“Amrika,” I remember them whispering as we all crammed together in the long, winding immigration line marked “other”. It was December 1979 and I should have been much too young to have any memories of our arrival to America but I do. I remember the waves in your belly, excitement mixed with a lump in your throat, fear that we’d somehow stepped into an unknown we’d never be able to escape.

I was born in Assam, in northeastern India. When I was two, my mother was killed in a car accident. By the time I had turned three, my father had moved my brother and me to the US, along with Dede, our Nepalese nanny.

My father raised my older brother and me as “universal citizens”. The concept was broad but in a nutshell, it meant that we’d grow up in a world without ethnic, religious, cultural or racial boundaries – instead, we were sponges that soaked up as much as we could without ever defining or limiting ourselves to any single idea.

For the longest time, I believed Dad’s utopian philosophy derived from the romantic dreamer spirit that somehow managed to survive within his utilitarian, criminologist exterior. But now, as I look back at the last four decades of my universal citizenship, I sometimes question if Dad’s principle derived not from an idealised view of humanity, but rather from a pragmatic urgency to ensure his kids fit into a world we were so destined to be shut out of.

I wonder if my father, who had actually come to America two months before to get everything settled, had felt the same way when he’d arrived. He’d boarded the plane in India as a high-ranking police officer and landed in Detroit a much humbled graduate student. Perhaps he understood the transformation his children had gone through in the last year, from happy little Indians to motherless immigrants, and wanted to protect us. Maybe in his short time in the US, he’d already picked up on the real meaning behind the F-word: foreigner. Or maybe it was that the idealist inside Dad had finally found his voice in this brave, new land.

Whatever the reason behind it, my father notified my brother and me that we were universal citizens during the 20-minute car ride from the airport to our new American home. I can’t say at age three that it made much difference. At best, I understood being a universal citizen was like opening to a fresh page of a favourite colouring book where you could use any crayon to fill in the picture and you didn’t have to stay in the lines.

For those first few years at least, the “universal” seemed more relegated to finding a balance between our Indian and American selves than any kind of global identity. We ate beef chilli along with our aloo baja and dal. I spoke Assamese with a Valley Girl lilt (while my English definitely had its own John Wayne swagger). Sundays were a mix of Catholic mass, pujas and the Jeffersons.

Critics can call it assimilation and maybe it was, but universal citizenship allowed me to survive my new American life. I was a motherless, brown-skinned immigrant girl growing up in a small Midwestern town. In the US of the early 1980s, those things marked me as the “other” just like my Indian passport had at the airport. I would never fit in a box and being a universal citizen meant I never had to.

When I was eight, my father became a human rights expert for the United Nations, and that was when universal citizenship went into full swing. My world was no longer just limited to America and India. Instead, my life had turned into a global adventure that took me everywhere. Travelling with Dad, living in countries such as Yugoslavia shortly after the fall of communism or spending my eighth grade year in Finland, I flourished.

My father did his part to ensure that our international adventures didn’t end up like the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World. Being a universal citizen meant stepping out of our comfort zone to see the good, bad and ugly of a country. From enrolling us in local schools despite language barriers and moving us into apartments in the sometimes shady neighbourhoods, Dad would take all sorts of measures to see that we had “genuine” experiences.

One of his favourite exercises was shortly upon arriving in each new place, Dad would send my older brother and me on a bus to the furthest part of town and have us find our way back home. Dad didn’t accompany us on these trips, but he encouraged us to talk to as many people as possible, hoping that the more conversations we had with strangers, the more we’d understand our sameness with all the various citizens of the world. Sometimes his little theory worked and we’d end up making some friends. Other times, my bro and I were so damned scared that we’d pool our pocket money together and take a taxi home.

In essence, that was what universal citizenship was – an experiment. It had its successes and its failures. For the most part, I continue to see myself somewhere in between the lines. I think a lot of us do now. I’m not one or the other and that’s allowed me to experience a life that’s rich with diversity, adventure and experiences. Still, almost 40 years later that little girl who arrived in America all those years ago lingers inside me – struggling with the push and pull of the thrill of discovery and the fear of the unknown. I just know now that as long as I continue to be that sponge my father taught me to be, being the “other” isn’t so scary any more.