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

“I, er—I saw your mom the other day.”

“I heard.”

“And Prachi saw you—it’s like—” I almost said It’s like I conjured you. “Small world.”

“It’s always been a little claustrophobic to be an ABCD,” Anita said. “No exit.”

The tarp’s resident—and I—watched a yellow windbreaker try to make its way downriver. It caught on a rock and flapped, an accidental flag.

“Prachi looked right through me,” Anita continued. “She never did like me.”

“That’s not true.” The man was removing his shoes and wading into the river to unhook the windbreaker. Freed, it was soon carried out of view. “I hear you’re not getting married.”

She laughed. “If there’s an extreme opposite of getting married, I’m that.”

My chest untightened, as it had when Anjali Auntie had denied it; there was something about hearing Anita’s own coarse dismissal of the possibility. It confirmed that she had not chosen the life that could have by now subsumed her—Prachi’s life, the life of a future-oriented South Asian professional.

“I think that’s just called being single.”

The man sent several more objects from his shopping cart downriver. I discerned a piece of wire, a saucepan, a red bandanna. I had a terrible thought that he was ridding himself of all this in preparation for some self-obliteration. I started to walk down the slope toward him.

“Somehow that doesn’t seem strong enough,” she said. “Hey. I googled you. You’re a historian? Sorry, do I have to say an historian?”

“You don’t have to say either. I’m just a grad student.”

Close up, this man didn’t look like a person about to absent himself. He just looked leathered by sun and time. He pointed over my shoulder. Behind me, to the west, the sun was setting over the bursting red of the Bok-Kai temple.

The man splashed the river onto his face, lifted his eyes to the sky, then walked back to his tarp. I pictured Snider making these gestures, kneeling at the bank, brushing the water.

Had I been silent too long? “Your mom,” I said. “She looked different.”

“Yes,” Anita said. “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. It’s about my mom.”

I followed the man’s tread marks down to the water and dipped my fingers in as he had. The lick of the cold Yuba on my hand made me shudder, and a wave of visceral déjà vu passed over me. After a moment, the initial uncanny jitter ceased, but I still felt like the very surface of the Yuba was glistening with recognition.

Of course, though, it was just the girl on the line, Anita’s old voice, skewing time.

“Listen,” she went on. It was as though her words were reaching me not across miles but across decades. I had to ask her to speak up. “I’m out of town for a few weeks hustling up vendors for this ridiculous event I’m working on, a bridal expo,” she said, louder. “I’ll be back in two weeks. I know it’s been ages. But can we meet up?”

7.

Those next two weeks were a kind of bardo; I hung between lifetimes. Flashes of who I had been ten years ago struck me in the mornings. One time I rolled over, my eyes foggy as strange dreams receded, to see that it was eight a.m.—I have a chemistry test! I thought, before realizing I was not sixteen. It was early August; San Francisco’s most flamboyant denizens had caravanned off to Burning Man, and Berkeley’s college students had been replaced by talented youths attending debate camps, science camps, philosophy camps, summer honors colloquia. I stepped into the sunlight only to buy the crap I ate but couldn’t call food, spicy hot Cheetos and ramen, and one afternoon bumped into a short brown boy with a bowl cut, maybe twelve years old. His bright blue shirt read berkeley summer honors enrichment program. Go on, enrich yourself, I considered shouting. Look at how wealthy all that enrichment made me. The boy spied something unstable in my pupils and bolted.

Another time, on the way back from meeting Chidi’s dealer, I passed the shop on University that sold Bollywood cassette tapes and georgette saris and Nepali prayer flags. Through the window I saw the owner in his full Indian dad attire—hoodless Hanes sweatshirt and white socks tugged halfway up his shins. He was still, taking in the passersby, his whole figure milky colored through the glass. His face did not warm when I stopped to reread, for the thousandth time, the yellow lettering. shree krishna’s—berkeley. since 1976. He simply held his arms behind his back and regarded me as though he had seen me a thousand times before, his expression as precise and calculating as my father’s as he readjusted the pharmacist coat in the mirror. The drugs were hot against my thigh. Are you making use of all you took? I raced home to suck the fresh, pure powder up my nose until my sinuses froze over with this so requited cold, as I did it again, again.

Led by the bumps, I met with my one welcome ghost, Isaac Snider. I was writing things down about him, things I intuited but could not yet prove. It was the first time I’d written like this, with something that felt like truth flowing through me so quickly my hands struggled to keep up. Cold academic work yielded none of this transcendence; the many baffling components of my life had never converged so clearly as they did when I wrote toward Isaac Snider. I let myself forget the professionalization of the study of the past, because my private project felt like a purer communion. Maybe I looked at him because it was easier than looking at myself. He, my Bombayan gold digger, and the story I spun of him, was just about the only thing that took my mind off the impending meeting.

The Tale of Isaac Snider

He was an immigrant, like all those forty-niners who crossed Death Valley or rode the Pacific or braved the Great Basin, tempted by the Californian promise. In