My father prodded the college insert. “Keep that aside.” I did. Later I would find it contained a workbook to help you build your college essay “Mad Libs–style.” My name is… My dream is… When not studying I… My most important experience between ages 10 and 18 was…

There were the question-and-answer sessions, during which the ladies skirmished to offer the inanest possible response to that platitudinous question and its many manifestations: What does it mean to be both Indian and American? To wit: How should this generation ad-just to the New Country? Prachi faltered trying to explain why we didn’t speak an Indian language at our house; we had Kannada and Tamil and Malayalee roots, and a mother who’d grown up among Hindi speakers, so settling on any regional identity had never been an option—“My mother, see? Speaks about six languages? And my father two? But when they moved here, they wanted us to only learn English?”

Better was Uma Parthasarthy’s response to a question posed by judge Manisha Fruitwalla: “Miss Uma, which place would you most like to visit, and why?”

“Um, for me, to Tirupati, because God has, um, been very calling on me, recently…”

There were the talents: too often Bollywood-infused hip-hop or Kathak-infused tap. Prerna Mallick, fifteen, of Clay County was the highlight of that year’s program, as she twirled a folded umbrella about like a cane to some old filmy monsoon song, which subsided into “Singin’ in the Rain.” As the English interrupted the Hindi, Prerna snapped open the umbrella to face us: Ah! The instrument! It was patterned in the colors of the Indian flag. She rotated it in front of her, legs lifting into many chubby Rockette kicks. Then she began to do Kathak chakkars, twirling and twirling to a beat not audible within “Singin’ in the Rain.” Finally, Prerna set down her umbrella, stumbled, covered her mouth, and ran out of the room, having dizzied herself into nausea.

A few people followed her anxiously into the hallway. The judges went on making notes. The audience kept elbowing each other, eyeing the glossies, undertaking college-application Mad Libs. And my father began to emit deep, ursine snores.

The most important part of the pageant, apart from the (known but unstated) primary point of judgment, the quality of its contestants’ features and curves, was the Charity Presentation. That was where Prachi lost. Her charity project for the past six months: a clothing drive that gathered discarded T-shirts and sent them to villagers in Karnataka. But the room shifted when Anita took the mic, her Sprite-can-colored outfit jangling with mirror work, and began to talk about her fund for battered South Asian women in Queens.

I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase South Asian before. I definitely hadn’t heard of battered women, nor did I know of Queens. I had the sense Anita was not relying on her own knowledge of the world. How could she have suddenly come into such an adult, global perspective?