When my parents left india for England in the '50s, before I was born, they went by ship. The entire clan came to see them off, for no one knew when they would make the long journey back. The Suez Canal had just reopened and the ship meandered through the Red Sea, past the smoking volcano of Etna, across the choppy Bay of Biscay and the English Channel. Seasick, homesick, heartsick, my mother landed in cold, gray London, leaving all the flavors of home behind her, but not her memories.

Some days when the Polish landlady was out and couldn't complain about the smell, my mother would try to cook dishes that reminded her of warmer days in Calcutta, dishes like greens with fish head curry. Too embarrassed to admit she ate fish heads and bones, she'd pretend to own a cat. "Wrap the heads and bones up in some newspaper for the cat," she would tell the English fishmonger. I imagine my mother coming home, past delicate English flowers like snowdrops and primrose, clutching her package of smelly lies wrapped in newsprint. Migration was the fish bone stuck in their throats.

Now, that melancholy has left migration in a gust of globalization. This new interest in India is beyond "the bleeding heart interest in poverty and the orientalism of Taj Mahal, sitar, and Kamasutra," says Sudipto Chatterjee, who teaches performance studies at Berkeley. He sees this as America acknowledging not just that there is a world outside but that "the world outside is populating our world inside in places like California."

It's a two-way street. Indian markets are opening up to international brand names - the real Levis and Coca-Cola instead of their knock-off cousins - Lavis and Campa Cola. And the best of India washes up in the malls of America, its music hammered into rap songs, its mirrored bindis sewn into dresses. I can walk into the sprawling fluorescent warehouse of India Cash & Carry in Sunnyvale and pick out paanch phoran spice and Ayurvedic digestive pills. I can get all the fish heads my diasporan heart desires.

When Bharati Mukherjee came to America in the 1960s, no one had seen saris on Main Street. "Even in Manhattan we'd smile at another Indian if they walked by us," remembers Mukherjee, an author and professor in the English department at Berkeley. "You felt an affinity to other Indians that you might not have felt in India."

It's a feeling echoed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. In an interview soon after the publication of her first novel, The Namesake, she said that her mother would be sauntering along Cambridge's Harvard Square with her in a stroller "and every time she would see someone who looked Bengali there was this instant: ¥Who are you? Where are you from? Let's be friends.' " She says that even after years in America her parents never seemed to feel quite safe, except in the company of those friends. In the suburban Rhode Island town where she grew up, none of her friends' parents locked their doors. "My parents were always locking the door, locking the garage, closing the windows, locking the windows every night," says Lahiri. "I think it's just a sense of not feeling on firm ground."

That Indians are feeling on firmer ground in America is indisputable. It's hard not to when the U.S. president is trying to push a special India-U.S. nuclear deal through Congress instead of engaging in the usual finger-wagging about non-proliferation. Some of this new confidence undoubtedly stems from the numbers. In 1990, Indians were 0.33 percent of the U.S. population. In 2000, they were 0.6 percent of the population, with the highest average growth rate of all Asian subgroups. According to Merrill Lynch, almost 200,000 of them are millionaires.

"During the twenty years I've been in California, an immigrant fog of South Asians has crept into America," Bharati Mukherjee writes in the voice of her heroine Tara in her latest novel, The Tree Bride. When some 21st-century Fitzgerald writes the chronicle of Silicon Valley, it might well be called The Great Gupta, she says.

But it's not just the numbers that account for this new confidence. "These are the children of the immigrants from the '60s and '70s coming of age," says Chatterjee at Berkeley. "They don't have the divided loyalties of their parents. They are born American." It means they are freer to experiment with their culture and to embed it into their American lives. They are hungry to see themselves onscreen and onstage, he says.

When Chatterjee staged Indian playwright Manjula Padmanabhan's play Harvest on the Berkeley campus, he was astounded. "They were sold-out performances and people were jumping up and down with joy," Chatterjee says. "They were saying it's about time."

This shifts the very notion of multiculturalism. "The old melting pot versus rejection of American culture rhetoric doesn't work anymore," says Bharati Mukherjee. She sees the new Indian Americans at home both in San Francisco and in the "McMansions of the Dollar Colony in Bangalore." They self-confidently take what they want from each culture. There's no need to erase one identity to be the other. "They are ready to max SAT scores and go to Harvard and MIT," she says. "But they are also the guardians of (classical dance traditions) Kathak and Kathakali."

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