IN FIRST GRADE, MY FRIEND CAILEY held her white hand up to my brown hand, linked her fingers with mine and said, “Look, you’re like the chocolate chips and I’m the rest of the cookie.” In fifth grade, our social studies book touched briefly on Indian history, everything from the Indus Valley to Gandhi in one slim chapter. I got to read the whole thing aloud in class because I was the only one who could sound out words like Mahatma. In sixth grade, at recess, when I tried to cut in front of Chad P. at the slide, he called me a camel jockey. I puffed up a little, tried to sound tough and asked, “What did you say?” “I said you’re a camel jockey,” he said, so sure of himself. “You know, a sand nigger. Your people ride around on camels and eat sand all the time.” My teacher Mrs. Adams was enraged when she heard about this. She didn’t even care that the slur was misplaced and that, as far as I knew, my people weren’t from the desert. I had visited India with my family that year, the first time since I was two years old. Mrs. Adams asked me to give a presentation to the class about my trip, to make up for Chad’s remarks and because, as she told me, “It would be nice for everyone to learn about where you’re from.” Where I’m from is St. Joseph, Missouri, a city that acts like a town, minding its own business in the middle of the country. Growing up in St. Joe, I knew that being Indian made me a little different, but it was only in these moments that I realized everyone else knew it too. In high school, when I asked my parents if I could have a boyfriend, they said that dating at such a young age was an American thing and not right for us. Then I knew that I didn’t just seem different, I was. I grew up imagining myself the only girl to grow up American and Indian at the same time, the only one to feel the pull of these two distinct cultures. I thought life in the middle was mine and mine alone. So, I spent my teen years yelling at my parents because they didn’t understand me and patiently educating people who asked me if I ate a lot of curry or if my family worshipped cows. I preferred to think of myself as brown, rather than Indian. Brown was simple and true. It was just a color and not a subcontinent full of stereotypes. I accepted that as a brown girl in a black and white town, I would always have to explain everything to everyone. As I grew older, I learned that there was, in fact, a sizable subculture of girls like me spread out all over the country, but mostly concentrated in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Our parents arrived in the early ’70s, after the Immigration Law of 1965 opened America’s doors to South Asians, with a special invitation to those who possessed or were seeking higher education. They were part of a unique immigrant group, educated in English-medium schools and dominated by professionals. They came to America thinking of themselves not as ingredients to be melted in a pot and molded into something new, but as gleaming copper vessels of Indian culture, malleable, but designed to last.