INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Gautam Godhwani peered out a window at Club 1616, past its lacy red curtains and onto the street.

"My God," he said.

Roped in at the entrance to the Center City nightclub, clamoring to join the 800 people already in its smoky interior on a recent Saturday night, were college-age women in bellybutton-baring pants, high heels and sequined halter tops. They clutched cigarette packs and jostled against men in slacks and dress shirts.

"I don't think I've ever seen such a scene in Bombay," said Godhwani, a King of Prussia software engineer born and raised in India.

The din on Locust Street unfolded at a "desi" party, where two identities of the children of immigrants from South Asia regularly try to cohabit amid music, alcohol and hormones. There, U.S. pop culture and social mores clash with and embrace the conservative expectations and values, anchored in distant homelands, of their parents. The fusion and the wrestling take place not only in the subculture as a whole, but in the souls of some of its members.

Desi (pronounced day-she) is a Hindi word that means "someone from the homeland" and, in the lingo of second-generation Americans with roots in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, loosely translates as "homeboy" or "homegirl."

"Being with people who look like you, there's a common ground," said partygoer Mukhul Sukhwal, 28, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. "There's a feeling of safety."

The spectacle outside Club 1616 replays itself almost every weekend in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and other places where the South Asian population - according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the fastest growing among Asians in the United States - boomed in the last decade.

But the circuit came alive in the mid-1990s as the children of the first wave of immigrants, who arrived in the late 1960s and the 1970s, were coming of age, academics and demographers say.

"It's not just a party," said Partha Mazumdar, a lecturer in Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "These kids are doing political work [simply by partying together]. They're asserting not their Indianness, but their Indian-Americanness, in a very creative way."

Inside Club 1616, where Godhwani stood, a DJ was spinning "Dil Le Gayee Kudi Gujurat Di," or "The Heart is Taken Away By a Gujurati Girl." (Gujurat is a state in Western India.)

The chart-topping song by Indian musician Jasbir Jassi mingled with the thumping bass line of American hip-hop. And every inch of the packed dance floor writhed to its hybrid rhythms, with women curling their arms above their heads in an echo of traditional folk moves from the subcontinent.

The vast majority of the people at the party were "ABCDs," or "American-Born Confused Desis," in the self-effacing shorthand used to describe teenagers and twentysomethings caught between two cultures.

Godhwani is not an ABCD. He is an "F.O.B.," or someone who is "Fresh Off the Boat," another double-edged term used in South Asian circles. The high-tech labor shortage in the 1990s brought him and hundreds of thousands of other young professionals from India to America, and it deposited him in the middle of the subculture.

The Bombay native is fascinated not only by the semi-clad women but also by the irony of the scene, he said.

The partygoers at Club 1616, mostly area college students, do things they could only venture in the most cosmopolitan cities of South Asia, if at all. They drink. They smoke. And they flirt in less than subtle ways.

"In an Indian family, there is a limit," said Rajendra Patel, the father of DJ Ill-S, 19-year-old Drexel sophomore Sachin Patel. "In this country, it's more open. People take chances. In our culture, we don't want to take a chance [especially] on our daughters."

Teenagers growing up in the fortress of such protection often don't enjoy the same freedoms some of their friends do. Some aren't allowed to date, and many have parents who frown on distractions from academics and the goal of a successful career.

Still, the Americanized carnival of "desi" parties unfolds in a setting where academics say the young people are trying to cultivate - through East-West musical concoctions and an ethnic social clique - that part of themselves connected to their ancestral homelands.

"The parties fulfill a sort of cultural nostalgia for these youth," said Sunaina Mehra, an Asian American Studies professor at the University of Massachusetts and author of the book Desis in the House.

"They're trying to evoke this place many of them see as their true home, even though they've never lived there," she said.

Consider one recent Saturday night at the Delaware Avenue restaurant The Chart House.

A boy wearing a Bobby Abreu jersey, emblazoned on the back with the number of the Phillies outfielder, darted from room to room, slicing through an atmosphere thick with cologne and post-adolescent tension.

From the booth where Sachin Patel manned two turntables, the voice of R&B; singer Truth Hurts filled the restaurant's foyer: "He breaks me down. He builds me up. He fills my cup. I like it rough."

On the downbeat, in the middle of the Truth's single "Addictive," another diva - this one from Bollywood, Bombay's musical-dominated movie industry - crooned in her trademark syrupy style.

"Chorna, Chorna Larka Hai," warbled Lata Mangeshkar.

"Growing up, I heard so much of it," Sachin Patel said of classic songs like Mangeshkar's, which gushed from the tape deck in his father's car. "For some reason, I'd hear it, and it would just click in my head. It's almost like it was subliminal."

The DJ has traveled the country, from Ohio to Florida to Washington, D.C., splicing together the nostalgia tracks from Bollywood with trance, funk, rap and reggae at parties advertised on Web sites such as www.desiparty.com.

But, for some American-born desis such as Patel, their two worlds do not always fuse as seamlessly as the musical tracks.

As partygoer Sukhwal, who has struggled to reconcile love for a non-Indian girlfriend with a desire to placate his mother's itch to arrange his marriage, put it: "Sometimes there's no overlapping... and then there's torment."

Take, for example, Drexel junior Javin Jose, who for the last year has been one third of Illicit Night Sounds, or I.N.S., a team that throws desi parties in Philadelphia. Jose has kept this life as a promoter - renting nightclubs, printing and distributing flyers, and raking in thousands of dollars - a secret from his parents.

"They know I'm a leader, to help Indian people grow together," said Jose, who also hangs out with other South Asians outside the nocturnal haze of nightclubs, through a campus cultural association. "They just don't know in exactly what way."

His parents, a nurse and a subway worker from New York, want him to become an accountant. But Jose dreams of other futures, perhaps as owner of a nightclub. Rapper Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace's rags-to-riches story appeals to him, and Beanie Sigel, a gangsta rapper who came up on the streets of South Philly, is among his musical icons.

"That's what America is about," Jose said. "It's automatic loot to you, off of kids' psychological urge to get out and have fun. That's what the red, white and blue stands for."

Still, Jose sometimes tires of the scene. At Club 1616, he watched one desi with her hair in cornrows doubled over sick from too much liquor. He shook his head.

"They're just trying to find themselves," he said. "Sometimes, I think it's bad, keeping all this from parents."

But the parties also provide a way for young South Asians to meet their parents' expectations - sort of.

"Some of them have come to a point in their lives where they want to date co-ethnics, and they want to do it in what they believe is the American way," said Penn academic Mazumdar.

Like the traditional arranged marriages that some South Asian parents expect of their sons and daughters, the parties are a way to meet someone from the same ethnic group, who might speak the same second language, share a religious background, and understand the delicate dance of identity that many children of immigrants must perform.

"It's like a compromise," said Sueann Zachariah, 19, an organizer of a South Asian cultural group at Drexel. "We're going to try to take the best of both worlds."