My first winter in Boston
tldrTen years ago I landed in Boston from India in the middle of winter, knowing almost no one. A first blizzard, empty grocery shelves, learning a city that moves around the Patriots and the Celtics and the Red Sox, a landlady who scammed me out of my deposit — and a question I still turn over: what if I'd arrived somewhere that didn't already speak my language?
More than ten years ago now, I landed in Boston. Winter, 2014. I came from India knowing a handful of people in the entire country, and none of them well enough to call at two in the morning.
The first thing I learned was the T. How the metro worked, which line went where, the particular logic of a city that had grown up long before anyone thought about grids. That felt like an accomplishment at the time. I could get from one place to another without asking. In a new country, moving on your own is the first small proof that you can live there.
Then came the first blizzard. I want to be honest: I did not know what the word meant. Not really. I had read it, the way you read a lot of English words without ever standing inside the thing they describe. So I was genuinely surprised — walking into grocery stores and finding the shelves stripped of bread, water, milk. People buying like the city was about to be cut off, which, in a way, it was. Then the power went out during the storm. I remember sitting in the dark thinking that “blizzard” had turned out to be a much heavier word than the one I’d learned.
Not all of the lessons were gentle. The first room I rented was in a three-bedroom house, a good room, shared kitchen. The landlady seemed fine until she didn’t. She found ways to trick us, then turned hostile — at one point threatening to call the police, claiming we had tampered with her food because we shared the kitchen. One by one she pushed everyone out. I lost eight hundred dollars of my security deposit in my first four months in the country. As a first lesson in how a place actually works, it was expensive and it stuck.
Learning the city by showing up
I spent a lot of that first stretch outside anyway, photographing the city. Snow does something to Boston. The brick and the light and the quiet after a storm. I walked and I photographed and I met people, which was the other project of those months — turning a city full of strangers into a city with a few faces in it.
The way I met most of them was Meetup, which was itself a new idea to me — the notion that strangers with a shared interest would just post a time and a place and show up. I went to photography walks, tech nights, whatever looked interesting. One of those turned into a free ferry ride: someone I’d met offered to take a few of us out on the harbor, no reason other than that it was a good day for it. I’d been in the country a few months and a near-stranger was handing me the water and the skyline. It reset something in my head about how this place worked. The landlady had taught me one lesson; the ferry taught me the opposite one, and the second lesson turned out to be the truer one.
Another one of those nights was an Intel Arduino hackathon — a room full of people I’d never met, wiring up little boards to make something blink or move by morning. I barely knew anyone walking in and left with people I’d keep running into. That was the shape of a lot of those early months: show up somewhere on the strength of a listing, leave with a few more faces you recognized.
A town that runs on a schedule
There were other new concepts too, and the biggest ones ran on a schedule. I had landed in a sports town without understanding what that meant. Back home the calendar bent around cricket. Here it was three sports on rotation — the Patriots in the fall and winter, the Celtics through the cold months, the Red Sox once the weather turned — and the whole city would tilt toward whichever one was playing. I learned to read the mood of Boston by the score of a game I didn’t yet know how to watch. On game day the T filled with jerseys. Bars I walked past would go silent and then erupt a beat later, and I’d know something had happened before I knew what. When the Patriots won the Super Bowl in early 2015, the city felt different for days — lighter, louder, briefly all one thing. None of it was mine at first. It’s the kind of belonging you have to be taught, and the city teaches it whether you ask or not. By the end I could feel a Sunday coming.
The language I didn’t have to think about
All of it was, in its own way, interesting. That’s the strange part, looking back. Even the bad stretches read now like the necessary texture of arriving somewhere. But there’s a thought I keep returning to, and it isn’t about any of that.
I keep wondering what my life would have looked like if I had gone somewhere that didn’t already speak my language.
Because here is the thing I didn’t appreciate at the time: I arrived somewhere hard, in the cold, mostly alone — and yet English was already mine. The labels in the shops made sense. The signs on the buses and in the transit stations made sense. When two strangers talked near me, I could pick up the thread, catch the joke, understand that a storm was coming and that I should probably buy bread too. The language did an enormous amount of quiet work for me that I never had to think about.
If I had landed instead in a country where English wasn’t the first language, all of that scaffolding would have been gone. Every label a small puzzle. Every overheard conversation a wall instead of a window. The scam with the landlady, the blizzard, the empty shelves, the slow business of learning a city’s sports — all of it happening in a language I’d have to decode before I could even react to it. The loneliness of not knowing people is one thing. The loneliness of not being able to read the world around you is another order entirely.
I know this isn’t a new thought. Wittgenstein put it more sharply than I can — “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — and Eva Hoffman wrote a whole memoir, Lost in Translation, about emigrating from Poland and losing the self that only existed in her first language. I’ve come to it late and by accident, standing in a grocery store that still spoke to me. But arriving at an old idea through your own life gives it a weight that reading it never does.
I don’t say this with regret, exactly. Boston was hard enough on its own terms, and I’m not romanticizing a harder version of it. But I’ve come to think that the language you land in is one of the largest invisible advantages a person can carry, and it’s almost never counted. So much of what felt like resilience in those early months was really just the fact that I could read the room. Literally read it — the walls, the signs, the faces.
I stayed in Boston close to two years before moving on to other cities. It was the place that taught me how the country worked — the cold, the T, the games, the deposit I never got back.
You carry your first city with you into all the others.
Ten years on, I know a lot of people now. I know what a blizzard is in my body, not just on a page, and I can feel a Sunday coming. And when I meet someone who arrived here without the language already in their pocket and made a life anyway, I understand a little better how much heavier their first winter must have been than mine.