Meera is an only child, winsome and wide-eyed with a face the shape and cheeriness of an Easter egg. Her creamy almond skin tans easily and turns vacation brown as early as March. In the last year, Meera has begun to appreciate her looks and the perks that come along with them, like attention from boys, friendly envy from girls and skyrocketing self-confidence. Being super-cute requires that she smile a lot and wear the right clothes, that she stay in shape and under no circumstances seem weird. Even just a small oddity, just a whiff of difference, is enough to shatter a force field of cuteness for a sophomore in high school. Such devastation is to be avoided at all costs.

Meera is one of a handful of students at her private high school who is not white. She’d rather not let anything bring this distinction into even sharper relief, so she battles with the smell, among other things. To her, it’s something that just comes to mind when people think about Indians, like red dots on brown foreheads, poverty and Apu at the Kwiki Mart on The Simpsons. She dreads the moment when someone says, “Oh…you’re Indian.” It’s the moment when all those things might rush into someone’s head, the dirt and the dots and the animal gods. The stereotypes that Meera perceives of India and Indians bother her so much that even the things she loves, like the wonderful food and the rich culture, are stigmas at times.

Meera never talks about being Indian when she’s with her friends from school; she prefers to keep her two worlds separate. Not long ago, when her English class studied the Hindu epic The Ramayana, Meera almost spoke up in class. She hadn’t read the text before, but she knew some of the stories in it, and she was interested in her teacher’s discussion about dharma. She was about to raise her hand, when someone in her class interrupted the dharma discussion to say, “What’s up with the flying monkey,” referring to Hanuman, the Hindu deity in the form of an ape and a hero of The Ramayana. The class erupted in laughter, the conversation turned to flying monkeys, and Meera remembered why she never talked about being Indian.

By her looks and her unusual name, most people can tell that Meera is not black or white, but they don’t usually venture guesses beyond that. Sometimes, total strangers approach her with questions she finds obnoxious, questions like “Where are you from?” and “What are you?” Recently, Meera’s friend Tyler asked, “So, what’s your ethnicity?”

“Indian,” Meera had replied. “My family’s from India mostly.”

Then, as an afterthought, “and French too, I have like a French great-grandmother or something.”

Meera didn’t know why she said that. There’s no French in her family. It just seemed better somehow. It sounded more exotic and less foreign, cooler than just being Indian. It derailed the train of thought she expected her friend to follow. Indian with a little French thrown in was mysterious and not at all ordinary. Meera could have an ancestry of possibilities, and not one compact enough to fit into one subcontinent or discrete enough to come with obvious accessories like caste and cows and the smell of curry.