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

daughter makes her theoretically safe. Plus, historically some desi brides got that gold as a backup in case the marriage went wrong, for their own financial security—”

I couldn’t help but think of even my thoroughly modern sister, how something in her had stabilized as soon as Avi slid the conflict-free diamond onto her ring finger. How in a rare moment of reflection, she’d told me once that the bulimia had finally ended with Avi, how the ground beneath your feet stopped shaking when you knew you had a partner in all things.

“Tell me your ‘plan.’” I used air quotes.

Anita was panting from the exertion of explaining the Indian wedding industrial complex. But she nodded invitingly, in the same fashion Chidi did when he was asked a probing question about his start-up, as if to imply there was nothing he’d rather be doing than assuaging the asker’s doubts.

“We’ve got to deal with security. Metal detectors, guards, cameras. Then, discretion. How to do it without alerting the jewelers. Plus, getaway.”

“That wasn’t a plan. That was a list of problems. And who’s ‘we’?”

“For now, just me.”

“A crack team, huh.”

“You’re the only person I’d imagine trusting with this.”

“You don’t even know me anymore.”

She was unscathed. “Maybe I don’t.”

My voice fell to a near whisper. “You really think it wouldn’t hurt anyone?”

I looked around the room, on instinct. Shruti didn’t step from the shadows to remind me about the unspeakable costs of fulfilling unnameable lusts. It was just me, Anita, and the bartender, who’d turned the TV to a black-and-white Japanese film.

“Yes, Neil,” she said. “I really think it wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“And would the gold contain . . . actual happiness, you think?”

“Something close to it,” Anita said. And there her hand was, on my knee again. I was dizzy, as I hadn’t been in years. “But, honestly, I’m not sure my mother’s familiar enough with the real thing to discern.”

I tried not to move, not to lose her touch. I nodded. A question formed in my throat, but I didn’t say it aloud. Could I have some, too? “I’m not sure I’d know the difference, either,” I said.

8.

It had come time for the suitable families to meet. Prachi and Avi were beginning to look for houses, and the Kapoor clan, self-identified Los Altos natives, had taken the opportunity to invite my parents out for a visit. Houses. Homes! These things were my mother’s purpose. She was only too happy to lend her expertise to the hunt. We were to troop around, my whole family and Avi (his parents pled fatigue re: Bay Area real estate), working through as many open houses as could be crammed into one August Sunday.

I’d been conscripted into joining. “You’ll have to do this one day, too,” my father insisted, just as when we’d toured colleges for Prachi. There, the ever-dangling threat of the future.

I picked my parents up from my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya’s house in Fremont, then gathered Prachi and Avi from the city.

“How mad that my brother lives so near your parents, Avi,” my mother said merrily, as everyone squished into the backseat of my knee-knocking Honda. (Avi was lingering on the waitlist for a Tesla, and Prachi had never liked driving, not since her traumatic year of lessons from my father.) And yet it was not mad at all, because the Bay Area is the upper-middle-class Indian American promised land. These sunny small towns, with their citrus trees, their tidy main streets—all these qualities make the place peaceful in a way that promises an end to competition, suggesting (incorrectly, of course) that the game has been won.

“We should have rented a car,” my father said when my Honda took too long to start.

Avi attempted to soothe nerves. “We can take my mom’s other car tomorrow, Uncle.”

My mother fluttered. “Oh, no. No. We would not put your parents out. We can rent.”

I was exhausted from a week of pushing further into the Tale of Isaac Snider. He’d be back from Indonesia the following week, and we were scheduled for a check-in to ensure I was on track for the proposal defense in November. I was aware that I’d produced more on Snider than on the Gilded Age. I was aware, too, that the sentences pulsed in the former pages, and lay limp in the latter. I still had time, though, to try to breathe some life into my sample chapter on religious messaging surrounding money during the period.

I’d been further discombobulated thinking about Anita—the new Anita, who’d said she needed me, bringing forth a rocket of old wants. I hadn’t yet given her an answer to her wild pitch. She’d been texting me occasionally to prod my decision along. Each buzz in my pocket drew me further away from this world, of my family, of houses, of the basic arrangements of life.

To see Prachi’s and my mother’s dreamy expressions upon entering each low-slung on-the-market California home was to feel that I had been locked out of one of the great secrets of the world. Each house shared a few things: a single story with sparse grass marking a front “lawn,” a tinlike flat roof, pale paint—orange sherbet, cotton candy pink. Inside: sunbeams on hardwood, lanky windows. Citrus trees, tomatoes. Discussions of how to keep the squirrels from the plants. These were, by most standards of the country, modest buildings. But here, the land upon which they sat, which had once been dotted with flappy tents as gold hunters fled inland, was worth millions. A century and a half ago, to stand on this terrain would have made Prachi and Avi pioneers; even a well-to-do woman like my sister would have struggled to hire someone to build her a house, for all the able-bodied men would have been in the goldfields.

Now, though. Now Prachi and Avi would step into a home full of smart thermostats and smart fridges. They would drive Avi’s Tesla, order groceries for delivery, stream any entertainment they liked, while Avi nursed his