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

I drove, often. My love of the road may be the most American thing about me. When I felt a crash coming on, or when I could no longer bear to be in my own brain, I’d get in my Honda, roll down the windows, and push onto the 880, winding past Oakland’s warehouse edge, taking the 92 to Half Moon Bay. I’d follow the trampled grass on the bluffs above the state beach, all dotted with weathered, blister-blue clapboard houses. Untamed purple salvia sprouting up everywhere, the spring’s yellow wildflowers drying out. If ever I had an open house craving to match my mother’s, it was for these homes of windbeaten wood and high windows, places that seemed the right sort to hide away a writing man, shelves stocked with Great Americans, Styron and Stegner and Steinbeck. In gray-glum corners of California like this, I imagined myself not so much living—for that seemed to require a burdensome act of imagination, living—but persisting through the years.

Other times, I’d cross the Bay Bridge, wheezing my car up a vertiginous San Francisco hill. The sight: California splayed out around me. I’d cross the Golden Gate to the Marin Headlands, passing through the veil of fog to breathe the green-and-gold horizon line. Pockets of the Pacific bloomed out around Sausalito. The careens and curves jostled something loose in me. Every thirty minutes on one of those roads, the light and heat or chill of the air rearrange.

That June forced my head back toward the past. Perhaps the haunting began with the mention of Anita. It was aggravated by Arabella, with whom I suffered a nauseating afternoon on mushrooms one Saturday, during which a Shruti-like creature rose up from the red Mount Diablo dirt. She was inchoate yet clear, forming and re-forming into curly locks and small knowing eyes, even as I blew into the air to disperse her. I spent the trip quaking and retching and mapping my drug-induced pain onto first Shruti and then the world. (Dear Shruti, We’re all sick, riddled with holes, and you saw it first. . . . I set down in my Moleskine, before the queasiness made writing impossible.)

Later, sober, having driven me home in brutal silence, Arabella had asked me to please, please let her in on whatever demons had manifested during the trip. I refused.

“I’m done trying to teach men to feel things,” she huffed, her eyes trained on an addict addressing the sky by the Ashby Avenue BART station. “Just done.”

“I feel things,” I muttered. “More than you know.”

“Well, you should probably find out how to talk about them, or no one will ever be able to stand being around you—you’re roaming around your own head all the time, Neil, and maybe, just maybe what’s going on in there isn’t the most interesting thing on the planet.” Then, accessing some reserve of cruelty I’d never before encountered in her, she added, fumbling with the key in the ignition: “I saw what’s on your phone. Dil Day? That Indian marriage app? You don’t take me seriously. You’re waiting around for your perfect brown girl.”

I’d downloaded Keya’s app out of curiosity—about it, and about Keya, who’d struck me as off-kilter in a charming way. But I didn’t explain.

“Yeah, well.” I got out of Arabella’s car and nearly plowed into the addict, who was calling passersby on Ashby to attention: Remember! he yelled. If you don’t, He will, if you don’t, He will! “To you, I’m just hyphenated, right?”

I was spending my summer attempting to explain why and how one era leads to the next, why a distant shout of gold in California draws migrants across the brutal Sierra Nevada; how gold-lust formed railroads and poisoned rivers; how the forty-niners’ ache to stake their claim on the earth, to make a home in America, coalesced to change the course of the West, and the world.

My work as a student of history was the moral opposite of my work as a debater. As a debater, I’d lived in the present and made arguments about possible futures, claiming wantonly that someone’s well-intentioned proposition would collapse the economy or cause nuclear war. The fact that the truth of the future never came to bear on a given round—that we were not accountable for being wrong, for defending a protracted occupation of Afghanistan, or for arguing, as I did most of sophomore year, that investing in clean coal was preferable to initiating a renewable portfolio standard—meant we were relieved of the responsibility of truth-telling at all. But when you study the past, you know how things turn out. The weight of the present demands something of you.

I was supposed to be constructing an argument about all that followed the California gold rush. But even after many hours of picking dully through papers on the abstract forces of money and power in the late nineteenth century, I found myself without interesting characters to follow through the era. And while I understood the tropes and pitfalls of narrative history, I wanted to meet someone in my research whom I could live with, whose voice I could hear, or perhaps had heard once before.

I had sought Ramesh Uncle’s Bombayan gold digger as an undergraduate in Athens and during my first year at Berkeley. He was an obsession that seized me for a period of time, until the trail ran out and I had to give up. I’d researched foreigners in the gold rush many times, locating Australians and Chinese and Chileans, but never an Indian or a Hindu.

Finding that the genealogy of American belonging continued to exclude me, I’d taken Irwin Wang’s advice to pursue economic history, a subfield in which job opportunities came slightly more easily. Now, though, with Wang accompanying his wife on her Indonesian fieldwork all summer, I found myself looking for the Bombayan once more. The hunt for him sustained me through those strange, blurred months; it tugged me back in time, or resurrected revenants, or both. For it turned out that