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:
At the tournament, some six hundred competitors sat in rows in the boxy, corporate Marriott ballroom, scribbling furiously behind cardboard dividers. There were nearly four times as many competitors in the Westchester geographic division as in the entire Foreign division, which comprised mostly Canadians. Outside tournament hours, Ghogre spent the weekend sampling Americana that he’d encountered only in crosswords. He tasted his first PBJ and his first BLT, saw his first TPK, ate his fill of OREOS, and overheard someone say MY BAD (though not EGAD or NEATO, both of which, from crosswords, he thought were still commonplace).
Since 2000, Ghogre has kept a crossword diary (“my personal Wikipedia”), detailing the lexicon that solving American puzzles has revealed. There is a section on Biblical names (ENOCH, HOSEA, ENOS, ESAU) and one on American lakes and rivers (ERIE, MEAD, HURON, GILA). There is a section with clues for ERNE, TERN, and EMU (“birds which I have never seen, but I meet every day”). Recently, when Ghogre showed me the pages—dutiful tick marks next to frequently occurring answers, in the stocky, diligent handwriting of an engineer—they seemed like flash cards for a fun-house citizenship exam. I imagined Ghogre raising his right hand, swearing—AVOWING—upon an EPEE or a SNEE, and reciting lines from Melville’s OMOO. When he told me the date he began journaling, March 4, I couldn’t help noticing the serendipitous whiff of mobility in the date’s homophone—March forth! “It’s been an eight-thousand-mile march,” Ghogre said, laughing. To both of us, every pun is a crossing: a refusal to let a string of letters mean only one thing. Ghogre said that, when he was solving, “I could not physically travel to the U.S., but I was travelling every day in my mind.”
As the crossword migrated overseas, it assimilated to the places that took it in. In the U.K., a variant called the cryptic now reigns supreme. Where, for difficulty, modern American-style puzzles might resort to arcane and forbiddingly laconic clues, British cryptics build an answer up from riddle-like instructions. In a New York Times crossword, MIGRATE might be the solution to the clue “Move” or “Emulate Albert Einstein in 1933”; in a Guardian cryptic, MIGRATE could be clued by “Move to noodling ragtime.” In America, “Move” is a straight-ahead definition of MIGRATE, whereas “noodling” indicates that we should rearrange the letters of “ragtime,” which anagrams to “migrate.”
Solvers exposed to both styles might emerge bilingual, literal code-switchers—but with preferences. Stephen Sondheim, an avid cryptic solver, whose stamp of approval helped the style find an audience in America and thus enacted a reverse Atlantic crossword crossing, wrote, in 1968, “There are crossword puzzles and crossword puzzles. The kind familiar to most New Yorkers is a mechanical test of tirelessly esoteric knowledge: ‘Brazilian potter’s wheel,’ ‘East Indian betel nut’ and the like are typical definitions.” His fantastical examples imply that esoterica are often dredged up from far-flung countries with far-fetched definitions. When the British poet W. H. Auden, another noted crossword lover, moved back to Oxford from New York, he published a farewell letter to America in the Times:
In Auden’s image of America, crosswords, culture, and immigration are inextricable. He invokes the original sense of “melting pot,” in which, as an 1875 article put it, “the individuality of the immigrant” melts into uniformity “in the democratic alembic like chips of brass.” The crossword alembic does something similar to foreign languages, burning off punctuation, spaces between words, and diacritical marks, until they are naturalized. An analysis by Charles Kurzman and Josh Katz of 2,092,375 New York Times clue-and-answer pairs shows that words like NADA lose their Spanishness over time: clues go from, say, “Nothing, in Navarra” to, simply, “Zilch.” But, Kurzman and Katz conclude, puzzle parochialism is actually deepening: “the [Times] puzzle today uses one-third fewer non-English clues and answers than it did at its peak in 1966, and makes two-thirds fewer international references than its peak in 1943.” Globalization, waves of immigration, and hiring efforts encouraging diversity may have remapped the newspaper’s reporting desks, but “when we turn from the New York Times news pages to the puzzle page, the rest of the world fades away.”
Non-English words are often, as Auden implied, represented absent “their own characteristics.” At worst, the puzzle inflects a clue or an answer with negative, sometimes racist, connotations, as when ILLEGAL was clued in the New York Times as recently as 2012 as “One caught by border patrol.” Ghogre recalls the sense of defamiliarization he felt when, say, seeing the clue “Unstitched garment” for SARI: “un-stitched” appears in the first sentence of the “Sari” Wikipedia page, but he says it’s a feature of the item that no Indian national would notice. In his 2012 A.C.P.T. letter, otherwise a friendly salvo, Ghogre mentions that American puzzles offer a narrow aperture through which to view Indian culture, citing the “usual suspects” of NAaN, RAJA, RANI, SARI, DELHI, SITAR, RAVI, NEHRU, and so on. It felt flattening, doubly so when clues had inaccuracies, as if the words were tchotchkes bought by the cosmopolitan solver and deposited on the mantelpiece of the grid.
The American crossword’s misfires aren’t preordained. If the British cryptic is predicated on riddles, its composers looking for words like LOOKING, which they can decompose into slippery cluable units (LOO + KING; an anagram of OK LINGO), then the three aspects of American puzzles—its marquee entries (theme), surrounding words (fill), and their definitions (clues)—are more pliable zones for constructors to politicize. Kurzman and Katz’s analysis ends in 2015; since then, much effort has been devoted to making the puzzle respectfully worldly, both within the borders of the Times grid and without.
In 2021, the psychologist and puzzle-maker Erica Hsiung Wojcik published the Expanded Crossword Name Database, a “list of names, places and things that represent groups, identities and people often excluded from crossword grids.” Because of English’s consonant-heavy phonotactics, crossword constructors make use of vowel-heavy French loanwords to fill out the grid—ETE, OUI, EPEE. That’s also, perhaps, why we know Jean AUEL, EERO Saarinen, all the canonical IRAs. If vowelly nouns are so useful, why not arm constructors with an updated canon: Why not put EULA Biss, Michaela COEL, or YAA Gyasi in a crossword? One solver’s trivia is another’s lived lexicon; what’s “fair” to W. H. Auden might keep newbie solvers on the other side of the fence.
Most constructors use software assistance to build their grids, including a word-list file where thousands of entries are ranked by their crossword worthiness. Higher-scored words pop up as suggested fill more often; a new clueing angle might lead a constructor to rescore a word, as if on appeal. Nancy Serrano-Wu, a constructor and an immigration attorney, recently clued TPS not as the usual “Festoons with Charmin, informally” (TPS was a lowly 25 in my word list; I won’t use any word under 50) but by way of Temporary Protected Status, the immigration relief granted to many Ukrainians, Afghans, and Venezuelans. (I’ve since bumped it to a 50.) Wojcik clued VIET not as “___ Cong” but as “___ Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer-winning author of ‘The Sympathizer.’ ” And, given the U.S.’s enormous Spanish-speaking population, the constructor Brooke Husic often writes clues in what she calls “stealth Spanish,” where bilingual crosstalk obviates the need for disambiguation: “Hand it over!” might clue the imperative ¡DAME! “Pies for a social distancer” is SEIS, or six; the pun shakes off the othering manacles of italicized, “foreign” words. In all of these cases, the editor can override a constructor’s original angle; Will Shortz in particular is known for rewriting up to ninety per cent of a submission’s clues. To get something new accepted, constructors load a clue with the kind of accolades—like Nguyen’s Pulitzer—that might adorn an EB-1A application.
Ghogre, for his part, preaches “crossword diplomacy.” His second Times puzzle, a 2017 collaboration with the veteran constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley, ran on the Fourth of July. Its marquee answers are JAY GATSBY, YOU ARE NOT ALONE, ELLE MACPHERSON, and WHY BOTHER. Each begins with a spelled-out version of the letters “J,” “U,” “L,” “Y”: a fourth of the word JULY. The consul general in Mumbai noticed the puzzle and invited Ghogre to a celebration of America’s Independence Day. The consulate asked the Times to print five hundred additional copies of the crossword, to distribute to guests. Shortz autographed a copy, as did Quigley, Ghogre, and, at the event, the consul general, who wrote below his signature, “This is a great symbol of U.S.-India dosti.” Dosti means “friendship” in Hindi. I didn’t know the term, but I’m glad to have learned it. One day, you might see it in a crossword.
Harry Houdini, the most famous escapist in the history of magic, was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874. In the book “Houdini’s Box,” the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips describes how Weisz’s family, which tried and failed to assimilate to the commercial churn of the New World, raised “a child who would defy nature, confound gravity,” and “devote his life to the performance of a violent parody of assimilation.” Where his parents either couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt, Houdini “would be the man who could adapt to anything and escape from it.” Before Erik Weisz became Harry Houdini, he had another identity. Phillips writes:
A “crossword puzzle clue” to a man who escaped boxes for a living, but also a clue to those who escaped immigration narratives and made it into the boxes of the crossword. As a crossword writer myself, and as the son of an immigrant, I’ve always found world-making through wordplay intuitive, almost fated. My father signs his e-mails and texts ABBADAD, concatenating the Hebrew transliteration for “father” with the English; the string appears to me as an alien rhyme scheme, the specs of a poetic septet for an as yet undiscovered form. The writer Ocean Vuong has said that his late mother, who neither read nor understood much English, would sit facing the audience at her son’s poetry readings, fluent at least in the language of bodily rending, of visible transport and escape. I imagine my mother, a Moroccan Israeli immigrant whose written English is spotty, going over to customers at the restaurant where she waited tables, scowling as they worked one of my crosswords instead of calculating the tip.
Once, a friend remarked that if an author were to give a crossword writer a name in a work of fiction, you could do worse than Natan Last. My first name, derived from the Hebrew for “gift,” is a palindrome, spelled identically forward and back, a round trip of letters; my last name is autological—a word that describes itself, such as “pentasyllabic.” When a customs officer, glancing at my passport, mispronounces my first name, I feel at once like an outsider and like someone else, someone new; if the officer riffs on my last name being Last, I’m quick to develop the joke.
Perhaps this is why the crossword has long kept company with émigré writers. In Berlin in 1924, as the crossword craze raged in America, Vladimir Nabokov published the first known Russian crosswords (initially called kreslovitsa, ultimately krossvords) in Rul, the émigré newspaper founded by his father. The American-style puzzles afforded Nabokov a fresh point of view; one clue asks, rhyming with Arthur Wynne’s first Word-Cross, “What the Bolsheviks will do,” with the answer being Disappear. Nabokov’s fiction brims with anagrammatic avatars of the author: Vivian Darkbloom (from “Lolita”), Adam von Librikov (“Transparent Things”), Bladvak Vinomori (“King, Queen, Knave”), Baron Klim Avidov (“Ada, or Ardor”). Immigration is an occasion for “self-renaming,” exposing, as one of Nabokov’s characters notices, the fact that all names—the ones we come into the world with and the ones we make a new world with—are formed from the same set of letters; Vladimir Nabokov knows that Vladimir Nabokov is, too, a fiction. He seems to know it better for having written crosswords. “Definition is always finite,” Fyodor says in Nabokov’s “The Gift,” “but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricade (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity.”
The writer Georges Perec’s most famous work is likely his lipogrammatic “La Disparition” (“A Void”), a novel composed entirely without the letter “E.” He also wrote a moving book about Ellis Island and immigration, a weekly crossword for Le Point, and the novel “Life: A User’s Manual,” which features a started but uncompleted crossword grid. When I first saw it, it felt like the ultimate ideogram for the hybrid crossworder-novelist-migrant: the half-finished puzzle, always anagramming, escaping and assimilating at the same time. Writing crossword clues, Perec has said, is like “a stroll in the land of words, intended to uncover, in the imprecise neighborhood that constitutes the definition . . . the fragile and unique location where it will be simultaneously revealed and hidden.”
When, in December, 2022, Mangesh Ghogre came to the U.S. on his EB-1A, we met for lunch in midtown. Although I’d worked for a refugee-resettlement nonprofit nearby for three years, I couldn’t remember any suitable lunch spots. It turned out not to matter. All the storefronts had, during COVID, anagrammed or rearranged themselves into other eateries: PRET A MANGER had become CHIPOTLE; TWO FORKS was FIVE GUYS. At a ramen joint with a decent lunch special, Ghogre explained that although this phase of his immigration tale was over, there was much to do. Find an apartment in New Jersey. Enroll his children, Eva (named in part for his favorite crossword answer) and Advait, in school. Though the EB-1A does not require one have a job lined up in America, applicants must explain how they intend to continue working in their area of “expertise.” On his application, Ghogre expressed interest in eventually owning a puzzle company. Since he’s an I.P.O. banker by trade, he wants to list his own firm, and he already has the four-letter ticker picked out: CLUE.
“Fill in the crossword grid,” the scholar Gareth Farmer suggests, “and you get an epic.” Ghogre continues to imbue each grid he makes with his own perspective, stretching the horizon of common knowledge. He’s proud of a recent clue for EPICS, normally “Iliad and Odyssey, for two” or “ ‘Beowulf’ and ‘Paradise Lost.’ ” Ghogre’s clue was “The Hindu ‘Ramayana’ and others.” These little shifts can add up. ♦
