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

onto her shoulders. Her forehead was smeared with the warm sunset hues of haldi kumkum. She looked ruddy in the cheeks, terribly hale.

“Neil, what the shit is wrong with you?” Prachi said.

“Prachi!” my parents both said.

“Why talk like that?” my father said.

“Tell what?” my mother said.

The three other Narayans, the three functional Narayans, stared at me, still as wax museum figurines. They appeared much better, more sensible, the three of them, without me. Upstairs, Shruti was waiting, pacing by my bed, ready to chide me: A two on the chemistry exam, really, Neeraj? I would accept all her reproofs, and then when she was preparing to depart, to slip once more into the underworld, perhaps I would ask her to take me with her. I would tell her that, as usual, she’d gotten it right, found the best answer to the complex problem we were all locked inside.

“Tell what?” my mother said again.

Across the way, the Dayal house had gone mostly dark but for two squares of dim light on the top floor, like the drowsy eyes of a beast preparing for sleep. And all around, that early-June Georgia night, the sultry swell of change in the air. I had been waiting to arrive somewhere for so long, and now that I was here, I wanted only to roll backward in time, to swim upstream until I sat at the font of something, to avoid ending up as this unbearable me.

“I’m fucking drunk,” I said.

There were no secrets worth keeping anymore.

Part Two PANNING

He who steals the gold (of a Brahmana) has diseased nails.

—Manu-smriti, Hindu legal text

Had the immigrants known what a task the gold-hunting would be, their spirits might have failed.

—H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

6.

Something strange was happening to my family. Of late, the Narayan definition of success had morphed. This was not to say my parents supported my professional choices—in the summer of 2016, I was piddling around as a student of history, suffering their disdain. No, rather, they had accrued additional expectations, ones I did not discover until Prachi fulfilled them.

“Shaadi-shaadi-shaadi!” my mother kept squealing—the Hindi word for marriage. She declaimed the triplicate in times of both exuberance and distress, in much the way my ajji used to utter the name of the Lord—narayana narayana narayana—in prayer.

“So long we have waited for this shaadi-shaadi-shaadi!” (when Prachi first waggled her conflict-free diamond). “This is a shaadi-shaadi-shaadi, not some country club Buckhead Betty nonsense!” (denouncing my sister’s plan to wear a white lehenga rather than the traditional red-and-gold).

My mother broadcast her daughter’s impending nuptials to her clients—when I was in college, she had begun a second, fated career as a Realtor. The wedding talk helped close a deal, in much the way the scent of freshly baked cookies in an on-the-market house does—the general whiff of familial completion is infectious, makes everyone hot for suburban settling.

Preparations for Prachi’s shaadi-shaadi-shaadi were even impinging on my life on the West Coast. Our parents remained in Georgia, but my sister and I had each made our way to California by way of the tech bubble and academia, respectively. She lived on the third floor of a converted Victorian in San Francisco and I in a cannabis-infused walk-up in Berkeley. And on a particular foggy day in June, my roommate, Chidi, and I were running late to a party at said Victorian.

We stood by Alamo Square Park, taking in the vast bay windows of Prachi’s nearly three-grand-a-month apartment, while I sucked on my vape. I discerned the shadows of her friends moving about on the other side of those cakelike window trimmings, and something about their shapes startled me. I’d told Prachi, in trying and failing to beg off that night, that I was spending my summer ensconced in my dissertation and couldn’t be disturbed. In truth, I had no coherent justification for the social skittishness that had become my norm. Yes, there was the mounting pressure of graduate school, but there was also some other general allergy that erupted most acutely when I was surrounded by the hyperopic residents of my sister’s version of San Francisco.

“None for me, I’d like to be on tonight,” Chidi said, virtuously refusing a hit of my sativa-indica blend, which made me anxious that I’d already begun. “It’s a useful skill to be able to walk into any room and get along with people, Neil. Especially a room with a collective net worth of”—he frowned, doing mental math—“call it tens of millions?” He rubbed his hands together gleefully, prepared, as always, to charm, persuade, finagle, and fundraise. “If you thought more creatively, you could get one of these people to endow you a chair one day, or rethink the whole concept of a university, really bring it into the twenty-first century. . . .”

I was already walking away.

Upstairs, inside, we found the room arranged by twos. It reminded me of the opening of those Madeline books Prachi read growing up: twelve little couples in two straight lines; in two straight lines, they talked tech shop, they ate their Brie, they swirled their wine. The betrothed, Avi Kapoor, tapped on his phone, while Prachi, next to him, picked at red grapes and chatted with one of her Duke sorority sisters. Chidi shook hands with Avi, whom he knew from incestuous, elite tech circles. I spied, with great relief, Manu Padmanaban, gripping a Blue Moon and being talked at by Prachi’s friend Hae-mi. Manu had grown into himself after coming out in college. He’d briefly been Prachi’s colleague at a midsize start-up, and sometimes wrangled an invite to her affairs, where he was my life jacket. He didn’t see me.

“I own our tardiness,” Chidi lied to the happy couple on my behalf. (I’d dozed through the afternoon following a late night out with the girl I’d been sleeping with. I remembered little of the prior evening’s party, save the gas station whiff of coke