Long before the well-known large-scale migration of Indians to USA since the mid-to-late twentieth century in response to a call for highly trained and skilled labour, there remains obscured in the annals of history a case of the earliest known Indian to have arrived in America as early as in the seventeenth century. Based on a name of an ‘east Indian’ found in a 1635 Virginia ledger, Brinda Charry weaves a captivating tale of the arrival and adventures, trials and tribulations of this first indentured servant of Asian Indian origin in her novel, The East Indian (2023). As Tony, the protagonist, knowingly declares: “Others of my kind will come here [to America], … and they will tell their stories … [B]ut mine … is a first story” (Charry 246, emphasis added). This article proposes focusing on analysing the (lack of) forward movement in any migration in a deeper/truer sense, the journey away from home(land) in search of home(land)—in other words, the stasis inevitably inherent in such motions—as incontrovertibly demonstrated in this “first story” of the first South Asian immigrant to North America.