ON A BLUE Chicago morning in October, the tiny-leaved canopies of honey locusts turning gold against the horizon of the Great Lake beyond, I stood in the Enterprise car rental agency on South Michigan Avenue, gazing with trepidation at the Dodge Charger parked outside. “Did you see it?” asked the agent. I nodded through a fog of nerves. It felt like a joke had been carried too far. Months before, I had typed out a few fevered paragraphs to my editor about wanting to do a classic all-American road trip, following the outline of Route 66, once known as the Main Street of America, from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Coast, stopping in places that sounded breathtakingly exotic to my foreign ears — St. Louis; Tulsa, Okla.; Amarillo, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz. Now I was confronted with the terrifying result: an American muscle car waiting for me to get in. I had only recently reacquired a license after almost 20 years, and I had never driven more than a few hours at a time in my life. The idea that this automobile, with its mean face and hulking body painted in what a man at a gas station in Missouri would lovingly describe to me as “an off shade of battle gray,” would arrive in Los Angeles in fewer than 10 days with me at the wheel seemed unthinkable. I signed a contract and headed into the bright autumn sunshine.

As signs to St. Louis channeled me down a six-lane highway (Interstate 55 South), and Saul Bellow’s city reappeared in my rearview mirror — “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city … ,” the opening lines of his 1953 novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” went through my head — my breathing slowed. Road trips for me had always been about making a whole of the places that lay between two points, of filling in the gaps. When, in 2005, I went by land from Venice to New Delhi, it was because I felt torn between Europe and Asia, and I thought in seeing what lay between I would be able to resolve some of my cultural anxieties related to place and belonging. I wasn’t wrong: The memory of Eastern Europe, Turkey, Arabia and Iran had stayed with me all these years, serving as a ballast against the surreality of air travel: the Delhi-London flight that left me forever balancing two societies in my head.

America, where I attended college and returned to live 10 years ago when I was 34, brought anxieties of its own. I was a relatively new American, having become a citizen in 2020. But I had lived here with what felt like a systematic incuriosity about the country west of New York. I went every year for Christmas to Tennessee, where my husband is from, but I resisted that most American of American injunctions to go west. The shape of my world had India on one side, the East Coast of the United States on the other and, on some subliminal level, I was afraid of expanding my worldview westward, almost as if it would spread me too thin. It wasn’t rational, but these things rarely are. I was intimidated by the immensity of America and felt a kind of panic at the sight of those downtowns — a bank, a hospital, a university — erected in what felt to me like a nullity, the flat land stamped with cloud shadows. For years I had clung to the idea of India as a rip cord of a kind: Should everything go to hell in America — should the idea of growing old here become too fearful, too expensive, too lonely — I could always go back to the protections of India and the ready-made community of my childhood. But after 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government stripped me of my Indian citizenship and banned me from the country I had grown up in after I wrote an article critical of his re-election, I had to look squarely at the possibility that America was the country I would die in. It forced me to confront what it meant to set down roots here — “to unpack,” as my husband always implored me to do — and to come to terms with the continent of a country across the river from my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

All around me now, city was succumbing to prairie — the corn was high, the soy solid gold in the fields — but I was jittery. I imagined I was thirsty. Did I need to pee? I didn’t have the right cable to connect my phone to the car. I had to get off the Interstate to breathe and assess. When I saw signs for Dwight, Ill., proud of its place as a stopover on Route 66, I veered right. At the Texaco filling station, with its red gas pumps redolent of Edward Hopper’s roadside nocturne, “Gas” (1940), I met Scott Sand and his wife, Maureen, volunteer local tour guides. The 1920s had turned America into a motoring nation. In a single decade, the number of cars grew from 8 million to 23 million. In 1921, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which set in motion the creation of a network of roads covering the entire country. Started in 1926, Route 66 would eventually offer more than 2,400 miles of paved road from Michigan Avenue in Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier in California. It acquired a hallowed place in popular culture almost immediately. It is the road that the Joads, the Depression-era family in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), embark down. It was also the road that the artist Ed Ruscha took when he moved from Oklahoma to California, and that he paid tribute to in some of his most striking works, such as “Standard Station” (1966), which captures the luminous sky over Amarillo.

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