Case in point: after more than a month of being grounded, I remained unsure why my parents had reacted so restrictively to the insolence I’d displayed at the Bhatts’. I got my answer when an invitation arrived for Shruti Patel’s birthday pool party at the YMCA. She was turning fifteen, and her parents had called around inviting everyone on her behalf. A sad existence, having grown-ups handle your social calendar. But I’d been isolated for weeks and I thought I’d go.
My mother shook her head. “I don’t trust what goes on at these parties.”
“At Shruti Patel’s birthday?” I contorted my features into a Shruti-esque expression to remind my mother who we were talking about here. I pulled my hair up and out from both temples and bared my teeth like a gopher.
“Anyone can get into all kinds of nonsense these days.”
My mother wanted Prachi and me to endure apart from the corrupting influences of American society—drinking, drugs. And dating: “Americans learn how to break up with each other very easily, all of them with endless baggage, exes upon exes. . . .” I first received the dating diatribe on the eve of Gabby Kaufman’s bat mitzvah in seventh grade. “Mrs. Kaufman, I have called her on the phone,” my mother had said, wagging a finger. “There will be no close-close dancing.” I spent that night being taught how to grind by Gabby’s spunky cousin from New Jersey, who informed me that she had kissed two Indian boys already and liked the chocolate look of us. In order to keep in contact with the thrilling Jersey Kaufman, I created an ill-fated screen name that followed me into high school: neil_is_indian. It would be years before another girl displayed interest because of my race, rather than despite it.
Some of these topics came up with my father one afternoon that summer, after he had finished pushing the lawn mower across our front yard. He surveyed his work with a sense of defeat. The grass looked like his back, little tussocks of fur sprouting here and there, unevenly.
“Mom’s being insane,” I complained, standing barefoot in the driveway, feeling the heat scald my foot soles. “She’s, like, pre-grounding me for stuff I haven’t even done yet.”
He lifted his Braves baseball cap, one of those articles of clothing that my immigrant parents had amassed unthinkingly through the years, part of the assimilationist wardrobe; my father could not have recited any of the players’ batting averages, or performed the fans’ highly questionable “tomahawk chop.” The southern sun knocked against his bald spot, reflecting merrily. He wiped the ring of his sparse hair with a hankie, deliberately, then shook the cloth out in front of him, as though looking for a premonitory guiding pattern in the sweat.
“You know what they say on the trains in India when it gets very crowded?”
I sighed to make clear my disinterest in whatever parable that was to follow. “What?”
“Ad-just.” He pronounced each syllable separately. “Ad-just. No matter how many people are there, someone wants to sit; they’ll say, ‘Ad-just, sir, please ad-just.’”
“Uh, okay?”
“We are all still ad-justing to this place, see?”
“I’m not. I’m American.”
“Your mother—she’s protective.”
“I don’t get into trouble, though.”
“What do you mean, trouble?” my father said.
“You know. Drinking, whatever.”
He inhabited a grave silence for a moment. Then he said, “That is hardly the only kind of trouble.”
That was a loquacious exchange between my father and me.
• • •
Nothing would excuse me from attending the Miss Teen India pageant in July, which was held in the convention room of a Ramada Inn in Duluth. I’d not been forced into a kurta this time, but I shriveled inside to think of stepping into a lobby full of white people as a member of the Indian pageant caravan. It turned out the hotel was owned by desis, and the only non-Indian in sight was the paunch-bellied Black security guard who kept asking, “Are y’all having some kind of festival or, like, traditional thing here?”
The ways in which the pageant was traditional were more American than Indian. The owner of the MTI Georgia was a Gujarati businessman with beady, roving, salacious eyes, proprietor of a chain of liquor stores across Alpharetta and Gwinnett, who introduced the twenty-some pageant competitors as they filed from the crimson-carpeted hallway into the yellow-wallpapered room: “Give it up for our contestants, beautiful inside and out, isn’t it,” he said, his vowels those mutt noises, folding in on themselves in an effort to keep the speaker from rolling the ensuing r’s or clacking the t’s too hard.
There were perhaps fifty chairs laid out for the audience, surrounding a long judges’ table. About half were filled. A toddler in a gold-and-maroon lehenga waddled laps around the seats. Some auntie leaned over me, her sequined dupatta falling on my face, to say hello to my father. My mother stood in the hallway with the other mothers, armed with bobby pins and safety pins and concealer. I hadn’t spotted Anita or Anjali Auntie when we came in.
The pageant opened with a column of brown girls balancing on spiky heels as they runway-walked a makeshift stage about two feet off the floor. Last in line: Anita, wearing a lemon-lime, yellow-and-green number splattered with mirrors and tie-dye. Her whole belly was visible—it was a little soft, like an inviting pillow. I caught her eye for an instant and noted nerves there, in the wideness of her gaze, the way all her concentration seemed to be devoted to stilling her facial muscles. I mouthed hi, and then regretted it. Applause sounded and the contestants retreated. The MTI owner was muttering to someone next to him, but the mic had not been removed from his lapel, so we all heard him hissing, Tell that very fat one to cover up little more. It echoed, and a shushing auntie came to unclip him while we awaited the next
