A Sikh, a Sri Lankan and a regular Joginder walk into a Whole Foods café. Cicatrix has her hair blown straight and at this very moment can pass for brown Japanese. I’m sometimes confused with Latino. But Ennis the turbaned Sikh? People recognize. There’s no mistaking where he’s from.
Ennis makes a food run downstairs. Here’s what he hears in the sushi line: ‘Sat sri akal, sardarji!’ It’s coming from the chefs rolling seaweed serpents behind a chic bar. They’re actually Tibetan, not Japanese. They say they get hired to work the sushi counter because ‘assi chinki lagde ne’ (we look East Asian).
So Punjabi-speaking Tibetans pass for Japanese by resembling the Chinese because it fools Americans. It’s like Sepia-ites inventing black ancestry to win street cred in North Dakota 
The conversation turns to accused shooter Biswanath Halder, a longtime ranter on Usenet (one prescient 1993 reply was titled ‘Mr. Biswanath Halder, please calm down’). There’s disbelief over the mechanics of the rampage. I explain that a thousand rounds don’t take much space at all. Ten small boxes, neatly packed as chocolates. The turbaned man looks worried and says, ‘Keep your voice down.’ It’s just a Sri Lankan, a turbaned guy and a pajamahedeen shootin’ the shit, saying things now off-limits to brown people in public.
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