He was going to the United States for the first time. Trying to, anyway.

When Shyam Srinivasan booked a flight out of India for July 27, he couldn’t have known that a drowning city 600 miles away would alter his plans.

Srinivasan was leaving his hometown of Chennai in southeast India for a place called the University of Kansas to take graduate classes in aerospace engineering.

But it would be a while before he’d arrive.

Srinivasan’s first scheduled stop was Mumbai, formerly Bombay, on the west coast of India. But the day before he was scheduled to leave, a reported 30 inches of rain in 24 hours devastated the city. When he went to the Chennai airport early the next morning, flights had been cancelled and delayed throughout the country.

Fortunately, none of Srinivasan’s friends or family members were caught in the floods. As more than 1,000 people drowned on the streets of the city of more than 12 million people, Srinivasan had more mundane things to think about. Like when he would get to Kansas and what he would eat until he arrived.

He checked his bags, went through customs and learned that his flight had been cancelled. He’d have to wait for the next flight to Mumbai, although nobody knew when that would be.

For two days he was in the Chennai airport, waiting to leave. He couldn’t venture outside because he’d already gone through customs. After living off mostly juice boxes, sleeping little and meeting other college students bound for the United States, Srinivasan finally caught a plane to Mumbai.

There he found an airport in disrepair.

“There were no phone booths, nothing,” he said. “No communication, no proper food.”

He was in Mumbai for the next day and a half, he said, waiting for a flight out of the airport as officials counted bodies outside. When he got on the plane, he had to wait three more hours on the runway for clearance.

“We were not sure of what was going to happen,” he said.

When he finally arrived in Newark, N.J., after a five-hour layover in Paris, he saw his two suitcases for the first time in days. When they came around on the baggage claim, they were drenched.

“Water was dripping off my suitcase,” he said.

From there he flew to Kansas City, Mo., and caught a shuttle to Lawrence. He met up with his roommate, whom he knew from India, laid his belongings in the sun outside their apartment to dry, and slept for 14 hours, he said.

Prashanth Rengaswamy Chandran, another graduate student from Chennai, had left three days before Srinivasan and avoided the delays. Chandran laughed when he saw how Srinivasan’s trip ended.

“I saw his books all dried up outside his house,” Chandran said, grinning.

Last week at the University of Kansas’ New International Student Orientation, Srinivasan won a contest for logging the most travel hours to the United States: more than 60. He won a coffee mug.

“It was fate,” he said.