My grandmother clutches her rosary and wags an admonishing forefinger at me as I sort through the dozens of saris she has collected over eighty years. Fish curry cooks over a wood fire in the kitchen while a cow saunters in the street outside. It is a soggy monsoon afternoon in Sampige, the village home of my mother’s family since before Vasco de Gama landed in India. My summer is drawing to a close. I have done bloody battle with leeches in the jungle, wrangled a classroom full of children yelling, “Ajith said a bad word—beat him!” and encountered a man who, hearing I was American, growled and proudly showed me the pixilated Osama bin Laden on his cell phone. Yet few memories stand out as vividly as my grandmother and the unlikelihood, bordering on absurdity, that this woman’s granddaughter should sing the fight song at college football games, use the word “Google,” or watch MTV’s Pimp My Ride.