Riverside

I arrived in Riverside in the summer of 2023 on a one-way flight from Kolkata, carrying two suitcases and a vague notion of what a PhD in Computer Science at UC Riverside would look like. The city, in those first weeks, felt enormous and empty in the way that only American cities can — spread flat in every direction, interrupted only by the San Bernardino Mountains looming to the north.

The UCR campus is beautiful in a way I did not expect. The Bell Tower, the eucalyptus-lined walks, the oranges that still grow on campus as a nod to the citrus groves that once dominated the region. I spend most of my days in the engineering buildings, but the campus itself feels like a place worth lingering in.

The light here is different from anywhere I have lived before. In the mornings, before the smog rolls in from Los Angeles, the mountains stand with an almost embarrassing clarity against a sky that turns shades of orange and violet that I have only ever seen in paintings. Riverside is at the intersection of the Mojave and the Sonoran desert influences, and you can feel that in the way the heat holds at night in summer and the way the chaparral smells after the first rain of the season.

Box Springs Mountain rises immediately east of campus and offers a trail system with views of the entire Inland Empire. On a clear winter day, after the Santa Ana winds have scrubbed the air clean, you can see the downtown Los Angeles skyline on the horizon — a reminder that the rest of California is just seventy miles away.

There is the Mission Inn, Riverside's baroque centrepiece, which sits in the middle of downtown like an architectural argument that refused to be resolved. There are the orange groves on the edges of the city that remind you this valley was once famous for something other than university rankings. There are the Friday night food trucks near campus, the drive-in movie theatre on the edge of town, and the remarkable concentration of international students who make the whole place feel less provincial than it might otherwise.

I have lived in Riverside long enough now that the mountains feel familiar rather than dramatic. The city has revealed itself incrementally — the best Thai restaurant, the hiking trail that empties into a valley of boulders, the particular corner of campus where the sunset hits the Bell Tower at a certain angle in October. Belonging is built from exactly these kinds of small discoveries.