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

few times, like she was warming up for something. “Whatever’s going on with her,” she said, “that’s what I need to talk to you about. I need your help. She needs our help.”

•   •   •

Anjali Joshi met her husband-to-be on the green IIT Bombay campus in 1988. Her brother Vivek, in his second year at the elite institution, was earning C’s and D’s in everything save the joke class, Indian philosophy.

“Mama told me Vivek swore off the gold as soon as he got to IIT,” Anita said, swirling her wine. “He never forgave himself for what he saw as stealing his neighbor Parag’s spot, and he refused to acquire gold from his batchmates. He must have been very strong to white-knuckle his way through the withdrawal. I sometimes imagine that he wanted something else enough to make it bearable. He loved theater, and music, you know. Maybe he would have ended up an artist.”

Happy, or average, or artistic, or whatever he was, Vivek was enjoying himself for the first time in years, playing guitar, sustaining flirtations with girls from nearby schools.

“I’ve pieced all this together over the last few months,” Anita went on. “Talking to my mother, and my grandmother.”

Anjali, who lived at home and commuted south to a women’s college, used to visit Vivek sometimes. The Joshi parents abided this; they considered IITians harmless and presumed Vivek looked out for his baby sister. He did. He wouldn’t let her near the minority cohort of boys who smoked ganja or got drunk, but he did let her pass rowdy evenings as a guest in the mess hall while he and his friends had endless conversations about American rock and roll. She was always packed off home before the real raucousness began in the hostels. Vivek was developing quite the foul lexicon, trading friendly insults in rough Marathi and Hindi late into the night. For now that he had reached this vaunted place, there was joy, and a chance to be young, at last.

Anjali—who’d grown into a striking woman—felt more comfortable among the IIT boys than with her female classmates. The others at her college, where she was a scholarship student (having been encouraged for the first time by a chemistry teacher in her final year), were products of upper-crust schools in Malabar Hill and Fort. They spoke in Oxford-tinged accents; some had boyfriends with whom they flitted into the Royal Willingdon Sports Club or the Bombay Gymkhana. The school’s pink walls and the surrounding streets of foreign consul general offices, even the name of the neighborhood—Breach Candy—all rang of a place beyond sealess Dadar, its ruck, its clamor.

The first time Anjali visited IIT, she debarked from the paint-peeling city bus and spied a single female passing into a boxy beige building. “Are there any girls here?” she asked Vivek’s Bengali roommate. They were filling up metal trays with mess hall vada pav. “Thirteen,” the Bengali replied. “Of two hundred fifty.” Perhaps those thirteen had been raised by mothers who brewed them the right drinks at the right hours.

The Bengali excused himself to join a scruffy curly-haired boy wearing glasses and a khadi kurta, messenger bag slung across his chest. They were off to protest one of the evening socials being held at a hostel; women from colleges like Anjali’s were bussed up to keep young men company. “Socials are an American imperialist form of engaging!” the comrades chanted, pumping fists as they filed out. Hardly a catchy slogan. Which was when a plump young man with thick eyebrows adjusted his spectacles and cleared his throat.

“His hostel couldn’t get anyone to come if they paid for it,” he said. His voice sounded like an out-of-tune violin, but it was also hefty. He spoke as though he’d been practicing the line.

“They’re communists,” Anjali offered. “I don’t think they want to pay.”

The plump boy began to spout more insults about the Bengali, likely less because he disliked him than because the chap had served as a conversational entry point.

Anjali interrupted. “He’s my brother’s best friend.”

“You’re Vivek Joshi’s sister?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, god,” Pranesh Dayal whimpered. “Oh, god, don’t tell him I harassed you or something, na.” He scuttled away.

When Anjali sat down across from her brother and inquired about the boy, Vivek and his friends laughed as they slopped up bhaji.

“Sad fellow, what to do,” Vivek said. “Too studious, total pain. Gets ragged.”

“Class topper, though,” one of the friends said. “Got to respect it.”

“You don’t rag him, do you, bhau?”

Vivek mussed her hair with one large mitt of a hand. “Don’t be bothered, Anju.”

Anjali pictured a table of her classmates having this sort of exchange about her: Anjali Joshi, sad girl, don’t talk to her, her father is just an excise tax officer. . . . And so when she came to visit Vivek every month or so, she kept an eye out for Pranesh. She’d notice him crossing the grass with a robotic gait, and she’d jog to catch him up.

“What do you want from me,” he once demanded, in that voice of his that did not seem to contain in its repertoire question marks. She was taken aback. Gone was the boy who’d approached her to impress, replaced by a defensive creature. They stood in the shade of a flame-of-the-forest tree, but still they sweated. Fat brown pods dangled above them. Anjali tore one off.

“I hear you’re the class topper,” she said, fiddling with the pod. She took a finger to her loose hair and twirled it, as the Malabar Hill girls did. “I’ve never been much good at school.”

She was not sure what had come over her. Maybe it was that Pranesh seemed harmless, someone to practice on. Likelier, she was genuinely curious about his intellectual prowess. She was standing in the vicinity of the thing she’d been trained to recognize as power: academic achievement. She thought of how Vivek had described ambition years earlier, as an energy that runs in some bodies and not in others. She had begun to wonder what would happen if someone