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

Ramesh Uncle was right. We live alongside the past. It’s our neighbor. We bump into it in the checkout line, at the Laundromat, on the street.

•   •   •

One late June afternoon, I’d returned from one of my drives and was headed to the library to investigate a file a librarian had called over from a museum in Marysville. The town, established in 1851 and a couple of hours northeast of Berkeley in Yuba County, was known as the Gateway to the Goldfields. I’d found a news clipping deep in the archives about a “Hindoo” put on “citizens’ trial” for theft in a Central Valley mining camp. I wondered if he might be my Bombayan.

I wasn’t paying much mind to the redwood-shaded trails north of campus as I ambled along. In fact, I almost missed her. But she collided with me, shoulder-on-shoulder. I did not at first recognize her. She now wore red cat-eye glasses, and they fell from her face. I picked them up, and choked to find myself looking at her, after so long. She was visibly older—her skin looked almost smudged, as though with inky thumbprints. Her figure was less obviously shapely beneath the loose linen flapping around her torso. Her hair grayed around the temples and in a few streaks along her forehead. She was still very striking.

“Anjali Auntie?”

We stood in the shade of those majestic redwoods, so I thought it was possible I’d gotten it wrong. A passing resemblance, another ghost; perhaps I had only drawn her up from the well of memory. But the woman blinked as she took the glasses from me, and the voice that emerged was familiar yet deeper, newly gravelly, like she was getting over a bout of bronchitis.

“My god, Neil!”

“What—ah—what are you doing here?” I asked. “Are you still in Sunnyvale?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Mostly. Yes. I’m down there. But I had an event to go to. Here.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes and I realized the slight growl in her voice was not sickness but recent tears. “A memorial, actually,” she said. “I apologize, I’m a little—”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, unintentionally speaking over her.

We both stood there, arms hanging like tree limbs half-severed from trunks in a storm.

“Was it—who was it?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

Anjali Auntie seemed to consider before replying. “A friend, from Atlanta, actually.”

“Who lives here now? Ah—lived here?”

“Well. He once taught at Emory, and then he shifted over to Cal. In the South Asian Studies department. Time, well.” She sniffed. “So it goes.”

“How’s, um”—I scuffed the walk with my sneaker—“Pranesh Uncle? And, ah, Anita?”

“Oh.” Anjali Auntie sighed. “I suppose it hasn’t reached your mother yet? Pranesh and I are divorcing. And Anita is, well, mostly herself.”

“Shit,” I said. “I’m really sorry. . . . I’m out of the loop, I live in a bunker—I’m in the middle of my dissertation—”

“Your parents must be proud.” She said it pro forma.

A few runners passed us, looking haughtily over their shoulders; we were taking up too much space on the path. We stepped aside.

“It’s history,” I said. “They’d be happier if it was computer science, or finance, or something more lucrative. Right now, I’m a little . . . outside their fold. Say. Anita isn’t”—my voice cracked, but I barreled on—“she’s not getting married, is she?”

“Not unless she’s run off without telling me—wherever did you get that idea?”

It felt like a large chunk of air that had settled in my throat was dissipating. Anita Dayal was not—was not—getting married. A slight breeze lifted, kissing my arm hairs, and suddenly the world seemed wide and traversable, and life varied and branching, for I was not being left behind, for not everyone was folding into private couplehood. For there was time, still, time for old figures to reemerge from the past, and to recognize you.

“Erm, Prachi is,” I managed. “Getting married, I mean. And she saw Anita the other day, or, well, thought she did. At a bridal shop.”

“How funny,” Anjali Auntie said, though she didn’t look amused.

“You remember Manu Padmanaban?” I said. “I guess he’s seen Anita a few times. He said she’s in venture?”

“Ah, yes.” Anjali Auntie placed a finger on her forehead, smoothing her furrows, as I’d seen her do when I was younger. It used to remind me of my mother’s hands on Prachi, but this time it made me think of a priest daubing kumkum in blessing. “She left that job not long ago and has picked up some freelance” (she pronounced the word with a grimace, as though its very sonic quality was undignified) “event-planning work while she . . . plots her next moves. Running lots of holiday parties for these big firms, but occasionally odder jobs, too. They seem to take whatever clients come their way, trying to get off the ground. Don’t ask me how it’ll play on a résumé, but . . .” She chewed her lip, considering her words. “Your generation, you all seem to be having these epiphanies, huh; no one thinks they should have to work the way their parents did.”

I pressed: “So, Anita was in that shop . . . for work?”

“Probably. She’s doing, of all things, a bridal expo right now. One of those big desi affairs.” Seeing my confusion, she elaborated: “All the vendors—mehendi and caterers and tailors and photographers and everyone else you need for a wedding—come to hawk themselves. Tamasha. I’m sure Prachi will go to one. Anyway. That must’ve been why Ani was there.”

Two more runners, coming from the other direction, swished by. Anjali Auntie teetered. She lifted one arm as though she was going to fall over, and I stretched mine out so she could catch on to me. Her hand was almost trembling. If she weren’t still young, I might have called the quiver Parkinsonian. For there was something recasting her—not just grief or fading beauty. Nothing about her seemed well. How had time stolen up on us—on her? Did I only notice her age because it had been ten years? Or would anyone notice the spots speckling her