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

Roman general Crassus, put to death by drinking molten gold, or the tale of King Midas; Anjali Auntie related the end of the Midas tale, which I’d never before heard. After he turned his daughter, his food, his whole life into gold, he begged for a reprieve, and it was granted. He ran to a nearby river—I pictured a necklace of blue coursing through a sun-yellowed valley of wheat—and plunged his hands into the rapids. The water lifted the curse. The river became speckled with the metal. Thereafter, people panned its waters. Like the American gold rush, I thought. Like the Bombayan.

That day, I went home, new lemonade still slicking my lips, with nothing close to what I needed for my assignment. I brought to class a Wikipedia’d summary of a section of the Ramayana, the part about the golden deer that tricked Sita into following Ravana to Lanka, and to her imprisonment. I claimed my aunt had told me this story over the phone as a caution against greed.

Ms. Rabinowitz looked sadly at me after I shared. “You didn’t find out very much about your—aunt, was it?—on a personal level, did you? What does she miss about her home? What does her heritage mean to her today?” That assignment was the only B I earned that fall.

•   •   •

On a Saturday evening in mid-November, I was in the debate trailer, highlighting files with Wendi. We were behind, because Wendi had lately been waffling between debate and community service hours, having decided she needed to augment the moral and civic aspects of her Harvard application. (“Fuck fossil fuels,” she’d wailed the other day while dropping me off at home, as she dialed Jack Kim’s brother. “Can I come by your church? Well, yes, I know I’m not Korean or Christian, Frank, thanks for informing me, but ask yourself, what would Jesus do? He would probably give me a recommendation about a hungry homeless person I could feed . . .”) The trailer sat behind the gym and boasted one grimy window, a pizza-stained couch, and a whiteboard on which so many genitalia had been drawn and erased that there remained a perpetual shadow of dicks and balls beneath whatever text you tried to write on top. Just then it read weapons of mass destruction in a slanty hand over a faded green penile shaft.

We were preparing for one of the larger tournaments of the semester, coming up in Chicago. My mother was going to buy me a down jacket, which she had said might “come in handy” if I went to school in the northeast, which for my parents meant the Ivy League; my grades that semester had made them hopeful.

I was positively thrumming with a recent dose of lemonade, and therefore reading rapidly, connecting arguments, anticipating rebuttals, and feeling the surety that came with the gold. The lemonade powered me through research, yes, but more important, it provided a swagger that laced my speeches, delivered at hundreds of words per minute, and the cross-examinations, held at a slower pace, which nonetheless required as speedy a mind. Who could have imagined the power carried around in the rings and pendants of unassuming desi debaters? Who would have guessed that in such gold (even in the girls’) lay what I must call an intellectual alpha masculinity? Though that strength was borrowed—and temporary—I was drinking enough such that, bit by bit, my private self was coming to resemble the person the lemonade helped me be in the aggressive theater of debate rounds.

I was spinning my pen, reading something about solar energy in Afghanistan, when my red flip phone rang. My parents had not paid for text messages on our family plan, and I didn’t give the number out often. So I was surprised to see it buzzing on the table. I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end at first; it was loopy and sodden.

“You’re, what—? . . . Where? . . . What about your mom? . . . Jesus, Anita . . . You know I don’t have my license. . . . I could ask Prachi—okay, okay, I won’t . . . Where am I supposed to get a car? . . . Fine . . . Say the address again.”

I put my highlighter down and looked straight at Wendi Zhao, who eyed me viciously before agreeing to drive me the forty minutes to Buckhead.

Traffic at eight on a Saturday was light. Wendi merged violently onto the highway and crossed three lanes in a frantic spurt to the HOV side. An unlikely number of tall pines lined Georgia highways, and though it was hardly nature, it still felt like air, like breath, a reminder that something beyond Hammond Creek existed.

Wendi: “This girl—do I know her?”

“She used to go to OHS,” I said, and named Anita.

Wendi shook her head to say it didn’t ring a bell. Then the headshaking grew vehement. “You know what I feel about this, though?” I figured she would tell me no matter what. “Like, just wait a couple of years to dick around. I’m going to dick around a lot at Harvard, trust me.”

“Anita wants to go to Harvard, too,” I said. That briefly silenced Wendi. We passed under green sign after green sign announcing another suburb where other Neils and Wendis were waiting. The interstate spat us out in Buckhead, where there were more trees—historic trees, all knotty. We turned onto a wide street where each home resembled a small plantation—enormous white houses with wraparound porches and lawns as well maintained as a golf course green.

I suddenly recalled visiting Harvard when Prachi and I were kids, on a vacation to see cousins in Boston. In the photographs, we are big squished ravioli in magenta and traffic-cone-orange coats. My father holds me up to the lucky John Harvard statue, on which, it turns out, freshman boys have an affinity for pissing. All the hope of the Asian immigrant is crammed into my father’s hands as he lifts me up—though I am too old and too fat to be held—so I can scratch a little good fortune from that urine-drenched talisman.

“Wendi,” I said.