“She fooled around all high school, didn’t she?” my mother said to Prachi. This was the latest tactic in the wake of Prachi’s Spring Fling moral miscarriage. My mother would ask her to recite the fates of those who “fooled around”—which might, in her view, include anything from neglecting to take AP Biology to shooting up hard drugs. She educated us about the wider world by assembling a kind of shoe-box diorama of other people’s lives—a cardboard drama. She arranged the characters, moved them about, and showed you how they were doing it wrong, turning the diorama into the set of a morality play.

Upon arriving at the Bhatts’, I prepared to abscond to the basement. Basements were the safest places to survive an Indian party in the suburbs. In a basement, the itchy clothes could be loosened, the girls’ dupattas dropped on the floor and trampled upon, the guys’ kurtas removed to reveal that all along someone had been smart enough to wear a T-shirt beneath the fabric, and jeans rather than churidars below. In basements you never encountered garish images of multiarmed gods, or family portraits shot in the mall photography studio—sisters draped in lehengas and brothers’ hair stiff with gel. In basements you found foosball and Ping-Pong tables, big-screen televisions, and, depending on the benevolence of the parents, video game consoles. In basements, I learned the secrets of sex, according to information curated from older brothers who were certainly still virgins. In basements, a semblance of our due—American teenagedom.

The Narayan family basement was, by the way, unfinished.

“Lavish-shmavish,” my mother whispered as I made for the underground. This was her general opinion on the Bhatts, and on any carpeting or televisions below the earth.

New graduates kicked back in oversize leather recliners. Meena Bhatt sat on the lap of George Warner-Wilson, who had spent high school as one of the only white people among Asians. He was going to Georgia Tech in the fall, where he might continue dwelling at this demographic crossroads.

“Neilo, Neilium, Neilius,” he said through his sinuses, saluting me. I waved. “Your crew’s in the exercise room.” He pointed.

As I opened the door, I heard Meena sigh, with a voice less damned (per my mother’s diorama) than insouciant: “Can someone bring me something that’s not frickin’ Indian food?”

The gym looked unused. Half the walls were mirrors. Folded up against an un-mirrored wall was a treadmill draped in plastic. Mounted in one corner, a television, and beneath it, a video game console. A report of gunfire went off on-screen.

“Fuck you, Osama, this is America!” yelled Kartik Jain, as Aleem Khan’s avatar, a square-jawed white soldier, expired.

Anita sat cross-legged on the floor, examining a glossy magazine. She hovered a pencil above the pages, marking off answers in some quiz.