Name changed to protect identity

A man goes to the moon, believing he’s making history. When he lands, he finds that two Punjabis have beaten him to it. “How did you get here,” the flummoxed lunar explorer asks. “Ohji, what do we know, an agent dropped us here,” one of them says.This is an old joke but it reflects the very real Punjabi desire to find a way — any way, no matter how expensive, circuitous or dangerous — to the west. Manpreet Singh, 30, is aware of what it takes to risk everything to make it to the US and the reports from El Paso — in the news for a tent holding children separated from their parents under US President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance migration policy — bring back horrific memories of the time he spent in a detention centre there.Manpreet, who is from a farming family in a village in Hoshiarpur district, decided to go abroad just because his relatives were there, and he wanted to return with money to flash. Not to be left behind, his family took loans, found an agent, and arranged Rs 26 lakh to fund his trip.In the summer of 2014, Manpreet flew from Dubai to Russia before being taken to Ecuador. “There was some problem in their plan to smuggle us further and they made us stay there for two months. The wait was unbearable,” he says. But the uncertainty of waiting was something he’d have to get used to over the next few months. From Ecuador , the group, which included 30 people from Punjab, was flown to Guatemala where they spent nights in a forest.Some of the travel to Mexico was done in vehicles, but for the last two hours, the group went on foot to avoid border patrols and enter Mexico, the last stop before the crossing into the US.In Mexico, the group split up and Manpreet ended up in the home of a local policeman, which was a safe house for illegal immigrants. “The house was locked from the outside so that neighbours and authorities wouldn’t know that there were occupants,” he says. People from different countries but with the same dream wound up at the safe house, sometimes for a night, often for longer.For a month and a half, Manpreet did not see daylight or draw a fresh breath as going outdoors was out of the question. There were no beds, and they slept 10 to a room. Food and other essentials were brought twice a day. A vegetarian, Manpreet was forced to start eating eggs when he could not get vegetables. Through it all, his hope never flagged.One morning it was time. "We were taken separately to cross the border to Texas ," he says. But police pulled him aside. "I had no documents. I was questioned, then body-searched," he says. As he was bundled in to a detention centre, Manpreet could feel the heaviness of a dream lost. Nine months later, in July 2015, he was deported to India.Manpreet has no plans to try again, but his travails did not deter his elder brother from using the same agent and a similar route a year later. He is now in the US living the American dream.