When I was a little girl, my mother used to call me her “Mississippi Masala.” A term of endearment and, as I would later come to find out, a reference: the nickname almost perfectly encapsulated my particular diasporic experience. My Pakistani parents moved to the United States in the 1990s, settling down in Mobile, Alabama—a town that is just about as south as you can get before plunging into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. People are shocked when my birthplace is revealed. To many, a Muslim South Asian family has no place in the flattened conception of...