There are cities that raise you, and then there are cities you must leave to become yourself. For Harmeet Singh, Mumbai has always been both.

When Harmeet last came to the Wankhede Stadium as a Mumbai cricketer in 2015, the visit ended rather humiliatingly. During the net session, then Mumbai coach Chandrakant Pandit asked him to go back home for not wearing the prescribed Mumbai kit shorts. He walked out immediately with a tear in his eye, beginning a tedious two-hour local train journey from Churchgate to Borivali. The same grind he had just endured to reach the ground.

"What people don't realise is that Bombay is a very big city," Harmeet says. "Coming to Wankhede itself is an effort. The travel on local trains can be physically taxing. Only after you clear that first hurdle does the question of effort on the cricket field even begin. I don't remember being angry often in my career, barring a couple of incidents, but that episode was frustrating."

Soon after, his Mumbai career was effectively over. He was 23. A prodigy whom Ian Chappell had described in late 2012 as the second-best spinner in the world, behind Graeme Swann, found himself playing his last first-class match for Mumbai barely three years later. Astonishingly, it was only in 2015, three full seasons after Chappell's remark that he was finally given a look into Mumbai's first-class set-up, featuring in just four matches before his falling-out with Pandit. For a cricketer who had made his Ranji Trophy debut at 16, an U19 WC winner and whose languid left-arm action had once compelled the great Dilip Sardesai to note him in his personal memoirs as a natural successor to Bishan Singh Bedi, the reversal was stark.

"I wanted a full first-class season, something I was never given," says Harmeet, who was handed just nine first-class matches for Mumbai spread across six years. "I never really even got the opportunity to fail. I always believed I was one season away from making it big, that a comeback was just around the corner. But that season never came in Mumbai."

Nearly a decade on from that unceremonious Wankhede exit and the long, painful two-hour journey back home, Harmeet returns to Wankhede on his own terms. This time, it is to the flashbulbs of a World Cup, on the biggest stage the game offers. He comes back as an international cricketer no longer dependent on remaining in a coach's immediate favour, with his place earned through performance and as one of American cricket's most travelled and sought-after figures on the global T20 circuit.

Harmeet views this return less as vindication and more as closure. Though not necessarily for himself. "I don't hold hate," he says. "God has given me back things in ways one can't imagine. He has brought me back to Wankhede in a dramatic way."

The moment, however, carries deeper meaning for those who are no longer there to witness it. Harmeet has often spoken of how painful it was for his parents to watch his premature exit from Mumbai's Ranji setup, followed by the media trial around the 2013 IPL fixing saga. An episode that tarnished his image despite him being cleared by the BCCI.

His mother, his greatest cheerleader, lived every step of that journey with him. She accompanied him to almost every game at Wankhede through his formative years. That she will not be there now on the biggest night of his career, in his hometown, at the ground that defined so much of his life adds a poignant stillness to the occasion.

It was a journey we lived together," says Harmeet. "My parents loved the Mumbai cricket setup, its importance, and its history. So my exit wasn't something they could easily digest. The media trial around the IPL fixing controversy affected them deeply as well. My name was eventually cleared, but by then the damage was done. I was only 20. Every player was worried about personal protection at the time. People don't realise how frightening that period was. Everyone was shaken, including members of the team's senior leadership. I think I handled it very well"

That phase may have distanced him from Mumbai geographically, but it never separated him from the cricketing values the city drilled into him. The refusal to concede, the insistence on winning games from impossible positions, the street hardened edge of Mumbai maidaans. All of it has travelled with him. It showed most vividly on his T20I debut, when he walked in during a desperate situation against Bangladesh and produced a breathtaking 13-ball 33 to script USA's first-ever win over a Full Member. The familiar Mumbai instinct of "kahi se bhi match nikal lena hai" taking over with the big hitting Corey Anderson reduced to playing a second fiddle.

Harmeet has also had a cultural impact on the American team. Along with captain Monank Patel, he has been central to USA shedding that associate team energy to play an enterprising brand of cricket. That shift has been evident since his debut series win over Bangladesh, followed by a historic World Cup run in which Harmeet's late-order batting heroics nearly carried USA past South Africa. The team later exerted their dominance within the associate world by genuinely looking a cut above the rest.

"I wasn't able to relate back then but when you move out of Mumbai and see the cricketing culture elsewhere it's very different in terms of how they approach the game. In Mumbai even our club games are treated as a matter of life and death. Whatever tournament it is the word would be that it is a prestigious tournament and there is no option but to win it. That thought is perennially drilled in your head and then how to win is the only talk that goes around in the dressing rooms year long"

His action today is totally unrecognisable. He has since abdicated that fluid action that had cricketing pundits drooling. It is now remolded into something that would better assist him in his T20 game. So is his persona. He has mellowed down. A few weeks back he visited his school coach Dinesh Lad and gifted him a cheque of 10 lakhs for his foundation which trains needy youngsters for free. By giving back to the city in whatever little way he can, he has already played his part. What remains, perhaps, is for Mumbai to respond by turning up and celebrating one of their own.