I had been following the house for almost two miles and, while trying to pass it almost ten minutes back, saw its cross-sectioned insides laid open like a dollhouse. I half expected to see a family posed stiffly at a dining table, their legs straight out beneath the tabletop. But instead, a piece of cloudy plastic sheeting whipped out from the living room like a flag, waving me back behind the house at its crawling speed as it inched into the outskirts of Laramie.

It was then that I looked out the window and saw them in front of me. Their black heads like notes marching up the scale of the shoulder. They walked two by two and one of them wore a long scarf that flapped like the plastic sheeting. I scanned ahead. The oversize load sign on the back of the flatbed hung unevenly and the flash of the pilot car blinked into the dusk. I was going nowhere. I passed the quartet of girls and looked into my mirrors.

Yes. They were Indian. I pulled my minivan onto the shoulder. The house continued up Grand Avenue to where the road turned into interstate, headed perhaps for a foundation in Cheyenne.

I rolled down the passenger side window and called out to them as they passed.

“Do you need a ride? Where are you going? To Wal-Mart?”

They stopped and huddled like Christmas carolers outside the window. The thinnest one looked into my empty car and then stopped on my face. She smiled. “Are you Indian?”

I didn’t answer the question. I unbuckled my seatbelt and moved across the passenger seat to open the door. The thin one repeated her question, “Are you Indian?” I pulled the door handle open.

The girl tried again, “From India?”

I looked into their expectant faces. “Yes.” And they began to climb in.

The thin one’s name was Rani Mukherjee and she had been in the country ten days. The other three deferred to her. Their names were Suparna, Vidia, and inexplicably, Bunny, which I found very funny. Bunny was very fat and wore the scarf, which she wrapped around her neck like a mummy. Rani Mukherjee looked me up and down and declared I was from the South of India—she guessed from Kerala.

“Madras,” I told her.

“It’s Chennai now,” she said.

I could tell that Rani Mukherjee was used to being right and being the leader of the pack. But I could also tell that Laramie had thrown her off a bit. I wondered if it was the wind or the altitude. She asked my parents’ name and scrunched up her face when I told her Mike and Ellen Henderson.

“And my name’s Faith,” I added.

“Faith.” She held it in her mouth like a wad of chew, then turned to the backseat and looked at the others.

I told them the short version. Left at a church. Adoption. Raised all my life in Torrington. No, I had never been back to India. I didn’t know if I liked Indian food. I never knew my birth parents. I told them I was finishing my BA in communications.

They had been walking to Wal-Mart to buy things for their new apartment. They were all living together as graduate students in a small place off 3rd Street. They were all teaching assistants. But only Rani was going into the classroom that fall. The rest of them had flunked the incoming Summer ESL test at the University. Their grammar was beyond perfect, their knowledge of English far superior to that of any Chinese (who were common on the UW campus) or American graduate student, for that matter. But the speed with which they talked and the wrong stresses on syllables bought them a year of lab work rather than teaching. I wanted to tell them this was good. That I had had a teaching assistant for Computer Science who was Indian, and all of us had tuned him out. We laughed when he said simple words like hardware. Hardvare he would say. And we would all roll with laughter. Another boy would do his own imitation of the teacher, stressing all his words like the Count on Sesame Street—all the v’s emphasized like a DJ. It was better none of them was teaching. I could see Bunny would be eaten alive.

All of them except Bunny were in engineering. She was a mathematician. Which again, I found funny. We talked about their programs and they asked me if I remembered India. And what could I say? I lied.