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?

“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.