A Novel in the Making: How Life On H-1B Visa Eventually Left Me Holding the Mop
- My debut novel “Rerouted” is about a guy from Indore who goes to America with a plan and then loses it.
I always wanted to write a book. I just never knew how to start and where would it end.
There was enough to write about. Leaving home at 18. Landing in a country where you don’t know a single person. Roommates who become family because they’re all you have. The small things nobody tells you about, like doing rupee conversions in your head in the grocery store or feeling weird calling home because you don’t want them to worry.
I kept thinking there’s a book in this somewhere. I never actually sat down to write it. Then I got laid off. That was the nail in the coffin.
If you’ve been on an H-1B, you know what that means. It’s not just losing a job. A clock starts. I applied everywhere for months. Recruiters would be interested, then they’d ask about sponsorship, and that would be the end of it. No reply after that.
Those months were bad. I’m not going to pretend they weren’t.
Money ran out faster than I thought. I ended up doing a work trade at a hostel in North Carolina, cleaning floors and making beds in exchange for a place to stay. A few months before that, my company was putting me up in Marriotts for work trips. Now I was holding a mop.
But the thing I remember most is what I found online. I’d be up at 2 AM going through social media (reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.), and I kept reading my exact situation written by people I’d never met. The visa uncertainty. Not knowing if you’ll still be in the country next year. Watching everyone back home move on with their lives. Missing weddings. Missing festivals. Missing the normal stuff.
Thousands of us going through the same thing. Nobody talking about it.
That’s when the book made sense to me. Not the version I had in my head for years, where everything works out. The other one.
“Rerouted”is about a guy from Indore who goes to America with a plan and then loses it. It’s fiction. But if you’ve been through this, you’ll know which parts aren’t.
It’s out this August.
Vinay Maheshwari is a writer and entrepreneur from Indore, India. He studied and worked in the United States for several years before returning home, an experience that became the basis for his debut novel, “Rerouted”(Notion Press), releasing in August 2026.