Sublime

ersatz.

If you can find your footing between two cultures, sometimes you can have the best of both worlds.

kitsch,

Middlesex County, New Jersey, where we went to see the movie, is home to one of the highest concentrations of people of Indian origin in the United States. And since the United States is now the country outside South Asia with the most Indians in the world, Nainesh and his peers might be said to be living at the epicenter of the diaspora.

But he was nearly as bewildered as I at the answer he gave me.—They don't have homes, they are living there. For Bhupendra, it was the first trip back to Mother India in thirteen years. He was shocked. Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by desperately thin children who begged for the humblest of items: coins, chewing gum, even ballpoint pens—a

Nainesh said he identified strongly with the term "ABCD," which stands for "American-Born Confused Desi," desi meaning Indian—a self-mocking label that hints at the difficulties of forging a new identity in the United States.

Slowly we became—all four of us—American. For Bhupendra and Bhanu this would become clearer with each visit to India or Fiji. Although they tried to blend in, to do as the locals did, the mask was less and less perfect. The changes were physiological: they could not drink the water, had to be careful about what they ate, were bothered by pollution.

The Gujaratis of Fiji mostly kept apart from native people, except as business demanded. Many of my relatives say they were afraid at first of the tall, strong people who seemed as fierce as their historical reputation for cannibalism suggested. Natives and whites tended to see the Indians as clannish and separatist—but the Indians were in fact div