Book Excerpt: Across Borders within Hearts by Benoy Ranjan Samanta

An exclusive excerpt from Across Borders within Hearts by Benoy Ranjan Samanta (The Antonym Collections, 2026)

Shards of Memory

When I entered engineering college in India nearly sixty years ago, I had neither the desire nor any inkling that I would head for the United States for further studies right after my graduation. America was a distant place. All I wanted was to finish my engineering education and get a job in industry. Things changed, however, in my second year of college with a new roommate in the college hostel. He planted the seed into my head that going to America to study could also be a viable option.

My roommate, who was an orphan from an early age, had migrated from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) by crossing the border with India about two years earlier. He was a Hindu, and naturally, wanted to be in secular India and join the rest of his extended family, who had migrated earlier. Though he came to study engineering in India, his ultimate destination was America. There he had an elder brother who was a medical doctor in Cleveland, Ohio. We soon became good friends.

During college breaks in the summer months, we often visited the United States Information Service (USIS) library in Calcutta looking for American universities where we could apply. Our search was random, as we had no specific university in mind. We were looking for colleges where financial aid was possible, and which did not require an application fee. The application fees back then varied from eight to twenty dollars. Even for that small sum, we had to apply at the Reserve Bank of India. The dollar was in exceedingly short supply and not available in regular banks. I soon discovered that getting admission into an American university was not difficult. What was truly difficult was obtaining any kind of financial assistance. Furthermore, without any evidence of financial support, the U.S. Consulate would simply not issue a student visa. My friend had his brother to support him, initially, but I had no one. Or, at least that is what I thought.

While we were growing up, our parents always put forward an example in front of us of one distant relative, who was extraordinarily brilliant, had endured tremendous hardships in life, and gone to the United States for medical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. I was only five years old when he left. With much apprehension, I wrote him a letter, not seeking any help, but only informing him of what I was up to. To my surprise, he almost immediately wrote back. He arranged for my admission for graduate studies at Howard University and also arranged for a part-time job in a research laboratory in the College of Medicine. According to U.S. immigration law, a full-time foreign student could work for no more than twenty hours a week. By the time I wrote to my relative, he had left NIH and had joined Howard University College of Medicine as a professor.

He was quite an influential man in the university. I arrived in Washington D.C. with one suitcase containing a few books, a few personal belongings and eight dollars in my wallet. Yes, eight dollars. That was all the government of India allowed people with a student visa to carry, and it was handed to me at the airport when I produced my passport and the student visa. My friend joined University of Missouri at Rolla for his graduate studies.

I lived for a month with my relative, and then after receiving two paychecks, I wanted to have my own place. Living in the university dorm was too expensive and hence, out of any consideration. I decided to live off-campus in an apartment. I found another Indian graduate student to be my roommate. However, I had a few challenges to overcome about the apartment. I needed an inexpensive but safe place. I was looking for a place with easy access to public transportation and not too far from the campus, in case I wanted to walk to the campus to save on the bus fare.

I selected an area about three miles from the university and, during one weekend afternoon, I ventured out on foot to look for an apartment. I entered a high-rise building, near the intersection of 18th Street and Columbia Road that had a vacancy sign outside. The building looked good from the outside, but not so clean in the lobby area. I could not locate the resident manager’s office and did not find anyone to ask, until I found a man near the mailbox area. He was a resident of the building and directed me to the basement, where I could find the manager’s office.

Excerpted with permission from the author and the publishers of Across Borders within Hearts by Benoy Ranjan Samanta (The Antonym Collections, 2026)

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About the Book

Across Borders Within Hearts by Benoy Ranjan Samanta is a lyrical meditation on belonging in a world shaped by crossings—of place, of language, of memory. Through an intimate weave of lives and landscapes, the book explores what it means to carry home within oneself, even as the coordinates of identity keep shifting. At its core is the quiet drama of human connection: how people reach for one another across distances that are geographic, cultural, and emotional; how love and loss echo differently in unfamiliar languages; and how translation—of words, of selves, of histories—becomes an act of survival and renewal. With tenderness and intellectual grace, Samanta charts the fragile bridges we build between worlds, reminding us that borders may divide maps, but not the imagination—and not the heart’s stubborn ability to recognize itself in another.

About the Author

Benoy Ranjan Samanta was born in Kolkata in 1947. He attended four different schools, including 2.5 years at Sriniketan under Visva-Bharati University, before finishing high school in 1963. He studied mechanical engineering at the Regional Engineering College (now NIT) in Durgapur and graduated in 1968. Right after graduation, he went to the United States for Graduate studies, attending Howard University in Washington D.C., and graduating in 1971. He also studied nuclear engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He worked on the development of the rapid transit railway (metro) system in Washington D.C. In 1978, he moved to Southern California. He worked on various fossil-fueled and nuclear power-generating projects before being sent on an engineering assignment to Saudi Arabia to help develop the industrial city of Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah on the Red Sea coast. He stayed there for eighteen years. He believes that eighteen years in Arabia and travelling to many countries, both within and outside Arabia, have given him valuable experiences and enriched his life through various cultures, faiths, and people. Over the last 56 years, he has returned to his home in Kolkata more than 40 times. He is retired now and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Lolita.