My father’s sense of America came from the John Wayne movies he watched as a young man in India. He loved the blank highways of the West Coast. An application sent on a whim from Chennai got him acceptance to a graduate program at U.C.L.A. and eventually a Ph.D in operations management, a new behavioral science in the 1970s that drew restless types from across the world. Physical openness suited his view of his second country.

We did all the American scenes big, but especially Thanksgiving. There can’t be many families of any race or creed as invested in the holiday as mine. Our house in Dallas became the center of the world come November. Cousins, aunts, uncles without the holiday off made space in the calendar to fly in from India. A turkey joined our normally vegetarian household, with no debate about Hindu notions of cleanliness.

The spread reflected aspirations. On the dining table, dishes married Hallmark and Karnataka: green bean palya, sweet potato raita. A friend of my parents dreamed up cranberry chutney, an instant hit. My mother’s best friend brought a touch of cosmopolitan sophistication: yams and marshmallows without any Indian spice.

The coffee table stayed frozen in time, homage to Mom’s take on America, and after her death, to Mom herself. Appetizers spoke to the quick-food era: cream cheese tortilla rollups served with salsa; a loaf of King’s Hawaiian carved to hold spinach dip thick in water chestnuts, recipes pulled from magazines she leafed through in her early years in the country.