“She gets tired,” I said, thinking of that windup key in Anita’s back slowing, threatening the vigor of her public persona. These days I couldn’t imagine who she was in private, what she dreamt of or loved.

“You haven’t been coming by,” Anjali Auntie said airily. “Are you sick of my food?”

“It’s been busy.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Anita might like some company soon. She’s been busy, too. Here, you want to come help? I lost my best set of extra hands.”

I joined her behind the buffet table and began piling up napkins from the package she had pulled from the shelf. People had mostly come through for their first round of food already, so though the dishes were hot and everything was still laid out, our corner of the party was quiet. From inside, high-pitched Hindi music sounded, and I knew some auntie would try to get everyone to dance and some uncle would give a speech about Meena’s and Jay’s futures and then the party would end and we, the non-Meenas and non-Jays, would go home to begin our summers of striving to become Jays and not Meenas. I would be spending my break up to my ears in debate research and, at my father’s behest, suffering through supplemental Kumon math courses. Thinking about this made me want to linger in the garage, to postpone the coming months.

“Have some dhokla,” Anita’s mother said, placing one on a Styrofoam plate. She drizzled it with tamarind and coriander chutneys. It melted into my gums.

“It’s good,” I said.

“I offered to make ice cream, but they said no. I should have said kulfi. Should have said, ‘I’ll make some saffron or pista kulfi,’ and then the Bhatts would have said oh yes oh yes please.” She said that last bit in a put-on accent. Anita’s mother did not speak like the fobbier parents; her vowels were wide and practiced, and she did not strike her consonants too hard. Her voice was all mongrel, almost English on some words (you knooow, she’d say in a pinched pitch) and mimicked American drawl and zing on others (you guuyz). My parents referred to this accent as “pseud.” They had kept their r’s and v’s and w’s just the way they had been when they crossed the ocean.

“Can you start boxing up leftovers? I have to get the cake from their basement and bring it upstairs for after their toasts. Know what? They made me put those kids’ faces on it.” She rolled her eyes. “These people.”

Someone with more sense of society than I possessed at the time might have called her bitter. But to me, Anjali Dayal was a minor thrill. She laughed at those who most annoyed me—the ones who so scorned her—and in that way, she debilitated them a little.