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

open, listening to the creak of beech and gum trees. I poured every personal revelation I had that summer into the Bombayan, braiding my small history with his Big History. Bit by bit, I lent him my story. Imagined that he had lived some version of what we’d been through—what we did—during the Lemonade Period. For wasn’t he also a gold thief? What would he do with his stolen goods? How could he bear them? Memories flooded me as I did tiny bumps in the middle of the day, and I channeled them into the Bombayan. I remembered Anjali Auntie telling me about the Saraswati, that holy river lined with gold, so like the rivers that ignited the California rush; I left the apartment to drive alongside those rivers, through the Central Valley, growing emotional as I imagined transposing our eastern mythologies onto the pioneering West. Could they stick?

In early July, high as the Hindenburg, having spoken to no one besides food delivery people and librarians in about a month, I opened a new page in the Marysville material and saw a dark-skinned man staring back at me from a photocopy of a university-press book. It was taken in 1868. He looked like the black-and-white photos of my nana, posed unsmilingly, almost militaristically, on his wedding day. Below his daguerreotype was a small caption. ISAAC SNIDER, it read. Editor of the Marysville Gold Star, 1865–1885. My eyes flitted between his name and his image and my breath caught. I stood up, stole into Chidi’s room, pulled out his dime bags—I was running low on his party supply—and did a line.

I returned to my desk and stared down at Isaac Snider. Snider was a Midwestern Jewish gold rush migrant and entrepreneur from St. Louis, the page read. Like many Jews in the California gold rush who opened stores, launched businesses, built Synagogues, and started schools, he helped establish Californian society as something beyond lean-tos and mining towns. He then became the editor of the largest newspaper in the Central Valley region. But I wasn’t looking at his biography. I was looking at his face. His eyebrows were thick and unruly, and his eyelashes girlishly long. His gaze was unsettled, as though he was sure some secret of his was about to be found out.

Snider, my ass. This dark motherfucker looked as Indian as samosas. I almost wanted to cry. I had found him—had I? Or someone like him. Someone enough like him. My gold digger—Isaac Snider. What if he had slunk not out of view, but right into the heart of American history? So what if he stole that gold the night the whites nearly killed him? What if stealing was the only way for him to make a home in this place?

July slipped by; I read as much of the Marysville Gold Star as possible, and slowly something invited me into the period. The paper had printed its fair share of anti-immigrant polemics, blather I was used to from years of studying the period. (In the wake of the frenzy of gold fever, is it not time for the Chinese and the Mexicans and all other foreigners to make their polite egress, so that the new Western states may go about settling into themselves?) But I noticed something. Toward the end of Isaac Snider’s tenure, the xenophobia abated and was replaced by some unbylined columns denouncing the British Raj. They were written with passion—even familiarity? (The brutish colonial presence recalls a period of American history now viewed in revolutionary light . . . )

More of those long drives down California’s endless highways, but nearly always meandering east now, through the Central Valley’s flat, breadbasket landscape. Orchards bearing matchstick tree limbs sprouted up by the highway, along with signs bearing Sikh politicians’ names—Singhs and Kaurs running for school boards. I’d stop for fresh apricots and drive with sticky fingers through neat town squares. And Marysville itself! It persisted—a couple of square blocks, a diner, antique shops, a set of swinging doors beneath a self-consciously styled sign reading sally’s saloon. Behind the saloon rose a red Chinese structure labeled the historic bok-kai taoist temple, and a sign marking the Yuba River, where it met the Feather. Pacing here gave me a sense of being close to Snider, though the Marysville Gold Star had long ago shuttered and there was no evidence of him—no statue, no plaque. But all I had to do was wander the little downtown, and I felt certain I was walking where he once tread.

I was in Marysville for perhaps the third or fourth time, having just digested a thickly mayonnaised sandwich at the diner, when the phone call came.

I had wandered behind the Taoist temple and up the path that led to a view of the Yuba. It was ugly: trampled sand and shit-colored rocks. Unfinished, graffiti-splattered concrete walls rose up on either side. I was standing there, looking out at the land beyond the river, the land now half-dead with drought, the land that belonged mostly to history, when my phone began to buzz. Perhaps it was my state—suspended as I was between eras and realities—that made me answer the unfamiliar South Bay number.

“Neeraj fucking Narayan,” came the voice. “It’s been a minute.”

Below, a hunched figure emerged from a fluttering blue tarp. He began to rustle in a shopping cart stocked with miscellany—tin cans, ripped shirts, a single in-line skate, a deflating basketball—before lifting a few objects to the sky, as if to inspect them in the dwindling daylight.

“Sorry? Who’s this?”

“It’s me, dummy.”

Who? “Who?”

“Anita!”

“Anita?”

I felt one of my old selves tap me on the shoulder and take up residence in me once more. My ears rang and my eyes filled with something briny—not tears, no. Something else was happening because of the presence of an old creature, a creature to which I was a little allergic.

“Yeah, her, me.”

“Anita? How’d you get my number?”

“Uh, I kept it. I got a new one in college. Okay. Maybe I should have started differently.