Amara has just finished an evening MBA programme in sales (she paid for it by saving money from tips) and spends night and day looking for an office job.

‘Let me tell you my story from the beginning. You won’t get bored?’ she asks me one day, sipping milky coffee at an Indian restaurant not too far from the salon. She is wearing a blue blouse on beige trousers, her eyebrows form nice arches over her big, bright eyes. Her hair falls lightly on her shoulders, on which she appears to carry the weight of the world, at 26.

Amara’s destiny, she says, was written not at birth, but at the age of seven when her parents made the choice of escaping hardship in the Pandharkawada village near Nagpur, at the centre of the Indian peninsula. News had reached their village that there was a country far across the oceans and archipelagos where lives changed and dreams came true. This mythical land embraced anybody and everybody and offered them riches.

Her parents left for America with her two-year-old brother in 2000, but without Amara and her sister.

‘To be fair, it was because when they tried to apply for a visa with us, they didn’t get it. An agent told them to try applying without us and they got it.’

The unfamiliarity of America was oppressive for the couple, who didn’t understand English. Her father slipped into a quiet depression, her mother held the fort, selling her clothes and jewellery. Months later, her father took a job as a waiter in a restaurant. Her mother rented out a room in their apartment to make money. By now, their tourist visas had expired; they didn’t have the right to be in the country, much less work. It quickly became clear that bringing the daughters to America would have to wait.

Back in India, Amara transitioned from child to adolescent to adult, consumed by dolorous feelings of betrayal and abandonment.

‘Can you imagine? I was only seven and was sent away to a boarding school near Hyderabad, while my older sister continued her schooling in Nagpur. I was a wreck. Wasn’t good at studies. Was terribly lonely,’ Amara tells me, her voice trembling.

At 22, she followed the path of her parents, who by now had their green cards. Amara arrived in Houston on a student visa (her sister had done the same a few years earlier). The reunion with her family was harder than she had imagined. The fourteen-year gap shrank in the instant she set eyes on her parents at the airport, she says, but in them she saw ageing strangers who stared back at their child, the lovely birdlike beauty she had become.

Houston was massive and isolating, the process of bonding with her family painful. There was no money. Gloom settled silently, like dust on furniture.

‘I didn’t get out of bed for weeks. I was angry and depressed,’ Amara says. One day, she decided to put an end to it and use the one skill she had learned in India.

‘Will you please give me a job?’ she asked the owner of a beauty parlour she frequented. ‘I am desperate.’

Amara’s narration is disarmingly lucid, amid sobs. ‘Majboori thi’.

Majboori, that gnarly upheaval in the heart which forces a person to break out of familiar bondage and leap into fearsome unknown seas. Majboori that makes them burn the candle at both ends so that, if not they, at least their children can glow in that fast-receding American dream. Majboori: desperate circumstances.

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