BANGALORE, India — Off the potholed road where chauffeur-driven cars jostle for space with bullock carts, past the gatehouse and the cluster of polite, uniformed guards, you'll find a vision of America.

"Palm Meadows," it's called — an enclave of gently curving streets, Spanish-tile roofs and lawns manicured to putting-green perfection. Before Christmas, colored lights go up around the windows of its tidy suburban homes. At Halloween, costumed children ring doorbells up and down the block.

Here on the fringes of one of Asia's foremost high-tech cities, not far from where the industrial parks give way to rice paddies, a new generation of Indians — young, affluent professionals back in India after years in the United States — retreat into a walled-off echo of suburban America.

Because coming home isn't always easy.

"It's mayhem once you leave the gates of the neighborhood," said Yamini Narayanan, an economist and stay-at-home-mother who was born and raised in India. After living in the United States for more than a dozen years, she recently returned with her husband and two children.

The first months were tough: The filth disgusted her, the servants confused her, the chaos of the streets worried her. "It was horrible," she said as her two American-born children, ages 8 and 5, ran in and out the front door. Then she added cheerfully: "Now I'm a pro."

In a nation where success used to be defined by how quickly a university graduate could snare a British or American passport, and where up-and-coming doctors, bankers and software engineers often did all they could to get somewhere else, India's best and brightest are coming home.

The economy is growing at 7 percent a year, the infrastructure is improving and salaries, once dwarfed by the pay in the West, are catching up.

Bangalore has become the booming nexus of India's high-tech outsourcing world. It is also the hub for the returnees, many of them refugees from the Silicon Valley meltdown.

Between September 2001 and March 2005, about 30,000 Indian information technology professionals returned to India from overseas, according to a study by the country's main software trade group, NASSCOM. The Indian media call it the "reverse brain drain."

Many of those brains came to Bangalore.

Narayanan and her husband, Sean, 36, arrived three years ago, moving from northern Virginia where he was an information technology consultant. Both are naturalized American citizens.

"India was starting to become part of the information technology world," Sean Narayanan said of his decision to return. He had been watching the situation in India since economic reform took hold in the early 1990s.

"I saw that I could do something different in India, something bigger," said Narayanan, now a top executive for Cognizant Technology Solutions, a major player in Indian outsourcing.

"Five years ago, six years ago, there was never the opportunity to come. You'd have to take a huge hit in your lifestyle," he said. "Five years ago, if I wanted to I could get a car here, but I'd have to wait a year."

Now, he says, living in Bangalore is "70 percent" like living in America.

Also, the Narayanans wanted their children to be nearer to their grandparents, and to their Indian culture.

To return, though, is to be forced to navigate between two countries and two cultures, between Western comforts and India's tug on its prodigal children.

Places like Palm Meadows make the cross-cultural navigation a little easier.

They're not cheap: nicer houses start at around $227,000, a small fortune by Indian standards.

Sealed off from the clamor of urban India, Narayanan knows his life is impossibly distant to most of his countrymen.

"I don't see myself as an expat here, but I don't see myself as an Indian either," he said. "We still consider the U.S. our home."

Thinking about it a little more, he concludes: "We're straddling both places."