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

of academic and familial pressures and Asian emasculation. She’d nodded as I wrapped up the perfunctory revelations and told me that she “lived entirely with people who identified as hyphenated in college” and therefore “got it.”

Keya’s shoulders slumped genuinely, but then she shrugged. “Same old. Don’t tell your sister, but I’m on a mission. I’ve only slept with white men. Isn’t that fucked?”

“So, I would’ve been an experiment.”

Keya looked unabashed, which in turn made me feel unoffended. “Yeah, exactly.”

“Shouldn’t your app help with that?”

“Oh, I couldn’t swipe on my own thing. And I can’t be seen using someone else’s. I am”—she sighed theatrically—“an analog spinster in the era of digital soul mates.” She lifted an elbow in the direction of one smooth-skinned couple. “I’ve been to three bachelorettes in four months. Maya, with the huge rock? Hers was five days in Belize. I’m broke.”

Before I could open my mouth to offer Keya a better definition of the word broke, Maya caught my eye. She was lovely, with a lithe neck and short black bob. But it wasn’t her face or figure that I was looking at. It was her dangly gold earrings, which swayed like the pipes of a wind chime. I could not help it: I performed the assessment instinctively, with the intuition of an addict, though it had been nearly ten years since I’d tasted gold. But I wondered, as ever: What would those earrings yield? A tumbler of lemonade bearing . . . what? The power to found the perfect company? To pin down the perfect mate? No, remember, the lemonade delivered not just a boost for a single task, but an energy, a way of being that guided you toward your deserved future. The gestalt of Maya’s golden earrings, of my sister’s white-gold engagement ring, of the party itself: shaadi-shaadi-shaadi. Settlement. Well-adjustment.

(My father’s old aphorism: We are all still ad-justing to this place. It had turned out to be true, clinically speaking. I’d seen a therapist just after graduating UGA, certain I suffered some cocktail of anxiety, major depression, and ADHD. I’d left with no pills, just a cruelly ironic diagnosis of something called adjustment disorder.)

At that instant, someone next to Maya turned. Her hair was still frizzy but had softened into gentler waves. Her skin was still acne scarred. She had smeared makeup over the crevices that used to cut so deep, darkening her. This was the clearest I’d seen Shruti Patel in some time. She was an occasional specter in my life, with a habit of appearing just when the material world felt most entrapping. She’d manifest at the periphery of my vision when I was drunk or high, or overlay herself on some brown girl. The memory of my own monstrosity? A reminder of the general futility of the games that comprised my life? Was she beckoning me to join her, wherever she had gone, looking at me through those marble eyes with that overfamiliarity I had always begrudged her, thinking, I know you, and you belong with me? Depending on the moment, I let her stand for all of those things, for her suicide—suicide itself—was the whirlpool swirling in my vicinity at all times, sucking into its gravity both every meaning I could toss its way and no meaning at all.

Are you making use of all you took?

Of course not.

I shook my head and Shruti slunk back into death.

The party had migrated to the kitchen. Prachi tittering with Hae-mi. Keya reaching for more Sonoma cabernet, despite swaying on her feet. Chidi all marble smile and head bobs, yammering at Maya about longevity. (“Really,” he said, “people have been trying to live longer for centuries, just look at the alchemists, only they didn’t have the rigorous experimental methods we do. . . .”) Manu trailing everyone, attempting to bid Prachi good-bye, evidently leaving without the key Rodham contact.

“Whoops,” Keya said, sloshing wine down her pale green blouse. “Shit.”

“Keya came wedding shopping with me today,” Prachi said too heartily, as the girlfriends swarmed with club soda. “I’d need a drink, too! I’m sure I wasn’t easy to handle.”

Keya did not correct my sister, only grinned amiably as Maya mopped her. Manu attempted to wave good-bye through the crooners, but Prachi seized his palm and squeezed several times as though his hand were a stress ball, keeping him from leaving.

“Did you pick something?” Hae-mi cooed.

Prachi reached for her iPhone with her free hand and began swiping to show off options, before suddenly looking up. “Neil! Oh my god. I totally forgot. Guess who we saw at that bridal shop.”

“Who?” I said through another mouthful of cheese.

“I’m heading out,” Manu called to Prachi, who still held his hand. “I’ll email you about Christine?”

“No, wait, Manu, you won’t believe this either—”

Prachi had inherited our mother’s love of gossip as we grew up. For us it was safe territory, untarnished by my views on her work in Big Tech (which I found repugnant, reminiscent of the inequality I studied) or hers on mine in academia (which she saw as a kind of performative hunger strike). Each time we saw each other, we ran through roll calls of acquaintances. So-and-so had become an angel investor, so-and-so a gastroenterologist, so-and-so a federal judiciary clerk. Many were engaged; some were spawning biracial, caramel children. This was what we had in common now, the general web that had formed us.

“Anita!” Prachi was shouting. “Total throwback, right?”

I swallowed my cheese too fast, began to cough, downed half a sparkling water, burped. Avi wandered into the kitchen, having finished his phone call.

“Anita-Anita?” I said.

“Anita Dayal?” Manu said.

“That name rings a bell,” Maya said.

“This is our old neighbor,” Prachi said, updating Avi. “Pranesh Dayal’s kid, actually.”

“Pranesh Dayal?” Chidi looked up suddenly. “That guy who sold the smart devices company last year for a fuckload?”

Avi and Chidi struck up a side conversation about Pranesh Uncle, which Keya joined. I heard her say, “Wait, do you think he’s investing now?”

“Neer, you in touch with Anita at all?” Manu asked.

I shook my head. San