A leggy woman with permed hair and a slit down the side of her gown — let’s call her the Indian Vanna White — introduced him. "Ladies and gentleman, the one, the only, Amitabh Bachchan."

He came out wearing a black suit with gold sequins. His hair was jet black, and his face looked as wrinkle-free as it did in "Amar, Akbar, Anthony" or "Parvarish," or any other flared white trouser Bollywood flick of the Seventies. Here was a living legend. A living legend, showing his age with a slightly rheumatoid gait.

"Is he like Elvis?" Juan wanted to know.

We were driving down Broad Street, Philadelphia’s main drag, when we saw a procession of sari-clad women. It was several Sundays ago, a few months after Juan and I started dating and a few months after he started noticing Indians. On the street (that’s usually in the University of Pennsylvania area). In restaurants (large numbers patronize Penang, a hip Malaysian eatery in Philly’s Chinatown). In the mall (that’s the Cherry Hill Mall, one that so defines the New Jersey suburb it belongs to, they named the entire town after it). And in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times (being profiled for inventing new and improved prophylactics).

Well, his Indian geiger counter was going crazy the day that Amitabh Bachchan came to Philly, with a supporting cast of Bollywood "megastars," including Sunil Shetty and Govinda.

Hundreds of South Asians filled an auditorium at Temple University to hear Bachchan perform "Rang Bersy" and treacly monologues from hits such as "Sholay" and "Silsila." More to the point, they were there to be audience to a celluloid god, his mere flesh devotees hoping perhaps to touch the hem of his pants. Some hoisted their poor, unsuspecting tots onto the stage, to give a hug to Mr. Bollywood himself.

"You’ve been a fabulous audience. Thank you. Thank you," Bachchan kept saying, a public relations sheen to his English.

And they were, though the turnout was not in the Nassau Coliseum range. They stormed the stage everytime he appeared, driving the security guards who formed a feeble fortification around it clearly mad. They danced in the aisles in little pockets of Bacchanalian release. A rail thin man in the front row couldn’t contain himself. For three hours, he almost wasn’t a man any longer. He was a profile of sinuous arms, a bopping head and churning hips. And he took it upon himself to show the mostly black security guards, who gestured impotently for everyone to take their seats, how it was done.

And despite the signal the guards kept trying to send — palms facing the ground, hands moving, as if (Juan offered) to keep the culture down — the audience could not be repressed. Bollywood live, like Bollywood onscreen, tapped into an energy that was at least partly sexual — with Vanna White and Govinda and Sunil Shetty’s back-up dancers flashing belly buttons and gyrating.

Yet, Juan and I — engaged in some innocent hand-holding, far less provocative than what was happening onstage or in the aisles — were the subject of many withering glances. We were looked up and down, mentally processed and disapproved of — all within a minute or two. Granted, it wasn’t the ABCDs in Tommy Hilfiger clothes or tight red dresses doing the moral ogling. It was a more middle-aged assortment of judging eyes. But it was enough people to mar the afternoon.

Perhaps it was because we were dressed in jeans, when most everyone else was dressed in silk saris, gold bangles and tailored suits. Perhaps it was because Juan, born in Miami to Colombian immigrants but pale and blond, was among two "goras" in the entire audience. Perhaps it was because the crush of a crowd brings out the nastiness in most people, including otherwise benign-looking, middle-aged Indian women.