Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and—in a tasteless bit of irony—the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services requires applicants to fulfill three of ten criteria for extraordinariness or, alternatively, to provide evidence of a major “one-time achievement.” “Pulitzer, Oscar, Olympic Medal” are the agency’s helpful suggestions. Of a half million permanent-residency visas issued in the fiscal year 2022, only one per cent were EB-1As.
One went to Mangesh Ghogre, a forty-three-year-old man from Mumbai, whose extraordinary ability is writing crossword puzzles. I first met Ghogre in 2012, in Brooklyn, at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (A.C.P.T.), an annual speed-solving contest in which crossword writers like Ghogre and me take over a Marriott hotel, playing Boggle, trading puzzle ideas, punning compulsively. I entered the ballroom grumbling because high-school baseball practice had made me late; just then, Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times puzzle and the tournament’s organizer, was announcing that Ghogre was, by a few thousand miles, the person who’d travelled the farthest to be there.
In early 2021, Ghogre came across a Forbes listicle titled “Seven Ways to Get Your Green Card in the United States.” Most of the methods were familiar: “marry your way in” (the IR-1 or CR-1 visa), “invest your way in” (the EB-5, for those with a loose million dollars). But the EB-1A (“achieve your way in”) was news to him. When I spoke to him last year, he told me the criteria seemed like a puzzle to which he was the perfect solution.
Q: Was there press on his accomplishments? A: Yes; as one of the lone creators of American crossword puzzles outside North America, he’d been profiled in the New York Times and the Times of India. Q: Had his work “been displayed at artistic exhibitions or showcases”? A: It had, at the 2014 Hindustan Times Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, where some of his grids had been colorized and dilated, every square the size of a fist. Q: Were his contributions of “major significance”? A: Ghogre had published a newsworthy tribute crossword in the New York Times, to mark the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. In it, the string GANDHI, put through the puzzle-maker’s dissective wringer, is reinterpreted as “G AND H I”; the trigram GHI appears squeezed into a single box in phrases such as WEIGH IN, LONG HISTORY, and NOTTING HILL.
Ghogre told only his wife that he intended to apply for the visa. He dashed off a form e-mail to some twenty-five immigration lawyers, expecting silence. Instead, he received a handful of enthusiastic replies; one confident attorney offered a full refund of his fee if Ghogre was rejected. “Suddenly, my immigration puzzle was solved,” he told me. “Today, when I look back, it looks like it was all destined to happen.”
Ghogre’s crossword and immigration stories began around the same time, twenty-six years ago, when he was an engineering student at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute. Born into a middle-class family in Chandrapur in 1980 and raised in Mumbai, he grew up viewing business and STEM subjects as a ticket to global mobility. As soon as he entered university, he began, like many of his classmates, to study for the GMAT, the de-facto entrance exam for U.S. graduate programs in business, in the hope of landing a scholarship to a top M.B.A. program. For this, students would need to conquer the Verbal section, and many used crosswords as a way of broadening their English vocabulary. Ghogre lived with a dozen or so hostel-mates, most of whom spoke and wrote English as a second or third language, on a campus where the Times of India—with a crossword syndicated from the Los Angeles Times—was delivered daily. Each morning, a handful of students clustered around the puzzle, honing their English on a borrowed crossword, in a periodical with the largest daily English-language circulation in the world.
This was in 1997. Within a few years, the dot-com bubble had burst, and Ghogre shelved plans to become an international student, obtaining his M.B.A. in India instead. (Until recently, he worked in Mumbai as an I.P.O. banker, for the Japanese firm Nomura.) In the meantime, he was hooked on crosswords. He was thrown out of an engineering lecture for smuggling a puzzle into class, more enraptured by the black-and-white grid than by the matrix grids of linear algebra. His mother recalls him crosswording while waiting in queues, solving in pen while standing. Ghogre delighted in crossword themes that backlit the malleability of the English he was rapidly mastering: the wordplay reminded him of his fascination, in the eighth grade, with Sanskrit, whose morphology could be deconstructively shucked into root, affix, and ending. The dictionary he carried around (Random House Webster’s) offered merely rote learning, whereas crosswords felt like engineering, a tactile means of putting his learning to use.
As Ghogre improved, he found that he could grok a puzzle’s linguistic quirks, even if, some eight thousand miles from the United States, he didn’t always understand their context. Crossword lovers, like joke lovers, have a quick-draw inventory of memorable puzzle themes; Ghogre describes a quip puzzle that featured the answers PIG-TIGHT, BULL-STRONG, and HORSE-HIGH—old cowpoke parlance for what a good fence should be. Ghogre had never seen a pig, and, as he told me, “We don’t have fences.”
Soon Ghogre was using graph paper and pencil to sketch his own constructions, and he began submitting his work to the Los Angeles Times. Between airmail and courier fees, it cost more to shop his grids around than he’d be paid on publication (eighty-five dollars). In India, he was the only one of his peers for whom the crossword had become a permanent obsession; in the online forums and message boards of the American puzzle community, Ghogre found mentors, collaborators, and friends.
He began corresponding with Nancy Salomon, a legendary constructor and also a generous mentor. Over e-mail—Ghogre couldn’t afford international phone calls—Salomon workshopped his theme proposals. She’d let Ghogre know when a phrase he suggested as a theme answer wasn’t, as crossworders say, “in the language.” Occasionally, they disagreed: Salomon had never heard of CHALK AND CHEESE, which Ghogre was pairing with BREAD AND BUTTER and COOKIES AND CREAM in a puzzle whose theme was MIDDLE AGE SPREAD. “Chalk and cheese” describes two things that are superficially alike but, on inspection, utterly different. From Salomon’s confusion, Ghogre deduced that the expression was a Britishism, current in India but not in the U.S.
Salomon also coached Ghogre on another language: crosswordese. A good crossword grid should avoid words such as STOA and ANOA—the Greek colonnades and the Celebes oxen, whose common consonants and felicitous diphthongs mean they’re overrepresented in puzzles, relative to their obscurity. Ghogre absorbed the dicta of the American crossword just as he’d absorbed American idioms. (A good crossword fence should be IBEX-tight, ANOA-strong, and OKAPI-high.) After dozens of attempts, one of his puzzles was accepted by the Los Angeles Times. Ghogre’s thank-you note to Salomon is jittery with gratitude:
How American is the crossword? Despite its aura of sophistication, the black-and-white grid has also been seen as anesthetizing American kitsch. In the “Weird Al” Yankovic song “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota,” a family piles into a ’53 DeSoto with “crossword puzzles, Spider-Man comics / and Mama’s homemade rhubarb pie.” Dead Kennedys, in their song “Drug Me,” from 1980, lump the puzzle in with markers of insensate consumerism, as though the black-and-white grid were a bar code: “Drug me with your sleeping pills / Drug me with your crossword puzzles / Drug me with your magazines / Drug me with your fuck machines.” Head down in a crossword, you may as well be asleep.
But the crossword, like many American triumphs, is the invention of an immigrant. Arthur Wynne was born on June 22, 1871, in Liverpool, England, where his father edited the Liverpool Mercury. At nineteen, he left for Pittsburgh—one of nine million migrants who came to America from Liverpool between 1830 and 1930. By 1913, Wynne was editing the FUN supplement of the New York World, which teemed with riddles, jokes, comics, and other frivolities. Charged with expanding its Christmas edition, he came up with the “Word-Cross.” The instructions read like guidance for immigration paperwork: “Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.” The first American grid even conducts a background check: the clue at square six asks “What we all should be”; the answer is MORAL.
The crossword was an overnight success. As Alan Connor notes in his book “The Crossword Century,” Stanley Newman, the longtime crossword editor for Newsday, once quipped, “Liverpool’s two greatest gifts to the world of popular culture are the Beatles and Arthur Wynne.” By the twenties, America was seized by what newspapers labelled a crossword craze. A solver with a penchant for needlework sewed a quilt composed of forty-eight puzzles, one from each state in the Union. In 1924, Simon & Schuster published “The Cross Word Puzzle Book”; for the second edition, one distributor ordered a then unprecedented two hundred and fifty thousand copies. The crossword was becoming a mass movement in an era of mass movement: the Pennsylvania Railroad printed crosswords on its menus; the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad stocked its seat backs with dictionaries.
Wynne’s native Britain looked on in horror, moving to close its borders to the crossword. A December, 1924, article in the Tamworth Herald, imperiously titled “An Enslaved America,” warned of a puzzle epidemic: “In a few short weeks, it has grown from the pastime of a few ingenious idlers into a national institution.” The crossword, likened to wildly proliferating hyacinths, was cast as an invasive species, indigenous to the States, but contagious; to prevent its spread, the authorities should erect a good fence. Nevertheless, in February, 1925, the London Times announced that crosswords had made it across the Atlantic. Within a decade, the Telegraph, the Spectator, and even the Times itself had added puzzles. “The nation still stands before the blast,” the Times said, “and no man can say it will stand erect again.”
When Ghogre and I met at the 2012 tournament, it was his first visit to the U.S. He imagined, between his obligations at home and the headache of the visa system, that it would be his first and last tournament, telling Shortz it was a “once in a lifetime opportunity.” Days before flying in, he wrote a letter to his fellow-convention-goers, which he sent to Shortz. After not hearing back for a little while, Ghogre zipped over an apologetic follow-up, worrying that he’d overstepped. “Are you kidding?” Shortz replied. “I loved your piece. I already passed it along to the ACPT webmaster for posting on our website.”
Ghogre’s letter begins: