The video, taken on a phone camera, was washed out. Behind Anita fluttered the Tricolor and Chakra next to the Stars and Stripes. The phone refocused on a Jumbotron, where Anita’s face had been supersized. There, through a camera on a camera, came the simulacrum of Anita Dayal. Her features looked slathered with too much cakey makeup, and her cheeks were chubbier than they’d been in Hammond Creek. Her hair hung down to her breasts, thick and artificially curled. There were the thank-yous and the lead-ups, and then the meat of it:
“So, why did the Miss Teen India committee choose me as one of your speakers today?
“For one,” she said, “because I won this pageant some years ago, as Miss Teen India Georgia.” A whoop from the crowd, perhaps 2014’s representative from the Peach State. Anita smiled wanly, waiting. She was plainly not there to cheerlead. “But I think I was invited because in the years since, I’ve lived up to the promise of this organization. I went to Stanford. I work in technology. Someone overly optimistic about my future once called me the next Indra Nooyi.”
Her eyes darted to the wings, as though she was trying to remember her choreography. She took a few long strides. “I keep seeing how successful our community has become. Everyone wants to celebrate that. People like you all, here. And me. And your friends, and cousins, and classmates, and siblings who are getting into good schools and winning quiz team tournaments, and who go off to work at tech companies and consultancies and banks.”
The camera shifted away from the Jumbotron and attempted to zoom in on Anita herself. “I remember wanting so badly to be where I stand now, when I was a teenager. I would have literally killed to be seen as successful. My mother would have killed for me to be seen as successful.
“I grew up in a community called Hammond Creek, outside Atlanta. It was the kind of suburb where immigrants move to give their kids a better life. It’s a beautiful thing, when you think about it. These masses of Asians who all somehow collude to land up in the same place.
“Now, Hammond Creek was still majority-white. We nonwhite kids stuck together, whether we meant to or not. Sometimes you wanted distance, but there was just no escaping other desis.” Titters in the audience; she was feeding the crowd a story of themselves with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation. Anita seemed to warm up at that. She began to pace more deliberately, growing lither and more leonine beneath those dramatic lights. “We sat together in the cafeteria and joined the same clubs. Our parents knew one another, and everyone’s business. There was no room to get in trouble, because someone’s auntie’s cousin’s sister-in-law would hear and tell your mom.” More chuckles, for gossip is an easy vice to cop to.
“But sometimes that hive mind would decide that one person was . . . off. You weren’t smart enough.” She pointed an accusing finger into the crowd. “Or you weren’t normal enough.” She swiveled and did it again. “Or you wanted the wrong things. And that affected whether or not you were fundamentally accepted.
“For instance, what if I told you that I left Stanford for mental health reasons?”
The person holding the camera let out a little hmm. Nearby, people were scuffling, though not all due to Anita’s confession. “When they’re doing awards?” a woman in the periphery of the shot whispered.
“You might not invite me to come talk like this, for one. You’d wonder if I belonged in the community, let alone represented it.
“This was what it felt like growing up. Adults and kids constantly gossiping about one another, judging whether or not you were Indian enough, using I don’t know what kind of standards. And at that point, it’s worse than gossip. It’s actually part of what I wrote my thesis about, at Stanford—because I went back, by the way, and graduated magna cum laude. We’re talking about an organized, systematic form of social exclusion. Perpetrated by everyone in the system. Kids. Parents.”
She tapped the mic clipped to her blouse. The sound rippled, as she called her listeners to more heightened attention.
“I know I’m running low on time. I wasn’t supposed to talk this much. I was supposed to tell you to lean into STEM. But before I go, I want to talk about a young woman at my former high school. She was the kind of kid every immigrant parent wants to have. Such a smarty-smart girl, they’d say.” （She descended into a fobby accent for that one. This time, no chuckles.） “But something happened. Something broke, or broke her. A bunch of forces we can’t entirely understand converged around this young woman. I can put a name to some of them, but not all.”