“All right, Meena, we’ll meet at the Starbucks by Belle Square. I want to return my brown gaucho pants at Nordstrom’s. OK . . . OK . . . bye!”

Sangita Joshi (a pseudonym) clicks shut her Samsung cell phone, grabs her black Kate Spade shoulder bag and the keys to her shiny blue BMW and descends the stairs.

“Aai, Baba! Me Meena la bhetaila zanar! Dinner nanthar yethe!” she yells to her parents in her mother-tongue of Marathi, letting them know where she will be and when she’ll return. She gets in her car, pops a CD into her player – the soundtrack from a recent Bollywood film – and unzips her black hoodie, revealing a low-cut pink silk camisole that her parents would think was risqué.

“It’s nothing compared to what the girls at school wear,” Joshi said of her top, “but my parents would flip.” She laughs, rolling her eyes a little.

Joshi is an Indian-American teenager, a tall and slim girl whose round face still has the innocent look of girlhood. She is the middle daughter of immigrant parents who came to the United States to further their studies in business and medicine. The Joshi household is one of about 20,000 Asian-Indian households in the greater Seattle area, and the number is growing. Because Seattle hosts numerous major engineering and computer companies, including Boeing, Microsoft and Honeywell, well-educated Indian young people, fresh out of college, are immigrating to the city to work for these companies. In fact, Washington now has the 14th highest Indian population of any state in the country.

For 18-year-old Joshi, straddling her two worlds can often be a challenge. During the weekdays, she juggles her schoolwork with extracurricular activities such as band, student senate and drill team. During the weekends, she juggles her “Indian activities,” as she refers to them – Bharat natyam dance lessons, meetings of the Youth Board of the Indian Association of Western Washington (IAWW), and the occasional Indian dinner parties to which her parents drag Joshi and her sisters.

“I could never give up my school activities,” Joshi says, bringing her luxury car to a stop at a red light. “And I’d never give up my desi activities!” she exclaims. The term desi derives from the Sanskrit word desh, meaning country, and is often used to describe South Asians.

Joshi respects both the American and Indian cultures, but she tends to think of the cultures as two separate worlds. She often refers to “Indian friends” separately from “American friends.” When asked about this, Joshi’s eyebrows furrow and she pauses. “Wow! I never thought about that,” she says. “But I guess I do feel like I’m living two different lives.”

Joshi whirls her car around a round-about and everything in her backseat shifts loudly. SAT prep books, advanced placement class textbooks, teacher recommendations, and college applications cover the leather seats. “Yeah . . . I did well on the SATs,” she says when questioned about the preparatory books. “But not that well. I’m applying to Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts . . . competitive. So I’m retaking them.”

This kind of ambition is not unusual among the offspring of Asian-Indian immigrants. “Parental ambitions for the economic success of their children are very high,” writes University of California-Irvine professor Karen Isaksen Leonard in her book “The South Asian Americans.” “Youth people are encouraged to undertake higher education and professional training, particularly in medicine and engineering.”

Joshi knows these pressures too well. “It’s doctor, lawyer, engineer,” she says of the occupational choices Indian parents tend to prefer for their children. “I want to go into medicine. But some of my Indian friends want to do business or social work or something. They’ll have to do some convincing.”

Joshi says she needs to do some convincing when it comes to dating. Joshi describes her parents, both professionals who emigrated from Mumbia, as liberal. But like many of her South Asian-American friends, she has yet to inform her parents that she has a steady boyfriend.

Leonard found that among adolescent, second-generation South Asian-Americans, “the most difficult issues involved dating and marriage.” Like Joshi’s parents, many immigrants had arranged marriages and are, as Leonard writes, “needlessly afraid of dating, thinking it means indulgence in sex.”

Joshi says her parents know she “hangs out” with her boyfriend, but she has not informed her them that she and her boyfriend are officially dating. “They don’t understand the concept of dating,” she says. “But they do know I hang out with him, and they’re cool with that. So, it’s like, what’s the point?”

Joshi thinks the prospect of marriage is more prominent in the minds of her Indian friends than her non-Indian friends. She says while she would like to find her own partner, she is not completely against arranged marriages. Leonard found that the youngsters in her study believed that the definition of arranged marriages was changing: “They are open to arranged marriages because to them it means not just the exchange of photos and biodata, but initial introductions and then the freedom to get to know the person . . . before making a decision.”

Joshi likens an arranged marriage to a friend setting up a blind date. “I trust my parents more than anyone to help me out with big decisions,” she says. “So why can’t they help me with finding a husband? It’s not how it used to be, where the girl and the guy were forced to get married before ever seeing each other. It’s different now than it used to be. Even, like, 10 years ago.”

Joshi says the tradition of arranged marriages is not the only thing that has changed in the past 10 years: “It suddenly started becoming ‘cool’ to be Indian,” she laughs. “Everyone at school is asking about mehndi (henna) and Bollywood.”

Experts who have studied South Asian immigration patterns agree. “Elements of South Asian culture are now abundantly available in the United States (as opposed to) even 10 years ago,” writes Leonard. Joshi says these cultural elements can be seen in Redmond, where she lives, and where almost 25 percent of the residents report an Indian heritage.

“There are Indian people everywhere here,” she says, pointing out two ladies dressed in salvaar kameezes walking on the sidewalk next to her stopped car. “Indian grocery stores, Indian restaurants. It’s crazy.”

Joshi exits her car and rushes into Starbucks to meet her best friend Meena. They gossip and laugh, talking about boyfriends, upcoming dances and college applications.
“In the end [after much soul searching],” says author Vindu Goel of second-generation desis, “you realize that you are neither Indian nor American. You are simply yourself, an amalgam of cultural contradictions.”

This seems to apply to Joshi, dressed as she is in her parentally unapproved camisole and her Seven jeans, waiting for a barista to serve Starbuck’s Americanized version of the Indian chai drink. When the barista hands the drink over, Joshi’s Indian blood boils. “Jeez!” she says, wrinkling her nose at Meena and pointing to the drink. “Why do they call it chai tea? Chai means tea, doesn’t anyone know that?” As she bursts into giggles, she could just as easily be a teenager in India, enjoying a cup of chai and some gossip.

“Sometimes it’s hard,” Joshi says of negotiating two worlds. She twirls a piece of her jet-black hair around a finger as she ruminates. “But I’m lucky. I get the best of both worlds. I can’t define myself as American or Indian. I’m not either.”

She is simply herself, an amalgam of cultural contradictions.