Vinay Maheshwari, Author
Vinay Maheshwari was on his way, having studied at Drexel University and landed a job in Philadelphia with his work visa. Then he was laid off. “That started a 60-day clock to find another job or leave the country,” he says. Eventually, he did have to return to his home in India, but because he had always wanted to write a book, he put his own experiences—including time spent in Asheville—into a novel, Rerouted, whose protagonist is “an Indian immigrant who goes to America chasing the dream and slowly loses it.”
After losing his job, Maheshwari found work cleaning in a hostel in Asheville. “I’d always wanted to see Asheville, so I picked it,” he says. “I didn’t know a single person there, and it turned out to be one of the best stretches of my life. Most people at that hostel didn’t know what an H-1B was. Nobody asked about my work authorization. They asked where I was from and what India was like. For the first time in months, I wasn’t just a visa with a clock attached to it.”
The chapters in Rerouted based on his Asheville days are some of his favorites. “Asheville was good to me when things were bad,” he says, “and I’m grateful for it.” He hopes the novel highlights an all too familiar situation for others like him. “There are thousands of us who did everything right and still had to leave,” he says, “and almost nobody talks about it. If someone reads this while they’re going through it, I want them to know they’re not alone, and that coming home isn’t a failure.”
Rerouted, August 2026, fiction, paperback, $17.99, by Vinay Maheshwari, and published by Notion Press, Chennai, India. Find the book regionally at Firestorm Books in West Asheville.
