A ‘Peter’ is someone who desires ‘foreign culture.’ A Peter speaks English when it isn’t necessary. A Peter speaks like he doesn’t know Tamil when he does and speaks English to a person he knows speaks Tamil just fine. The parodied figure of the ‘Peter’ has been a part of the Tamil lexicon for years*.

“Enna Peter-a?” Gayathiri was asked seven years ago, when she was spotted making friends with Americans on campus. Are you being a Peter? Gayathiri had just flown in from Chennai to Austin, Texas, when she was asked this question. She made a split-second decision to be loyal to the herd. After-all, like her, the others got the jokes of Tamil comedian Goundamani and had an affinity for ‘full meals’ – a colloquial way of defining a South Indian thali.

It was the Tamil network that had helped her settle in: a friend of a friend already had an apartment on campus. Naturally, she became friends with these contacts and their Tamil friends became her Tamil friends. The year after, they rented apartments across from each other and ate all their meals together. It was their first time away from home and the arrangement seemed familiar, like in their favourite 90s American sitcom, ‘Friends.’

It was also the “he likes her” phase. The boys had more opportunities to hang out with girls in Austin than they ever had back home in Chennai. This is how Gayathiri would meet and later marry Karthik. It was also the phase in which Gayathiri first tried on jeans with a kurta.

The twinkling lights of Mozart’s Café became a regular haunt, with most birthdays spent overlooking Lake Austin. It took multiple trips in a beat-up car to transport the whole lot of them for the five-kilometre journey from the University of Texas’ campus. Ten members of the group would learn to drive in that car. It is only now, in the San Francisco Bay Area that they aspire to the latest models of cars. Back then, they looked up bus timings and created an alert on a Google group to meet at the bus stop and head to the Indian grocer. Unlike that other Tamil boy they had heard of, at Ohio State University, they hadn’t packed 20 kilos of rice in their suitcase when they left Chennai.

*

I meet Gayathiri at the Inchin Bamboo Garden restaurant in downtown Sunnyvale, which could be easily mistaken for an ‘Indian Chinese’ joint in the IT hub of Bengaluru. With the exception of one white couple at a corner table, the place (and our own table) is brimming with Indians. I jog along the long table and am introduced as “The Hindu journalist friend” to twelve Tamil techies and the parents of one of them. Everyone raises a knowing eyebrow, familiar with the paper, the daily they grew up reading in Chennai. These are the members of a Whatsapp group called ‘GTS’ or ‘Guess the song’ and the plan for the night was formulated over several rounds of texts in the preceding weeks. ‘GTS’ began as a fun way to exchange lyrics and guess Tamil songs but it has evolved into a way of planning nights out in the Bay Area or road trips over long weekends.

I settle down into an empty chair near Gayathiri with a plate of Chinese Bhel in front of me and I am immediately accosted with questions. What am I doing in the Bay Area? What kind of journalism do I practice? Have I interviewed India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi? The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India has just stepped down and our part of the table begins a heated exchange on the Modi government, with the majority in favour of his policies. Gayathiri tells me her father-in-law is also a Modi supporter and that she and her husband reasoned with him when he had visited them that summer; they asked him at least to be aware of the “other side.”

The older man at our table today, another techie’s father, begins to chant, “Modi Zindabad” in between spoonfuls of vegetarian chopsuey. We move on to other topics: the Netflix show Raja Rasoi, Kenya’s invention of M-Pesa, and the enterprising Bay Area Tamil priest whose simple plastic sheets keep the dampness off the carpet while prayers are being performed. The bill is summoned and I am surprised to find a beef dish on it. My friend whispers that there are a lot of “NVs” in the group. Non-vegetarians.

We step out into the cool night and split up into groups, travelling in different cars to one couple’s house. Someone who walks in late notices the array of footwear at the door and comments that the entrance looks like that of a famous temple in Chennai. The wife has purchased a homemade birthday cake for her husband that will be sliced into neat triangles at midnight. Their house is furnished with IKEA trappings, a projector for movies, a surround sound system, air purifiers and bean bags. I listen in on a conversation about the group’s Fitbit challenge, in which Gayathiri is currently in the lead by twenty steps.

A tall techie from Chennai keeps pacing back and forth to make up the 3500 steps he needs in 45 minutes to win the ‘work week hustle’ on this Friday night. His friend, who works at Apple, asks him to flay his hands about while doing so; this way the M7 motion coprocessor, inside the Fitibit on his wrist, will pick up more steps. “Playing table tennis helps increase steps,” suggests someone else. “Cooking makes up 1000 steps,” the techie’s mother offers. Everyone laughs.

*