In my mind, I know exactly where we were heading on that bus and the events of that day. We were dressed alike because she was, and still is, my idol. We both wore overalls but since she was older, hers lacked the Minnie Mouse appliqué that I so proudly bragged about.

Back then, I was still living in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and we were visiting the Municipal Botanical Gardens. As a little girl, I was amazed at the amount of bushes and grass that existed inside of a busy concrete jungle. I obviously had no idea about places like Central Park at that time, and thought that Municipal Botanical Garden was a miracle of sorts, that we were the only lucky ones to have it.

That day I got to see flowers of every color and shape and trees that were as tall as the sky. To me there existed no more amazing place than where I was, then and there. I got to eat things that my grandma never cooked, and I could eat cotton candy until my face turned blue (but only my lips and tongue would). The only things I had to worry about were if it was going to rain or not, if my homework was complete and if I was going to wear shorts or pants to school. That is really all my little brain could concern itself with, because everything else was “grown up stuff” to me. We rode every rollercoaster twice just because the carnival was closing and I didn’t want to take a chance on it never coming back. That’s just how my younger self thought about things and surprisingly it’s still the same now.

Looking back at it now, I can’t tell if those memories are perfectly true. When I look at a picture, my mind involuntarily pieces together the specifics of how I got to that pose, to that place at that time. They could be fabricated memories, or ones that my mom has embedded in my memory. Regardless of veracity, I cherish those moments when my entire extended family was only a car ride away. There were no plane rides, no customs, no visas, no passports, just memories being made.

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Auntie #1, a large woman with a booming voice, consults with the driver. He’s a shifty character, all gangly limbs and plumes of cigarette smoke. They’re speaking Bengali so fast I can’t make it out.

“Does he have a spare?” I ask.

The driver gives me a despairing look. This does not bode well.

Auntie #2, serving as the unofficial Indian-American Cultural Relations Ambassador, informs me that yes, there is a spare. However, our driver doesn’t know how to put it on.

“Okay.” I shrug. “So, should we just get a cab?”

She gives me a blank look.

“You know…pay the driver and get a cab?” I glance out at the traffic on Queen’s Way: a serpentine procession of yellow taxis as far as the eye can see.

Auntie #2 tells me that the driver is friends with Auntie #1. If she just paid him off, it might make things awkward in the future. “They’ll figure it out,” she says with a bright smile. “We’ll be on our way soon.”

I take Erin across the street to an expansive public park. The day is hot, steadily growing hotter, and her pale skin is flushed. After buying us sodas at a nearby stall, I leave her to cool off beneath a copse of trees and go off to play National Geographic photographer. There’s a young boy herding goats, slowly swishing his stick and lost in a daydream. Teenage cricket players who immediately flip up the collars of their polo shirts and pose when they notice me snapping away. It’s all fun, but the fact that my wife is steadily wilting from the heat and I can’t do anything about it is never forgotten. This was her first time in India and it was weirdly important to me that she liked it. Apparently just loving one Indian guy wasn’t enough- she had to approve of India period. Unfortunately, my motherland takes great glee in defeating personal desires through circumstance.

Upon returning to the SUV, I see the driver and a stoop-shouldered fellow with alarmingly few teeth attempting to bang a spare tire into place using a rock. The Aunties and Uncle are watching this like it’s perfectly normal.

“Uhh, that’s not going to work,” I say. No one stops doing anything.

“That’s a rock,” I say, attempting to clarify. “It’s not going to hold a spare in place. You need…” my knowledge of cars failing at this point, “lug nuts and screws and things!”

“Oh ho,” Auntie #1 says, worriedly rubbing her hands on the end of her sari. I can’t tell whether she’s upset by the situation or embarrassed by my asking these questions. I watch as the two men “finish” the job and go over to her. However, when she reaches into her purse to hand them money, I stop her.

“What are you paying for?” I ask.

Auntie #1 looks to the stoop-shouldered man. “He’s a mechanic.”

“A what?” The man’s rickshaw is set down a few feet away from us. “He’s a rickshaw-wallah. Also, where are his tools? Mechanics have tools.”

Auntie insists on giving him several hundred rupees. Our driver then announces that the car has been repaired and we should all get in.

“Wait,” I say, “we can’t ride around in that.”

“No more complaining,” the Uncle, a sour-faced man wearing thick glasses tells me. “We’ve wasted too much time already.”

Against all my instincts, we load up into the SUV. It starts raining outside, instantly and hard, flushing dust from the air and lending a high-focus clarity to the labyrinthine, crumbling city. Sure enough, we haven’t driven more than ten minutes before I hear a steady clanking noise coming from the supposedly fixed tire.

“Stop the car.”

“Oh ho!” Auntie #1 exclaims.

“We’re going to flip over!”

“You know Anish,” Uncle says, “level of intelligence is related to level of coolness. You have to keep your cool.”

Opting against getting into it with an old-timer (it wasn’t easy, believe me) I speak directly to the driver. “Do you hear that noise? We need to stop.”

Eventually, the driver pulls over. We’ve left the city center behind and torrents of water are streaming down on either side of the road carrying bits of garbage and multi-colored flower petals. The driver inspects the tire and confirms that yes, it is about to fall off and yes, we were about to flip over into a watery grave. He goes off to find someone to help repair it. And still the Aunties and Uncle wait in the car, placidly watching the street begin to flood outside the windshield.

“We gotta get out of here,” I whisper to Erin. She nods, giving me the go-ahead.

I exit the SUV and spend twenty minutes trying to flag down a cab. At one point, I slip and nearly break my ankle on the muddy embankment. But I can’t spend another moment in that SUV, waiting forever for something that never comes. Finally, a passing cabdriver takes pity on the waterlogged tourist with his hand up and stops.

I stick my head into the SUV and invite my relatives to take the cab. Erin and I will take the next one, I say. You just tell us where you want to go and we’ll meet you there. None of this is a big deal- in America cars break down all the time and you simply move on with your day. But there’s a look on their faces that says I’ve disappointed them and they realize they’ve disappointed me…and neither of us can express the exact reason why.

They opt to remain in the SUV. We take the cab to the Oberoi, the most luxurious hotel in town, and drink cocktails with familiar faces: Johnny Walker. Captain Morgan. Later that evening, as it happens with family, things get sorted out. But that moment of peering into the SUV and seeing the looks on my relatives’ faces remains with me.

Crossing a physical divide is relatively easy: just buy a plane ticket and get a visa. Crossing a cultural divide is infinitely harder. The destination isn’t clearly defined, and the chances of an accident are much higher. Especially when you’re riding on 3 wheels.

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A few doors down on the right stood the Synagogue where she attended nursery school. She remembers a few things about the Synagogue Nursery School. First, they used to wash dishes with pretend dishwashing detergent in pretend sinks and they took their afternoon naps on towels laid out on the floor. Second, if a kid hit another kid, the teachers would line up the students and have them each take a swing at the offender. Last but certainly not least, the teachers would gather them up to go use the bathroom but they had to do headstands against the wall until it was their turn. She always wondered whether this was meant to teach them gymnastics, for distraction, or because they genuinely believed it was impossible for children to pee their pants while upside down.

Further down on the left were the Rabins, who served as local grandparents. They were Jewish and had the fanciest car in the neighborhood – a Cadillac. They were very sweet and bought her the most beautiful dresses, which she would only wear on visits into Manhattan. Every Saturday, she’d catch up with the Rabins on their way to the synagogue and fill them in on what she’d been up to.

Directly in front her house was Queens Community College. She was unsure what to think of it because her parents told her it was dangerous to take a shortcut through the college when walking home from school because some of the college students did bad things, like drink and smoke and have sex. Yet every weekend, for years, was spent attending swimming and violin lessons within its confines.

Most days, she took the shortcut through the college but didn’t tell her parents about it because she walked home with Mindy Park, a Korean-American girl in her grade who lived between the college and her house. Mindy refused to walk home with her if she didn’t go through the college. Mindy was also the first person to teach her a pop song, “Shadows of the Night” by Pat Benatar. They would sing it together as they walked home and she would continue to sing it on her own as she made her way alone from Mindy’s place to her home, trying to stave off the fear latchkey kids carry with them in their pockets alongside their house keys. Years later, she ran into Mindy during Freshman orientation at a small liberal arts college and Mindy was a bitch. She wasn’t surprised by this. Instead, it was somehow both sad and comforting.

The lots in her neighborhood could have been called “cookie cutter” yet each had a charm all its own. Their own small front yard was sloped and for a long time she thought it was the highest hill she’d ever climb, ideal for sledding or tumbling down into a pile of dried leaves. Their backyard was bordered on each side by trees and they had a simple swing set, which they swung on until Cynthia’s teenage brothers broke it by trying to use it for pull ups.

She learned to roller skate and ride a bike on that block, which meant she scraped her knees and elbows on that block. She played hide and seek and tag in adjacent yards. Her first Halloween trick-or-treaters were neighbors, as were the customers for her first (and last) lemonade stand.

She didn’t know then how many cities, states and countries she would later visit and live in. But years later, when she hears the word “home,” these memories keep her company, now that she has outgrown her imaginary friends.

Thank goodness, then, for television!  Television is where the normal people were, the real Americans.  From television, I learned that real Americans had stairs in their homes with banisters for sliding (thank you, Brady Bunch!).  Real Americans had fathers who went off to work “in the city,” and mothers who stayed home, and dogs, and rooms just to play in, and they rode their bikes everywhere and got braces and ran for Class President.  Oh, and some of them were also witches living in suburbia.

When I got a little older, my ideal American family went from the Bradys and the Partridges to the Ewings and the Carringtons and the Channings and the entire daytime line-ups of ABC, CBS and NBC. I was going to be a real American.  I was going to live on a soap opera.  And failing that, then I’d settle for the next best thing – writing a soap opera.

I did it, too.  After stints at E! Entertainment and ABC Daytime, I landed at Procter & Gamble Productions and their two classic daytime dramas, “As the World Turns” and “Guiding Light.”  I produced the shows’ official websites and authored their tie-in novels, “Oakdale Confidential,” “The Man From Oakdale,” “Jonathan’s Story,” and an online property called “Another World Today.”  I was finally where I’d always wanted to be – writing about the tortured, soapy lives of real Americans.

Except I didn’t know a thing about it.  Or them.

All of the P&G stories took place in small Midwestern towns in Illinois.  I’d never even been to Chicago, much less anyplace as homogenous and wholesome and Christian and White as Springfield or Oakdale or Bay City.

I was writing about people I didn’t know doing things I’d never done for reasons I couldn’t quite understand.

So I did what any writer does.  I made stuff up.  I wrote about minister-presided weddings and baptisms and family Christmases and community-wide Thanksgiving celebrations.

Sure, we celebrated Thanksgiving at my house growing up.  Only we served potato, egg and beet salad.  And smoked salmon with onions and olives. Not exactly the makings of a standard American “turkey day”.

The only Christmases I knew were from television (remember when all the shows used to have holiday specials?  Wasn’t that awesome?).  Same with the only weddings that didn’t feature the bride and groom being lifted up on chairs, and buffet tables overloaded with cow tongue.  And smoked salmon with onions and olives.  And vodka.

So I did what every aspiring author is instructed to do.  I wrote what I knew – from television.

It wasn’t until years later that I read Neal Gabler’s book, “How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” and his assertion that it was the original studio heads – all immigrants, mostly Jews – who created and idealized small-town America to the point where even “real Americans” began to believe that the fantasy up on the screen was their actual heritage.  That shows like “The Adventures of Andy Hardy” were a hair’s breadth away from being documentaries…and not the fanciful creation of men born elsewhere, longing for a perfect world at odds with the hell they’d narrowly escaped from.

I really related to those guys.  Just like they broke away from Cossacks and Nazis to bring forth a kinder, gentler Main Street, USA, so did I voluntarily lose myself in the small-screen intimacy of families that didn’t have a long list of relatives “killed in this pogrom,” “massacred at Babi Yar,” or “disappeared after a midnight knock on the door.”

And, just like the original Hollywood Jews, I made my contribution to the national narrative with my books and other tie-in writing.

By living inside their skins, even for a little bit, I became a real American.

Even if I still don’t know a thing about it.

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From that point on, it was all Japanese, all the time. A succession of Mazda 626s and 323s. A Toyota Camry that I’m convinced will still be puttering unexceptionally about long after the Apocalypse. All were reliable grocery haulers and Point A to Point B transporters. None came close to delivering the sheer pleasure of riding about in that ridiculous Pontiac. On weekend mornings I’d creep into my parents bedroom, set up an elaborate plastic racetrack, and launch Hot Wheels replicas of cars that thrilled: fire-engine red Mustangs. Sleek and sexy Corvettes.

I always assumed my love of American muscle would remain safely confined to fantasy. But a recent Saturday afternoon found me at a local Dodge dealership staring, slack-jawed, at the new Dodge Challenger:

A bearded salesman with an uncharacteristically gentle demeanor came up and introduced himself as Charlie. Thirty seconds discussing my finances made it clear that I wasn’t in any position to buy. And yet something about the way I was looking at the car kept Charlie from moving on. It certainly wasn’t an appreciation of the mechanics: apart from the 400 horsepower Hemi engine beneath the hood, I didn’t understand the finer points of torque, G-force, etc. All I knew was that something about its snarling profile and unapologetic girth brought on the giddiness of playing with those Hot Wheels replicas so many years ago.

“Do you know how to drive standard?” Charlie asks.

I shake my head.

“You have to get standard for a car like this. The sense of connection between you and the car…”

“How long would it take me to learn?” I’d tried, disastrously, to learn it once for a parking lot attendant job.

Charlie glances into the dealership, where throngs of buyers are waiting to take advantage of end-of-month deals. Inside would be endless negotiations about interior packages and warranties and financing rates- that came part and parcel with being a car salesman. But, as I’d soon find out, what brought Charlie to the dealership was what had brought me: a childlike passion for steel and speed. You’d think finding purchasers with a similar outlook would come easy, but it’s not. Becoming an adult often means giving up on those sensations. Accepting practicality as a way of life as opposed to embracing the impractical because it makes you feel alive.

He winks. There’s a mischievous gleam in his eyes.

“I taught my son to drive stick in ten minutes,” he says. “Get in.”

Over the course of the next hour, Charlie teaches me the basics of driving standard. I’m nervous behind the wheel; the car doesn’t just idle, it growls. Getting acclimated to using a clutch and a 6-speed gearbox seems impossible at first, but Charlie wisely avoids filling my head with principles. Instead, he advocates going by feel. Feel how pressing down the clutch disengages the engine from the transmission. Feel how to shift into first. Feel how to feather the gas to maintain a constant 2000 RPM and finally, ease up on the clutch and feel that magic moment when the transmission hooks in, lay on the gas, and you’re off. There’s some trial and error: I stall out more than once. But eventually it works and there’s a grin on my face that spreads ear-to-ear. It sounds silly, but driving a 400-horsepower car at 10 miles an hour in an empty parking lot was the most exciting driving experience I’ve ever had. I realized that driving American muscle didn’t have to be an unrequited fantasy. I could tame this monster and make it my own.

Afterwards, there’s the obligatory exchanging of contact information and promises to stay in touch. Charlie goes back to making commissions. I go back to my ’06 Honda Accord. But not before a look is exchanged, one that says: don’t forget this feeling. Don’t lose the grace that comes with going fast.

A fantastic Dodge Challenger commercial from the 70′s.