June rolled on. I hated math, I saw few friends, Wendi whacked me upside the head. And Ramesh Uncle ordered books from afar. The Hammond Creek library plugged into the college and university loan systems, making that little stretch of table where we sat gorgeously expansive, containing much more than our cramped lives. While other kids were splashing in the pool, shooting hoops, making out, I was listening to this old man tell stories in throaty whispers of Swami Vivekananda, showing up in Chicago to lecture Americans on Hinduism at the World’s Fair, and of Bhagat Singh Thind, who went to the Supreme Court in 1923 to sue for the right to be considered “white.” I learned, too, that Indians weren’t allowed to enter the United States for decades. He even showed me, once, a 1912 clipping from an Atlanta newspaper. It mentioned the Hindoos who had come to town, peddling exotic fabrics, trinkets, and jewels—dark as the Negroes, yet somehow different in complexion and mannerisms.

I’d never had an urge to muse on my roots in the way Prachi and the girls in the Miss Teen India pageant liked to obsess over their heritage, like, What does it mean to be both Indian and American? That kind of thing seemed simpering, and I suppose if I were to ruminate honestly on it years later, such questions only magnified certain inconvenient truths: that despite our bubble of brownness in Hammond Creek, we were, in fact, the minority. That the white kids were still, on average, considered more attractive, more popular. More essentially at home in themselves. That sometimes America baffled us teenagers as much as it did our parents. That every emphasis on achieving a certain future came from the anxiety of simply not knowing, none of us knowing, what life here could be. There was no room to imagine multiple sorts of futures. We’d put all our brainpower toward conjuring up a single one: Harvard.

But. If I had roots in American soil, if we had not all so recently crossed oceans, if our collective past was more textured than I’d been led to believe, then, well, maybe there were other ways of being brown on offer.

Of all these historical yarns, I most remember the one about the Bombayan gold digger.

It was the middle of the afternoon in late June, and I was growing drowsy. A Jenga tower of books was piled on the old man’s table that day, and he rapped the top of it as though to announce something. The tower collapsed, sending books skittering.

“Neil,” he whispered, unfazed by the thudding of books landing on his table. I yanked my headphones out. “I have found something incredible. Would you like to hear it?”