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 Tshirts 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.
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.
“Not only that,” my mother was saying. “When Prerna Mallick got sick, no one could find water for her, na? Someone’s asking those hotel employees, water please, water, and no one’s coming, and poor Prerna Mallick’s mother is asking Anjali, ‘Can you just give her some of your daughter’s water?’ and she reaches for this bottle, and Anjali grabs it and says, ‘Germs, she did just get sick,’ and everyone back there, we’re all thinking, ‘Just let her pour it in her mouth, no lips-touching, like a proper Indian.’ Shameless woman.”
The car went quiet. I was developing a migraine, and leaned forward, pressing my forehead into the back of the driver’s seat.