For Indira Somani, growing up in Springfield wasn’t always easy. Her parents moved to the capital city from Pittsburgh in 1974, and the next year, Somani became both a kindergartner and the first Indian student at Owen Marsh Elementary School. In the ’70s and ’80s, Springfield wasn’t as diverse as it is now, she recalls, and some of her classmates didn’t even know there was a country called India. Instead, in their taunts, they mistook her for being Native American.

As she grew older, Somani delicately balanced between what she called her inside world — visiting family in India every six months, eating traditional food and seeing her mom, Shipra, wear saris — and her outside world. She struggled to maintain her relationship with her conservative father, Satyanarayan, as she joined in American traditions like the high school prom. When she was 17, Somani spent the summer in India. During this visit she learned what it meant to be a practicing Hindu. She came back to Springfield, she says, wanting her friends to know she was Indian.

Somani, now a 38-year-old assistant journalism professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, recently co-produced a documentary called, Crossing Lines. The award-winning film delves into Somani’s life as a second-generation Indian, how she discovered her roots and her struggle to stay connected after her father’s death in October 2002. Plans to show the film in Springfield are in the works.

“It’s a tribute to him and how much I learned from him,” Somani says. “India was so important to him. He wanted to make sure his kids knew about India and understood India.”

Satyanarayan Somani and his wife, Shipra, migrated to the United States and met as students in the early ’60s. Somani’s father was the first person in his family to leave India to pursue higher education; he became a medical professor and went on to teach at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. Her mother also earned an advanced degree, becoming a social worker.

Somani’s father pushed her to take math and science classes at Springfield High School so she could later attend medical school. But her senior year English class changed her course. She was amazed by Pride and Prejudice and by the support her teacher, Mary Jane Peters, gave to her writing.

Somani graduated from SHS in 1988 and went to Knox College in Galesburg to study English (she eventually switched to an independent major focusing on media, race and gender). She spent a fall semester in Chicago, planning to intern for India Tribune, a weekly newspaper started in 1977 for South Asian families migrating to the U.S. Instead, she