‘‎Leenham can drop you back to the hotel’, said the manager of DosaHut at Flushing’s Ganesh temple. Leenham, the name made me expect a Chinese-American town car driver to show up. I waited. DosaHut is on Bowne Street in Flushing, a New York City suburb full of Asian settlers. It is a tiny restaurant. On landing in LaGuardia airport I did a Google looking for an Indian vegetarian restaurant, for a change. All those restaurants in Jackson Heights have the same stuff. Also I didn’t want to drive that far. My Hertz pick up was for the next day and I was gearing up for a long Monday morning drive to Shelton, Connecticut for a 9am and then onwards to Niskayuna in Albany for a 2pm. I knew it was going to be tight. Wanted to eat quickly and sleep and DosaHut happened to come up on top of Google’s page one. From LaGuardia it was less than 5 miles. Despite a lean staff that Sunday evening, Vanessa at the front desk of Marriott was as usual kind to get the hotel shuttle to drop me. But for return, I had to find my transport.

I was sitting sipping a masala chai, when I heard an ‘yes saar, are you ready to go’. Familiar accent. I turned to see a man walking in. He looked more Tamil than Chinese. Seeing my intrigue, the canteen manager made a formal introduction, ‘sir this is Leenham’. ‘Okay..’ I responded, quickly paid the bill and walked towards his town car. That was the oldest Lincoln I had ever seen. I sat next to him on the passenger seat. And buckled up. He liked it. ‘Please drop me at the Courtyard, LaGuardia’ I said. He had no clue where it was. He searched his Carmin device and figured it out, declining my offer to use Waze. He was driving as if he was maneuvering a tractor on an Indian road. All of it was adding up to my curiosity. So I started with his name. ‘Mr. Leenham’, I asked, ‘how come you have a Chinese sounding name’. ‘Oh saar, it is these Americans who made it sound like that. I am actually Lingam, Mahalingam’, he said. ‘You know sir, here in America they shorten your names, so I first became lingam and now Leenham’. That was an amazing twist. Reminded me of narratives from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel Namesake. ‘Wow, nice’. I said making him feel lighter.

Sensing an opportunity to hear a interesting life story, I asked Leenham if he is free to drive with me the next day. He readily agreed. I realized he is not a cab driver. His business is mainly to transport people visiting the temple. He had informal arrangements with some regular customers. So, he could easily take a day off and come with me. He came on time the next day. I didn’t expect that. With all that oriental accent, look and feel, I didn’t expect him to be so punctual. But then he is after all an American. We started off to Connecticut and agreed to stop at one of the roadside eateries on I-95 North.

Leenham was in fact a tractor driver! He is a Sri Lankan Tamil from Jaffna. He had a tough childhood, had to skip school to support his family. Eventually he set up a grocery shop in the little town near his village, and then progressed to driving a tractor trailer. In late 1970s when the LTTE movement started, he left his village and took up a cook’s job in a cargo ship. Leenham wanted to escape from the social repercussions of LTTE. His departure pained him as the woman he wanted to marry had to be left behind. Many years of sailing with many ports of calling, Leenham one day found himself in New York City to eventually become a US citizen. There began his life in America, chasing the American Dream.

If you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a good life in America. That’s how that country has come to be viewed as a land of opportunity‎. The American Dream encompasses a possibility. A national ethos in which freedom includes the opportunity to move upwards through hard work. The upward social mobility enabled by the spirit of freedom, by free enterprise, by the ability to create and share wealth through entrepreneurship and innovation. So we have a Facebook, a Google, and an Apple all of it together making a few square miles in the Bay Area one of the most valuable geographies on the planet. Leenham’s life also represents that American Dream. On one of my subsequent trips, I met his son, an engineering student doing his bachelor’s degree at the famed New Jersey Institute of Technology. Leenham’s daughter graduated from a medical school and recently got into a master’s program at Harvard. He had gone back to his home town married the woman who was waiting for him, brought her to America and started all over. His house was by then out of mortgage. And he had just changed his old town car for a brand new Lincoln. He now lives the American Dream.

God bless Leenham, God bless the United States of America.