“Now, Hammond Creek was still majority-white. We nonwhite kids stuck together, whether we meant to or not. Sometimes you wanted distance, but there was just no escaping other desis.” Titters in the audience; she was feeding the crowd a story of themselves with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation. Anita seemed to warm up at that. She began to pace more deliberately, growing lither and more leonine beneath those dramatic lights. “We sat together in the cafeteria and joined the same clubs. Our parents knew one another, and everyone’s business. There was no room to get in trouble, because someone’s auntie’s cousin’s sister-in-law would hear and tell your mom.” More chuckles, for gossip is an easy vice to cop to.

“But sometimes that hive mind would decide that one person was… off. You weren’t smart enough.” She pointed an accusing finger into the crowd. “Or you weren’t normal enough.” She swiveled and did it again. “Or you wanted the wrong things. And that affected whether or not you were fundamentally accepted.

“For instance, what if I told you that I left Stanford for mental health reasons?”

The person holding the camera let out a little hmm. Nearby, people were scuffling, though not all due to Anita’s confession. “When they’re doing awards?” a woman in the periphery of the shot whispered.

“You might not invite me to come talk like this, for one. You’d wonder if I belonged in the community, let alone represented it.

“This was what it felt like growing up. Adults and kids constantly gossiping about one another, judging whether or not you were Indian enough, using I don’t know what kind of standards. And at that point, it’s worse than gossip. It’s actually part of what I wrote my thesis about, at Stanford—because I went back, by the way, and graduated magna cum laude. We’re talking about an organized, systematic form of social exclusion. Perpetrated by everyone in the system. Kids. Parents.”

She tapped the mic clipped to her blouse. The sound rippled, as she called her listeners to more heightened attention.

“I know I’m running low on time. I wasn’t supposed to talk this much. I was supposed to tell you to lean into STEM. But before I go, I want to talk about a young woman at my former high school. She was the kind of kid every immigrant parent wants to have. Such a smarty-smart girl, they’d say.” (She descended into a fobby accent for that one. This time, no chuckles.) “But something happened. Something broke, or broke her. A bunch of forces we can’t entirely understand converged around this young woman. I can put a name to some of them, but not all.”

Only the holder of the phone camera murmured in recognition at that.