A scrawny man manifested beside my father and pressed a pile of glossy magazines into his hand. My father, ignoring, passed them to me. They were those diaspora rags, the kind piled up in the front of Indian restaurants and salons, which stay afloat through advertisements that purvey immigrant necessities and nostalgia: an article featuring a profile on the Scripps National Spelling Bee champion (can you spell juggernaut? indian americans dominate bee!) running next to an advertisement for kajol best ladies’ fineries and mega desi wedding expo, all shaadi needs: orlando, dallas, san jose.
I flipped through and saw one of Anita’s mother’s catering ads—anjali dayal: all types desi khana! and a black-and-white picture of her that stretched her out dishonestly, making her look pleasantly plump, turning her into another safe auntie. An insert labeled ace college application season fell out, featuring an interview with the Chinese mother who had authored the bestseller Harvard Girl. In the back, a column ran from a “Hindu activist” under the headline we must be more like the jews.
My father prodded the college insert. “Keep that aside.” I did. Later I would find it contained a workbook to help you build your college essay “Mad Libs–style.” My name is . . . My dream is . . . When not studying I . . . My most important experience between ages 10 and 18 was . . .
There were the question-and-answer sessions, during which the ladies skirmished to offer the inanest possible response to that platitudinous question and its many manifestations: What does it mean to be both Indian and American? To wit: How should this generation ad-just to the New Country? Prachi faltered trying to explain why we didn’t speak an Indian language at our house; we had Kannada and Tamil and Malayalee roots, and a mother who’d grown up among Hindi speakers, so settling on any regional identity had never been an option—“My mother, see? Speaks about six languages? And my father two? But when they moved here, they wanted us to only learn English?”
Better was Uma Parthasarthy’s response to a question posed by judge Manisha Fruitwalla: “Miss Uma, which place would you most like to visit, and why?”
“Um, for me, to Tirupati, because God has, um, been very calling on me, recently . . .”
There were the talents: too often Bollywood-infused hip-hop or Kathak-infused tap. Prerna Mallick, fifteen, of Clay County was the highlight of that year’s program, as she twirled a folded umbrella about like a cane to some old filmy monsoon song, which subsided into “Singin’ in the Rain.” As the English interrupted the Hindi, Prerna snapped open the umbrella to face us: Ah! The instrument! It was patterned in the colors of the Indian flag. She rotated it in front of her, legs lifting into many chubby Rockette kicks. Then she began to do Kathak chakkars, twirling and twirling to a beat not audible within “Singin’ in the Rain.” Finally, Prerna set down her umbrella, stumbled, covered her mouth, and ran out of the room, having dizzied herself into nausea.
A few people followed her anxiously into the hallway. The judges went on making notes. The audience kept elbowing each other, eyeing the glossies, undertaking college-application Mad Libs. And my father began to emit deep, ursine snores.
The most important part of the pageant, apart from the (known but unstated) primary point of judgment, the quality of its contestants’ features and curves, was the Charity Presentation. That was where Prachi lost. Her charity project for the past six months: a clothing drive that gathered discarded T-shirts and sent them to villagers in Karnataka. But the room shifted when Anita took the mic, her Sprite-can-colored outfit jangling with mirror work, and began to talk about her fund for battered South Asian women in Queens.
I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase South Asian before. I definitely hadn’t heard of battered women, nor did I know of Queens. I had the sense Anita was not relying on her own knowledge of the world. How could she have suddenly come into such an adult, global perspective?
“I had this desire,” she said, “to do something here, in America, because people have this idea that when you get to America everything is all of a sudden okay.”
She launched into a barrage of statistics, speaking in a practiced staccato reminiscent of Wendi Zhao’s debate voice. I craned my neck to see where she was looking. In the very back of the room stood Anjali Auntie, wearing a tatty gray T-shirt that read iit bombay. Her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. All of her attention seemed to have gone into Anita’s looks rather than her own that day. Her hands were pressed over her heart in a gesture that might have looked loving if not for the furrowed brow, the clenched jaw, the neck tendons bulging. I suddenly felt bad for Anita. The intensity of Anjali Auntie’s focus on her daughter just then seemed obliterating, like a too-bright spotlight. Anjali Auntie’s lips trembled as though she was reciting some enchantment to cast victory over her daughter.
It worked—something worked. Anita sounded unlike the other competitors. No one else had arranged a charity in the US. It was all send this or that to the third world. It was as though Anita had suddenly convinced the judges that there was such a place as Indian America, that she’d drawn up its borders and rerouted the foreign aid to the new domestic front; they had no choice but to honor her patriotism.
When the businessman placed the dinky crown on Anita’s head and informed her that she’d be going to the regional pageant that November in Charlotte, she lifted her hands in a namaskar and said thank you to the community and to her mother, who helped her see all the ways in which the Indian immigrant experience is complicated.
As she gave her valedictory, people were dispersing, mothers bitterly helping daughters from the stage, daughters pulling off heels and looking relieved to be barefoot. A photographer knelt, snapping shots from a lewd angle. A hotel
