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

and a dreadlocked white guy wearing a vial of ketamine around his neck, plucking solemnly at a sitar.) “My call with Fabian Fischer ran long,” Chidi went on. “He sends his best, Avi.”

Chidi had dropped out of Caltech when a billionaire awarded him a hundred thousand dollars to pursue a 3D printing venture. He’d since launched a wetware product dealing with longevity; that is, attempting to prolong the human life span to Old Testament proportions. He lived off a uniquely Californian income in the interim—exit money from the first company’s sale, supplemented with Bitcoin investments. He was half-Nigerian, the product of an Oakland Hills secular Jewish mother and a transplanted Lagos doctor, and I attributed all differences between us—his proclivity for risk, his openness with his parents—to the nonimmigrant side.

Avi appeared duly impressed. “Are you guys raising? I’m surprised you’re out.” Then, to me: “Book going okay, Neil?”

“Dissertation. A book implies someone’s going to read it. It’s coming.”

At that time, I was going to be an Americanist—a professional interpreter of this land and its layers. My specialty was to be late-1800s California, with a focus on the rise of immigration, the ballooning of enterprise, and the economic stratifications that buoyed the nation into the twentieth century. In other words, the aftermath of the gold rush. But these days, staring at the papers piling up on my desk, I couldn’t imagine spending decades burrowing into this corner of the past. It didn’t help that I stood out in this land of utopian technofuturists, committed as I was to the secular preservationist priesthood that is the history academy.

“You know,” Prachi said. “We just hired an ex-academic from Berkeley for my team.” She fumbled for her name, then remembered.

I knew the woman. “Oh. She’s an ABD—all but dissertation,” I clarified at Prachi’s quizzical expression. The ABD wasn’t the first to flee the academy for Big Tech’s six figures and office nap pods and wouldn’t be the last. The specter of dropping out—burning out—loomed over my life and the lives of many in my cohort. Few of us would land where she had. Without Berkeley, I was a Southern state school grad with two years of debate coaching on my résumé.

Prachi: “Ha! That sounds like ABCD!”

No one had applied that acronym—American-born confused desi—to me in quite some time. We’d grown out of it as we grew up; our generation had perhaps not resolved, but had at least begun to get over that Miss Teen India riddle: What does it mean to be both Indian and American?

Avi chortled. “Drop the C, and you’re an ABD! You could follow her to the big bucks.”

“I think I’ll remain confused, for now.”

But Avi was ignoring me to answer his phone. He worked for a Sherman Act–violating behemoth and was always nursing side start-ups, fielding endless calls. Chidi made for the couples playing Cards Against Humanity at the Crate and Barrel dining table, and I slipped off to greet Manu. He was a rarity in San Francisco, in that he had read a book not ghostwritten on behalf of an investor or a CEO in the past year. He quizzed me on my research and asked about my opinions on the election.

“Don’t bring this up in front of Prachi,” I muttered, having confessed where I’d stood in the primary. “She just calls me a sexist and a socialist.”

Manu grinned. “Sorry, buddy, but I was too much of a political pragmatist to support your man. Actually”—he checked his watch—“I showed because your sister promised to introduce me to this bigwig on the Rodham campaign—her words, not mine—who she swore would be here. I’m trying to escape, I’d like to do something meaningful, but at the same time, I don’t want to be an unpaid intern in, like, Iowa.” He shuddered. “Imagine Grindr in Iowa.”

Which was when Prachi arrived, arm in arm with one of the only unattached women in the room, who, it dawned on me then, was the reason my sister had so insisted on my attendance.

Prachi oozed hostess charm. “My brother’s going to be a professor, as I’ve told you, Keya. Neil, you’ve heard me talk about Keya. Her new company, Dil Day, is doing super well.”

“Dildo?” I coughed on my beer.

“Neil!” Prachi squealed.

Manu chuckled.

Keya, to her credit, seemed only entertained. “Dil Day,” Keya said, giggling. “Dil, Hindi for heart?”

“I told you, Neil, it’s the dating app Hasan and Farha met on!” Prachi cried.

“Shit,” I said. “Sorry. It’s for brown people?”

“It’s for future-oriented South Asian professionals.” Keya lowered her voice. “Believe it or not, they’re—we’re—willing to pay more in the marriage space than any other group.”

“Eat the rich, right, Neil?” Manu said.

“Let’s leave you two.” Prachi steered him away. “Christine is coming, Manu, she is . . .”

I wistfully fingered my vape in my pocket. It could put me to sleep. It could eradicate me. These days I sought out things to remove me from what felt like an increasingly constricted world. There had been a few years, in college, when I’d believed in life’s ever-unfolding variety. But now, as my compatriots entered the promotion and canine-adoption and splitting-the-rent and wedding seasons of their lives, reality had narrowed again, with little warning.

“I consider myself generally oriented toward the past,” I said to Keya.

Keya edged to the counter to pour wine, then filled a paper plate high with cheese. “I was supposed to meet you earlier, but when you didn’t show, I got drunk. Now I’m starving.”

“I should say,” I said, popping some cheddar in my mouth. “I’m seeing someone. Prachi didn’t know.”

I’d been sleeping with one Arabella Wyeth-Goldstein, of the ketamine and sitar party. I had once been her history TA. She now wrote for a leftist East Bay community paper. We’d spent three months mostly smoking weed and fucking, and we’d just reached that sharing-of-trauma phase that marks a crucial milestone in my generation’s patterns of courtship. Arabella’s confessions were terribly normal—concerns about the shape of her breasts, were they too eggplanty, etc. When it came my turn, I spoke