Indebted Immigrant

Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash

When I arrived in Iowa on a late summer night in the mid-nineties, with two suitcases and two hundred dollars in my pocket, I was the first person in my extended family of artisans to set foot on this continent. I had left behind friends and family, along with the leaking roof of my ancestral home and the invisible baggage of caste I had lugged around all my life.