KOLKATA, India — My friend says his cousin’s wedding has been called off. The wedding invitations had already been printed, but the bride got cold feet. She lives in India, the groom in the United States. She’d decided she did not want to move there anymore.

Once upon a time a bridegroom in the United States, an engineer or a banker, would have been a prize catch. This time his location was a handicap. Parents ask worriedly: “Is it safe? The things we are hearing …” The same friend says his sister in Mumbai was planning to visit him this summer but has decided to put it off. An American friend traveling in the northern Indian city of Amritsar says she keeps meeting people who say they want to visit America — “but not right now.”

They are not dreaming of America the way they used to in India — and this was happening even before Srinivas Kuchibhotla was gunned down in that bar in Kansas last week.

When I first arrived from India as a student in the early 1990s, America felt terribly alien. On my first night, I stared at the rows of car dealerships lining the main street of my small university town in Southern Illinois. They were closed yet brightly lit, with red, white and blue balloons drifting lazily above the gleaming cars. It was surreal, but it confirmed my idea of America — a country that always seemed open for business.