Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

the world. The room came into view. Everything quivered at its edges before erupting into brighter, more saturated color.

“You’re okay.” Anita sounded both surprised and relieved, and then stepped onto the stairs, walking softly on the balls of her feet. “I’ll get you the Neosporin and—”

“Anita!” I spoke louder than I meant to. “Tell me what I fucking drank!”

She glanced at the ceiling as toward some higher power, or maybe just toward her mother’s room again, and there was distress on her face. “Technically, lemonade—but a special lemonade. Ah. Well. Gold, Neil. You drank a shit-ton of gold. Half our best stock, which is honestly pretty infuriating.”

Before I could reply, Anita raised a shaky finger to her lips and hissed shhh. It was too late. The basement door was swinging open, and Anjali Auntie was standing in the hallway, darkened by the bright lights she’d flipped on around her. Anita stepped not up toward her mother, but down, closer to me.

“Ani? Anita Joshi Dayal, what are you doing down there?” Anjali Auntie always said Anita’s name the Indian way, with a soft t—Anitha—but I heard that th with special resonance that night. Our parents could do this in anger, jerk us back from drawly Anita to terse Anitha, from mild Neil to positively spicy Neeraj. And Anjali Auntie reminded me of my own parents in another way just then: her voice resembled their shouts the night of the dance; running through their fury at my sister had been a vein of fear.

“If you’ve been meddling with my supply,” she went on, “I’ll—”

Anjali Auntie stepped onto the top stair and into the light, which was when she saw me. She was wearing powder blue pajama shorts patterned with dancing penguins. Her mouth was slightly agape, and her face looked puffy.

“My god, you two,” she sighed. “What have you done?”

•   •   •

Before she was Anjali Dayal, my neighbor, she was Anjali Joshi, just a middle-class Bombay girl.

Bombay, a city where Gujaratis and Maharashtrians and Tamilians and Parsis become Bombaykars, allegiances shifted to contemporary urban existence rather than to the regions that created them. The Joshis considered themselves modern, but in one respect they rang a bit of the bygone days: the parents—an excise tax officer and a housewife—privileged their sons’ education over their daughter’s.

Anjali grew up flitting about with friends in the housing society, playing with her two older brothers when they were free, reading English novels. She did fine in school, though not spectacularly, and no one told her to put in more work. There was an understanding: her brothers were to one day become somebodies; she was to one day become married. When Anjali was in fifth standard, she watched her eldest brother, Dhruv, sweating through entrance exams, mortgaging his adolescence for a chance to study at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. He made it to IIT’s Delhi campus, setting the bar high for the younger brother, Vivek, who did not display the same innate brilliance or work ethic as Dhruv. As Anjali crested into her teenage years, in the mid-1980s, Dhruv was accepted to graduate school in a place called North Carolina. Vivek came under even more pressure to follow in his brother’s footsteps.

The parents enrolled Vivek in the renowned Goswami Classes, the cram school meant to prepare him for the IIT exams. Dhruv had done without these courses, but Vivek needed help.

Anjali Joshi perceived something mysterious about the Goswami Classes, because they pulled Vivek toward some inexplicable newness. She used to spend hours eyeing the blue neon sign advertising the courses, waiting for Vivek to get home, hoping he might spare a few minutes to flick around the puck on a carom board.

In the height of monsoon in 1984, Dhruv came home from America for a visit, wielding gifts like arms, breaking through the barricades of the closed Indian economy. For his father, Dhruv brought a ceramic mug reading nc state dad. For Vivek, a Butterfly aluminum-frame tennis racket and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape. For his mother, melamine plates and Tupperware; she systematically emptied their steel vessels in favor of the foreign imports. For Anjali: Jolen hair-lightening cream. “For your face,” Dhruv explained, pressing a pinky to his upper lip.

The women in the housing society came to ogle Dhruv. Though ungainly, he was not bad-looking, and they wanted to hear how his accent had evolved. (“You sound just like the people on the TV,” said Parag.) They were ravenous for America. America: metonymy for more. A vast place full of all the things Dadar lacked. Nonstick cookware, Chevrolet Corvettes, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, small leather purses, Mary Kay cosmetics, Kraft cheese. And something all those trinkets added up to—another way of being in the world.

“A lucky girl, whoever marries him,” the neighbor aunties said. But Dhruv was in no hurry to be married. He left still a bachelor.

One afternoon, before Vivek arrived home, Anjali saw her mother return from Parag’s house, where the society mothers had been gathering, and set to work in the kitchen. What she saw baffled her. Had her mother melted gold? Boiled it? Anjali would learn the proper names for the processes later, in adulthood, reinventing some of them herself. But at the time, she gathered this much: her mother had somehow liquidated Parag’s gold coin and served it to her brother. When Lakshmi lay down for her afternoon nap, young Anjali crept into Vivek’s bedroom and found him there, sipping this strange drink.

Vivek, hunched over graphing paper, drawing numbers in pencil so small that he had to squint to make out his own markings. His skin blooming with dark shadows of sleeplessness. A devil’s bargain, this route to America.

“Can’t you tell me what it is?” she whispered, pointing at the tumbler.

Vivek folded his arms, glanced at the clock on the wall, and sighed. “I have to get back to this in three minutes,” he said, his voice full of the new lonesomeness that had frosted it in recent months. But he told his