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

sister what their mother had told him the first time she gave him a glass of brewed gold to drink, some weeks earlier.

“Gold,” he said, “is a wise metal. It contains people’s dreams and plans.”

“How, bhau?”

He sighed. “Think, Anju. Think what all reasons people buy gold.” She thought. At the birth of a new baby—gifts of gold. As a backup in case the cash economy failed. It appeared in poojas, at weddings. “Everybody puts many hopes and plans on gold, see?”

“Why go drinking it?”

“If it’s brewed properly, it seems to give us . . . some sort of power.”

“To do what?”

“To, na, achieve those plans.”

“You’re . . . stealing somebody’s . . .” Anjali fumbled for the word. “Ambition?”

“Don’t be dramatic. Skimming off the top, really.”

Anjali stood to examine the tumbler, but she saw only the dregs of whatever her mother had been brewing earlier. She tilted it back into her mouth. It was bitter, and it stung.

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“Well, you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to go to IIT,” her brother replied.

“What if I wanted to do something else?”

Vivek rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock meaningfully. “Like what?”

Anjali squatted on the ground and fiddled with her plaits. She felt very small down there, curled in that semi-fetal position. She did not know what else there was to do, or to want.

•   •   •

I’d been led up to the den and deposited on the plaid sofa while Anita ran off for Neosporin and Band-Aids.

Her mother was pacing in front of the television and bookshelves. The only sound was her occasional deep sigh.

“I’m sorry about the window,” I said.

“The window,” she said, disbelieving. “He’s sorry about the window.”

Anjali Auntie paused in front of a row of framed black-and-white photographs above the television. I’d never noticed them before. She reached out to touch one. It showed a young girl in a starched salwar kameez, with fat braids running down her torso. She was chubbier than she would be when she grew up, but the striking cheekbones and compelling eyes were recognizable through the puppy fat. She scowled at the camera. Next to her was a gangly boy in pleated shorts and a collared shirt. He grinned widely, as though to compensate for young Anjali’s grouchy demeanor.

“This is a massive fucking secret, Neil,” Anita said, stepping into the room, bearing a black first-aid pouch and waving the tube of Neosporin. Her mother didn’t flinch at the swearing.

“What Ani means is that I would be in some trouble. If anyone were ever to find out.”

Anita sat next to me and began mopping my bloody forearm with gauze. Her gestures were dispassionate, as though I were a stranger. The gel was icy on my skin.

Anjali Auntie looked again at the photo that had made her pause. It would be some years before I knew how many memories passed over Anjali Dayal that night. She seemed to resolve something in her mind. “It’s all already been set in motion for you, hasn’t it, Neil?”

She was correct. I already belonged, irrevocably, to this particular history.

Anjali Auntie paused and went to the kitchen for water. Gold. It was everywhere in our world: around my sister’s neck, dripping from my mother’s earlobes, adorning the statues at the temple. Even I had a few gold possessions—pendants and rings gifted by relatives, all stored safely in a box in my mother’s dresser. I recalled a white babysitter who’d worked for us a few times when I was small, and how curious she’d been about parts of our lives I considered normal. She interrogated my mother: Where did she get her spices? And the steel plates with Prachi’s and my names etched into them? And the gold—especially the gold—she wore every day? “You can’t get good pieces like this here,” my mother told Kimberly proudly. “Maybe at Jhaveri Bazaar Jewelers in Decatur. But even then, nothing like India.” Gold—now it ran in my bloodstream.

“I want in,” I said.

“In?” Anjali Auntie carried two glasses from the kitchen and pressed one on me. “What do you think in means?”

“Anita takes regular doses,” I said after sipping.

Anjali Auntie turned to Anita. “You’ve told him all that?”

“I guessed,” I said, as Anita opened her mouth in outrage.

“Oh. Well.” Anjali Auntie rubbed her forehead. “Yes. I give this to Ani regularly. But this works for her because she converts the energy very quickly. She knows she has to.”

Anita’s jaw clenched. “You have to make use of this stuff,” she said, then, more gently, “It’s only worth it if there’s something you want to do with it.” In this response lay the thing that divided the two of us these days. Anita knew what she wanted. Every day, she worked toward it.

“What if I did something?” I said. “What if I used it?”

They were sitting on the same seat across from me, Anjali Auntie in the chair itself, Anita on the arm, posed like two actresses in an ad for a television drama. Anita’s head turned slightly to the right, and her eyes met her mother’s—they were united again. Neither replied. Perhaps it was just too incongruous—that Neil Narayan might want something other than a video game, or a girl, or a nap.

“Can I at least ask some questions?”

Anjali Auntie made a small hmm-ing noise.

“Have you only been stealing from Indians?”

“Who else has good gold?” she said. “White people make and buy shoddy stuff. Ten-, fourteen-karat—you’re a boy, you won’t understand this. But the kind your mother has, certainly the kind your grandma would wear—that’s all usually twenty-two-karat. Handmade, hallmark, created with intention, beautiful filigrees, intricate designs, see, by superb artisans. Some of these aunties will even buy it on particularly auspicious days, increasing its power even more.”

“So, it’s good gold because of how it’s made? Because of who owns it? Wears it?”

“All of that. It starts with the quality of the metal—that has to be top-notch,” Anjali Auntie said. “It has to be made by the best artisans, people who have an almost sacred relationship with the gold.