A scrawny man manifested beside my father and pressed a pile of glossy magazines into his hand. My father, ignoring, passed them to me. They were those diaspora rags, the kind piled up in the front of Indian restaurants and salons, which stay afloat through advertisements that purvey immigrant necessities and nostalgia: an article featuring a profile on the Scripps National Spelling Bee champion (CAN YOU SPELL JUGGERNAUT? INDIAN AMERICANS DOMINATE BEE!) running next to an advertisement for KAJOL BEST LADIES’ FINERIES AND MEGA DESI WEDDING EXPO, ALL SHAADI NEEDS: ORLANDO, DALLAS, SAN JOSE.

I flipped through and saw one of Anita’s mother’s catering ads—ANJALI DAYAL: ALL TYPES DESI KHANA! and a black-and-white picture of her that stretched her out dishonestly, making her look pleasantly plump, turning her into another safe auntie. An insert labeled ACE COLLEGE APPLICATION SEASON fell out, featuring an interview with the Chinese mother who had authored the bestseller Harvard Girl. In the back, a column ran from a “Hindu activist” under the headline WE MUST BE MORE LIKE THE JEWS.

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…”