Reagan Louie

It's two days before I leave for India and I am shopping frantically in downtown San Francisco.

My niece is 17 and I assume she needs something trendy to wear, something to give her "my-uncle-lives-in-America" cachet among her friends in Calcutta. I roam the aisles of the voguish H&M department store picking out one little outfit after the other. I check the label of a nifty pink cotton number. Made in India. I pick up the next one-pistachio green with some elegant embroidery. Made in India. Made in India. Made in Bangladesh. Made in India. Made in Pakistan. I put them all back on the rack, trying to imagine my mother's face if she were to discover I had flown 28 hours from halfway across the world bearing gifts made in Pakistan.

India has come to America in a way I had never imagined. The credits of the newest Spike Lee film Inside Man thump with the beats of the Bollywood blockbuster song "Chhaiya Chhaiya." At the Rickshaw Stop club in San Francisco, hundreds of revelers of all shades crowd the dance floor for frenzied Non-Stop Bhangra. When Sudipto Chatterjee teaches a course on Indian films at Berkeley, most of his students are not South Asian. And here's the clincher-according to the glossy Indian Life & Style magazine, Indian American twins Veena and Neena, specialists in belly dancing with boa constrictors, proud owners of the "Indi-hop" dance trademark, once regarded as "too foreign" by casting agents, are storming Hollywood, from Ozzy Osbourne's 50th birthday bash to Brad and Jen's wedding. Yes, that former it couple's wedding.

A couple of years ago Newsweek anointed South Asians "the new American masala." This year it discovered "the new India." Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus thought he had discovered Indians, we are truly found.

"India's hot," says Renda Dabit. She should know, because for the past few years the Palestinian American event planner and one-time Henna salon owner in Berkeley has been putting on ever more lavish Bollywood theme parties for her clients in the Bay Area. Dabit's company Henna Garden organizes pirate parties, Hawaiian luaus, and Vegas soirees. "Moroccan themes were very big before 9/11," she says with a wry smile. "But Bollywood is something new, and it's cool, hip, and fun."

"Cool, hip, and fun" are not words I am used to hearing about the country I come from. Hot, dusty, smelly. Colorful, exotic, spicy. But cool, hip, and fun? What happens to the price of migration when everything you had to leave behind suddenly shows up around you in a new hypercool avatar-remixed and recycled with a sitar backbeat?

Immigration once meant cooking with substitutes, imagining the taste of a long-lost vegetable while nibbling its nearest (but still somewhat distant) American cousin. No longer.

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