could cover it up. More figurines adorned the hallways. They had pointed breasts large as their heads, tiny waists, and supple thighs. It was hot in the club, but I refused to remove my jacket. I was standing close to Sheena, in line at the bar, when I felt the back of my jacket being lifted, and a pair of hands encircling my waist. I grabbed the fleshy fingers that had interlocked over my belly and yanked them off, making a sound piercing enough that Sheena heard me over the music. I saw her turn around just as I jabbed my elbows into the man behind me. “Hey, sorry” he said, backing away. “Take it easy, honey.” He wasn’t much taller than me and had a plump body and a moon-shaped face that others might have called pleasant. “I didn’t mean . . . seriously, I thought you were someone else. You’re Indian, right? Let me buy you a drink to make up for it?” He lifted up one hand, palm up, in a gesture of friendship. “I’ll meet you outside,” I told Sheena, my body shaking. I waited for her across the street, imagining how that man must have seen me: as an exotic statue come to life.
While growing up in America, I longed to blend in and belong, to not be the only brown face in a crowd. My family, who had settled in Pennsylvania, often traveled through the Midwest and South on road trips to seashores, parks, relative’s homes, and a newly built Hindu temple. During rest stops men stared at us, chewing gum like cows. Local mothers dragged their children away as if we could infect them with foreign germs. When we’d stop to eat in small towns passed during long drives, I’d get served half the ice cream received by other customers, the women behind counters not meeting my eyes. Sometimes, people mistook us for other Indians they had met. Bellboys and waiters pressed their hands together; they said “Namaste” and told us how they just loved Indian movies, as if they expected us to get up and perform. I went to a party with Sheena on the south side of campus—a twenty-minute walk from where we lived at the northernmost border— a few weeks after we went to that club. I’d barely seen her since then and was happy to have her back. Before we left our room, she persuaded me to drink shots of tequila with her. I didn’t drink, and had never tasted tequila, but because she asked, and I was curious, I agreed. We walked down the main campus road through a muggy fog, streetlights illuminating slants of faint rain that dampened our clothes. I could see 98