Hasmukh P. Rama, 51, is the chairman of the American Hotel and Motel Association, the trade group representing America's $85.6 billion lodging industry. Rama is tiny, only 5 feet 3 inches tall, and his pate is as smooth as a brand-new cricket ball. His surname used to be Patel, but the family decided to adopt a new one ''because Patel, as you can see, is a very common name.'' He is the first Asian to head the 89-year-old organization, and at a recent Indian hoteliers' convention in Atlanta he worked the room like a politician at a rally. Rama seemed like the man who could explain the motel-Patel phenomenon. But his answers to my questions, it turned out, seemed more calculated to promote a certain myth that successful hotel-owning Indians have begun to spin for public consumption.

''You must know the ancient Sanskrit phrase, Atithi devo bhava -- The guest is God.' Hospitality is in our culture,'' he told me. ''It comes naturally to us. It is inherent in the nature of the Indian. It is natural for us to be in the lodging sector.'' If that is so, I asked, how was it that hardly any of these people ran hotels before they came to America? ''It's all about opportunity and example,'' Rama replied sagely, starting into a speech about hard work. He related how he arrived in America in 1969 and noticed how ''our people'' were buying motels; by 1973, he had bought one himself. Now his company, JHM Enterprises, operates 23 hotels in six states and one in India. Last year, his family created the Rama Scholarship Fund for the American Dream, with a donation of $1,000,001. (Hindus consider gifts of money ending in the numeral 1 to be especially auspicious.) The benefaction is intended to help students from minorities go to schools for hotel management.

It's an inspiring tale, and Rama seems to want me to multiply it by many thousands to explain the Indian dominance of the motel business. But it isn't quite that simple. ''If you look at an example of a domination of an economic niche by an ethnic group,'' says Thomas Espenshade, a professor of sociology at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, ''the general story is told in terms of the pioneers and the followers. This is so whether you look at Indian motel owners, Korean grocers, Chinese laundries.''

In this instance, the very earliest years are hazy. But the first Indian motel owner in the United States is said to have been an illegal immigrant named Kanjibhai Desai, who managed to buy the Goldfield Hotel in downtown San Francisco in the early 1940's. By the end of that decade, there was still only a handful of Indian-owned motels, one of them owned by Bhulabhai Vanmalibhai Patel -- whose grandson Pramod Patel is today a hotelier in the Bay Area; his company's portfolio includes Holiday Inns, Ramadas and Comfort Inns.

According to Pramod, his grandfather left his Gujarati village in 1949, at the age of 29, for a better life in America. ''Only 100 Indians a year were allowed into the country in those days,'' says Pramod. ''My grandfather came, met Desai and decided to copy him. So he leased the Auburn Hotel in downtown San Francisco that same year.''

By the 1960's, Pramod estimates, there were still only 60 or 70 Indian-owned motels, mostly in California. Evolving immigration laws helped the next wave of pioneers make their mark in the 1970's. At the time, explains David Mumford, the president of Mumford Company, a hotel brokerage in Newport News, Va., ''many American motel owners, people I call Mr. and Mrs. Jones, were aging. Motels were a postwar thing, and by the mid-70's a lot of the people who owned them were of retiring age. Their kids were not interested in the business.'' The concurrent global oil crisis meant people were taking fewer driving vacations, which hurt the motel business. Property prices were depressed. ''By the late 1970's and early 1980's, hundreds of motels were up for sale,'' Mumford continues.

So why were these Indians attracted to them? I got a more prosaic answer to that question from Vilpesh Patel, the owner of the 85-room Flamingo Inn in Windsor, Conn. ''Technically, it's easy to run. You don't need fluent English, just the will to work long hours,'' he says. ''And it's a business that comes with a house -- you don't have to buy a separate house. Another important thing,'' he adds, ''is the cash flow. We like that.'' Vilpesh was a plain-speaker. True, the guest is God. But the guest is also gold -- gold enough for Indian motel ownership to spiral upward, year by year.