“I had this desire,” she said, “to do something here, in America, because people have this idea that when you get to America everything is all of a sudden okay.”

She launched into a barrage of statistics, speaking in a practiced staccato reminiscent of Wendi Zhao’s debate voice. I craned my neck to see where she was looking. In the very back of the room stood Anjali Auntie, wearing a tatty gray T-shirt that read IIT BOMBAY. Her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. All of her attention seemed to have gone into Anita’s looks rather than her own that day. Her hands were pressed over her heart in a gesture that might have looked loving if not for the furrowed brow, the clenched jaw, the neck tendons bulging. I suddenly felt bad for Anita. The intensity of Anjali Auntie’s focus on her daughter just then seemed obliterating, like a too-bright spotlight. Anjali Auntie’s lips trembled as though she was reciting some enchantment to cast victory over her daughter.

It worked—something worked. Anita sounded unlike the other competitors. No one else had arranged a charity in the US. It was all send this or that to the third world. It was as though Anita had suddenly convinced the judges that there was such a place as Indian America, that she’d drawn up its borders and rerouted the foreign aid to the new domestic front; they had no choice but to honor her patriotism.

When the businessman placed the dinky crown on Anita’s head and informed her that she’d be going to the regional pageant that November in Charlotte, she lifted her hands in a namaskar and said thank you to the community and to her mother, who helped her see all the ways in which the Indian immigrant experience is complicated.

As she gave her valedictory, people were dispersing, mothers bitterly helping daughters from the stage, daughters pulling off heels and looking relieved to be barefoot. A photographer knelt, snapping shots from a lewd angle. A hotel employee stood in the doorway, eyeing her watch. But Anita was untroubled by her lack of audience. She turned, her bargain-basement tiara winking, and looked at Prachi, who had begun to unpin her dupatta.

“Thank you also,” she said, “to the fellow contestants, who have been such an inspiration, and whose best qualities I will try to incorporate into myself.”

On the ride home, my mother went in on Anjali Auntie’s activities backstage. The moms had been in close quarters all afternoon, pinning and making up, and now my mother reported that Anjali Dayal had been “behaving like one cow, only.”

Prachi sat glumly, her made-up face pressed against the station wagon window. She drew back. Whatever cakey stuff she was wearing left behind a ghostly print. Through Prachi’s window I made out a looming church sign—STOP, DROP, & ROLL DOES NOT WORK IN HELL—and past it, silhouettes of two buildings on the meager Atlanta skyline. But they were smeared by that makeup stain, so I felt I was seeing the city as through a shaken snow globe.