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And I am wondering, do I want to tell you?

But it’s too late. In San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in streets that still smell of piss, where homeless men shuffle around at the street corner, the clutch of Indian and Pakistani restaurants is brimming with hipsters. There are at least half a dozen Indian restaurants within a couple of blocks. Shalimar was the original hole-in-the-wall, in a rundown neighborhood of junkies and musty SROs. It started out as a place where cabbies could run in for a quick bite. Nothing fancy, no tablecloths, just a bustling kitchen and tandoori chickens turning on the spit. Now, the homeless man standing outside trying to sell a street newspaper greets me with a “Namaste.”

Isn’t this what we always wanted? Isn’t this what we demanded? For other Americans to understand our culture? Acceptance? A place at the table? I guess we didn’t fully realize we could also become part of the menu.

Fifty years ago, my parents emigrated to England by ship. My mother pretended to the fishmonger that she had a cat, so she could take fish heads home for a good Bengali fish-head curry. When I moved to the United States three decades later, she told me stories of how afraid they were to cook fish in their apartment, in case the smell upset the Polish landlady.

At my university in the flat plains of Illinois, we also learned that we had a private culture and a public culture. In the grad student apartments, where many of the Indians shared rooms, we could have our tape players on blaring tinny Bollywood songs and watch streaky, pirated copies of Hindi films, while giant pots of communal dal and rice and curry bubbled on the stove. But in public, we learned to leave that culture at home. Boys didn’t hold hands on the street like they did in India, we were told. At the department potlucks, we held back on the spices. On Diwali, we didn’t have any celebration in the department, even though half the teaching assistants were Indian. Being Indian was for after work. Then we could finally let our guard down and just breathe.

No more. My private culture has become public. At a recent film festival in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, the theater was packed for Bollywood night. And the audience was very mixed. “Some screenings are 60- to 70-percent white,” Ivan Jaigirdar, festival director for 3rd I’s South Asian International Film Festival, told me once. “Especially the Bollywood films.”

I could see that. My friends and I were cringing even as we were having a grand time. It was a strangely protective feeling. Even as we laughed and rolled our eyes at the excess of it all, we stiffened when we heard the blonde woman behind us sniggering. I was thrilled that this candy-color, emotionally charged melodrama was leaping across cultures and entertaining a diverse audience. But the nagging doubt remains—what really does cross over?

Gaudy and outlandish as they can be, Bollywood films are also an intravenous cultural drip for me. I relate to them somewhere deep inside in a way I, myself, cannot put a finger on. I remember standing in my living room in San Francisco watching an old Hindi movie with my best friend. We oohed and aahed as tragic diva Meena Kumari slowly raised her head, as if the weight of all that gold and brocade was crushing her.

My American friends laughed with us then and at us as we stood in our T-shirts and jeans singing Hindi love songs of indescribable pathos in shrill falsettos, towels draped around our faces like veils. We all laughed together. But my American friends had no idea how we longed in our flat-footed way for Meena Kumari’s languid grace, how we tried to line our eyes with hopeless tragedy. And knowing we could never get there, we butchered it all by shrill impersonation, hiding our longing with caricature.