It happened a little past 10 am on a Monday morning, a minute after I brushed past Hollywood star Christian Slater near the apartment I was living in. That's when it finally sank in: I was on the mythical streets of America.

The feeling hadn't hit during the direct flight from Mumbai to JFK. As I got ready to step off the massive aircraft that brought me to New York City, I looked around to see middle-aged women smile, young students look around in awe, and elderly Indian men scratch beards in feigned nonchalance, all in response to the pilot's clipped 'Welcome to the United States.'

What did hit me at once was the weather. It was like waking from a long night's sleep and having one's head dunked into a bucket of cold water. The air cut through what I assumed was a warm jacket, reaching under my arms and shaking me -- as if laughing at what the jacket cost, knowing how ineffective its impressive price tag would be when confronting the New York elements. And then, the car jumped into traffic, the Manhattan skyline loomed, and a great many sitcoms jumped to life around me.

It was a tribute to the sheer power of American television that a whole new culture had been made so decipherable across continents. Nothing surprised me, the first-time visitor -- not the NY taxicabs, not delis strewn across every street, not street signs that read '43 W' and '24th St', not the blue NYPD vehicles or hot-dog vendors, their carts smoking at every curb.

My apartment, in the heart of Manhattan, had a concierge who gave me the once-over as I stepped across his line. There was -- a huge surprise, this -- the pervasive smell of Indian cooking emanating from one of the studio apartments on my floor. Outside, the Empire State Building vanished into fog, twinkling lights playing hide-and-seek with the clouds.

For a first-time visitor, America can be somewhat unreal. The culprit is, more often than not, an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Everywhere you turn lies a cultural reference from your youth. Let's say, for instance, you find yourself walking down Jones Street, in -- talk about names that don't quite fit -- the Village. The friend you're with turns to you and says, casually, 'The cover image of Bob Dylan's second album was photographed here.' Or, say you fancy a stroll down 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth, and find the Chelsea Hotel that was home, at some point or another, to Mark Twain, Leonard Cohen, Simone de Beauvoir, Stanley Kubrick and Andy Warhol.

Again, it's the cultural references that make this unusual. In my hometown of Mumbai, sellers of paan sit uncomfortably, and nonchalantly, close to sites that have yielded Paleolithic stone implements. In America, it's pop culture that makes a bigger impact. Like recognizing 34th Street, where I lived at the time, from its special place in Hollywood movies about Christmas.

There were other things that seemed quintessentially American -- things that reinforced one's sense of being immersed in a culture distinctly alien from one's own. I stepped into a comedy club one night, for instance, and shook my head in disbelief as the comic on stage proudly held on to a unique rule: Nothing was sacred. From racism to the attitudes of the English, dead celebrities to -- gasp! -- his country's President! What I liked best was everyone laughed, and laughed hardest when the joke was on them.

Image: On 34th street, home to the Empire State Building.
Photograph: Lindsay Pereira