In our house, it took only one gesture in the direction of India to compound an already grave situation. The accusation was that Prachi had flouted her responsibility as a daughter, a sister, a former Spring Fling princess, and yes, a granddaughter, too. She had imperiled the very nature of the sacrifice of crossing oceans. My parents relished that phrase, “crossing oceans,” as though they had arrived in steerage class aboard a steamship instead of by 747, carrying two massive black suitcases with pink ribbons tied around the handles and the surname narayan written in blocky letters on masking tape along the side.
My father, miffed, gestured at the two empty plates on my mother’s Walmart imitation-Indian paisley-print place mats. The bisibelebath and reheated aloo sabzi were all growing cold. I reached for some potato, but my father shook his head, and I got the sense that poking food around was the way we were going to ride this out, so back I went to that.
As Prachi continued her breathless apology, I looked out the breakfast room window, toward the Dayals’. Anita might step outside at any minute.
“It just got lost at a dance, Ajji,” Prachi was saying. “It was a very bad mistake, and I’m really sorry about it.” I could picture widowed Ajji on the other end of the line in Mysore, her long graying hair pinned against the nape of her neck, puzzled, perhaps unable even to remember what had been lost—she was forgetful these days—or if she did remember, thinking: Why are you calling me about a lost necklace when bigger things were lost in the move to America? Prachi signed off. “Love you, Ajji, see you soon. No, I don’t know when, but soon, right.”
We could now start dinner, which had gone completely cold.
Heroically, Prachi began to talk about the summer’s pageant as she heated everyone’s plates. My sister planned to be Miss Teen India Georgia and then Miss Teen India Southeastern Region, and then Miss Teen India USA. The prior November, she had placed second in the region, narrowly missing out on a spot at nationals, and was a favorite going forward. Prachi truly believed she was on her way to solving the riddle at the heart of the MTI: What does it mean to be both Indian and, like, American? One more shot at the tiara and she’d have the answer at last. She would communicate all this, and what it signified thematically and emotionally, on the Duke application she was to spend the summer filling out.
“Who’s Miss Teen India-India?” I inquired.
She glared. “The point is to empower Indian girls in America. Incidentally, your girlfriend’s going in for it, too.”
My parents’ eyebrows furrowed. They could not comprehend the utter impossibility of Prachi’s accusation that I, at five feet five, as brown, as me, could have a girlfriend.
“Who?” I said. My fist tightened around my fork.
“Anita Dayal.” Prachi sniffed. “She’s trying for MTI, too. Not that she’s ever been interested in exploring Indian American identity before.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, feeling a revolting feminine blush beneath my skin. “We’re barely friends anymore.”
“What happened?” This was my mother, surveying Prachi and me.
I twitched, looking not at my family but at what I thought was a figure stealing up the driveway of the Dayal house. I blinked; she, or it, was gone, or had never been.
“She’s a little climber,” Prachi said, accounting for my silence.
And my mother said, forgetting her anger for a moment, “Just like her mother.”
My father remained stoic the rest of the meal, but my mother thawed; that banter reunited the Narayan women. Gossip is to my mother what South Indian classical music is to my father—the virtuosic amalgamation of years of a community’s becoming. For as long as I can remember she has been a connoisseur of gossip, of the sounds it makes, the musicality, the overall gestalt, which is one that causes her to use the pronouns us and them, and the phrases these people and our people and such people, with confidence. One might call her ears—which are extremely large and loose lobed, with openings to the ear canal the size of a thumbnail—the place where the Indian immigrant public sphere gathers. In between wax and bristly dark hairs, the diaspora unscatters and lodges itself in my mother’s oversize hearing organs.
When I was younger, Anita and Anjali Dayal were held in perfectly fine favor at my house. Our two families mingled pleasantly; as a latchkey kid whose mother was less prolific in the kitchen than Anita’s, I often let myself into the Dayals’ house to rummage around in the fridge. The key beneath the watering can behind the azalea bush was mine to use. Our parents—the four brown adults in a largely white subdivision—collaborated to create a simulacrum of India in a reliably red Georgia county.
But over the past few years, Anita’s father, Pranesh Uncle, had grown conspicuously absent, discomfiting the other desi mothers. No one pronounced words like separation; it was stated only that Anita’s father was working in California, where he had founded a company with his classmates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. The official reason for Anita’s father living across the country while her mother remained in Hammond Creek was the daughter, and a desire not to interrupt her schooling. Which is why my mother was overtaken by a frisson of judgment when I came home at the end of May, weeks after Spring Fling, with the news that Anita would be leaving Okefenokee and, in fact, interrupting her schooling.
“California?” my mother said.
I
