutes left in the year, we stopped trying.

We counted down from where we stood, somewhere outside the Times Square we had come to see. We missed the ball drop.

I thought I would feel more disappointed. Instead, a little after midnight, we found one-dollar pizza.

There we were. Rasika and me, eating pizza in New York City.

We had kept the promise.

For years, New York had felt impossibly far away. In that moment, it was a cheap slice in my hand and my sister standing beside me. I did not need the ball.

We still tried to reach Times Square after midnight. We walked past Broadway theaters, Madame Tussauds, and posters for The Lion King and Harry Potter. Every few steps, I recognized another name from somewhere else in my life.

The NYPD stopped us again. Times Square was closed while crews cleaned it.

And just like that, our grand plan ran out.

Now what?

We had taken "New York never sleeps" as practical travel advice. The city might not sleep, but we needed to. More urgently, we needed somewhere that would stop the cold from reaching our bones.

Once the excitement faded, I finally noticed how freezing it was. We had dressed for winter, but we had not dressed for standing outside all night with nowhere to go.

A hotel was beyond our budget. Going back to Boston was not possible until the next afternoon. For the first time that night, I felt the weight of how reckless we had been.

Still, Rasika was beside me. We were tired, cold, and slightly ridiculous, but we were together. That made the situation feel less frightening and more like a story we might someday laugh about.

I had one idea.

"What if we go to the nearest airport and sleep in the terminal?"

Rasika hesitated. So did I.

Soon we were on the 7 train toward Jackson Heights, heading for LaGuardia with no flight to catch.

It was my first ride on the New York City subway. Even at that hour, with our energy disappearing and our plan getting stranger, part of me was thrilled.

Queens. Home of the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

At LaGuardia, we found a place in the passenger terminal and tried to look like travelers waiting for an early flight. We slept on and off. Every time I opened my eyes, I remembered that we had come to New York for the ball drop and somehow ended up pretending to be airport passengers.

It was not comfortable. It was warm.

Warm was enough.

When we woke up, it was 2024.

There was something funny and tender about beginning a new year that way. No celebration. No grand resolution. Just two exhausted siblings waking up at an airport where neither of them had a flight.

We returned to Jackson Heights hungry and found a Nepali restaurant. Outside, the subway roared above Roosevelt Avenue. Languages I could not identify mixed together on the street. Certain corners reminded me of home, which I had not expected to find in Queens.

Our bus to Boston left at 4 p.m. It was already around nine in the morning. New York contained everything I wanted to see, and we had only a few hours left.

I wanted the Empire State Building. Central Park. The Statue of Liberty. The World Trade Center. I wanted the whole city, which was an unreasonable thing to ask from one tired morning.

We chose Wall Street and the World Trade Center.

At Wall Street, I wandered around in disbelief. The New York Stock Exchange stood in front of me with American flags hanging outside. My first thought was dramatic: this is where the world runs from.

Maybe that was too much to place on one street. But standing there, fresh from Nepal and still trying to understand how I had reached New York at all, that was honestly how it felt.

The World Trade Center carried a different kind of weight for me.

Back home, I had walked around the memorial through Google Street View. I had looked at the pools, the streets, and the buildings often enough that the place felt familiar without ever having been real.

As we turned onto the final block, the top of One World Trade Center appeared above the buildings.

There it is.

I did not say much more. I could not.

Near the memorial pools, the city seemed to lower its voice. I did not see anyone smiling. I ran my hand across the names carved around the edge and prayed for people I had never known.

My mind went to Avengers: Endgame, when the Ancient One shows Bruce Banner how removing one stone creates a different timeline. It may be an unusual thing to think about at the memorial, but I could not stop wondering about the timeline in which 9/11 never happened.

I had learned about that day as history. Standing there, history felt painfully physical.

Meanwhile, my right shoe had begun attacking my pinky toe.

Part of the sole had pushed inward. Every step hurt more than the last. We had barely slept, the cold had followed us into the morning, and Rasika could see me struggling.

But Brooklyn Bridge was still ahead of us.

So I took off my shoes and carried them.

It was absurd. It was January. The ground was freezing. Somehow, walking barefoot still hurt less.

Nothing about the trip was going the way I had imagined, yet I did not want it to end.

When Brooklyn Bridge came into view, the theme from Kal Ho Naa Ho began playing in my head.

I cannot explain why my mind chooses background music for certain moments. It just does. That song followed me onto the bridge while people moved around us in every direction.

Rasika and I walked until we were about halfway across. My feet hurt. We were cold and sleep deprived. We had missed the event we came for and spent the night at an airport.

Then I looked toward the harbor.

Far away, small enough that I had to search for her, stood the Statue of Liberty.

For a second, the noise around me disappeared.

There she was.

The woman from the black-and-white photograph had color now. She had a harbor around her and a real distance between us. I had known her before I knew New York, before I knew America, and long before I could imagine myself standing barefoot on Brooklyn Bridge.

I could not reach her that day. But she was no longer a picture in a schoolbook.

"Don't worry, Lady Liberty," I told myself. "I couldn't visit you today, but next time for sure."

We walked back toward Chinatown with my shoes still in my hands.

Neither of us knew what to say. We were completely exhausted, but there was a fullness to the silence between us. We had finally done New York together.

A little over a week later, I am still trying to understand what those 24 hours meant.

The New York I knew before this trip was always shown at its best. Bright lights. Famous buildings. Food, culture, and endless possibility. I thought those things were what made the city great.

The New York I met was more complicated.

It had towers reaching into the sky and people sleeping on subway trains beneath them. It made me feel like I was inside a movie, then reminded me that I had nowhere to sleep. It gave me food cart smoke, police barricades, an airport floor, freezing streets, a broken shoe, and one-dollar pizza.

I loved it even more because it was real.

On my first visit to New York, I missed the ball drop. I slept at LaGuardia. I walked through the city without shoes. I saw the Statue of Liberty from far away.

But when I think about the trip, I keep returning to the smallest moment.

Rasika and me, standing somewhere outside Times Square, eating pizza after midnight.

The promise was kept.