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

side-project start-ups, nail-bitingly hoping against hope that one of those could bloom into a lucky billion-dollar idea, the gold in the dirt.

We considered the city—Glen Park, Noe Valley—but mostly the suburbs on the peninsula: Burlingame, San Mateo, Menlo Park, Redwood City. The latter was the ideal location in Prachi and Avi’s new collective couple consciousness—near their jobs and Avi’s parents in Los Altos. (Who else would watch the future offspring?) Redwood City’s heart: a pedestrian mall, streets lined with Mongolian BBQ and AMC Super 3D Cineplex and the Cheesecake Factory.

“You will have everything you need right here,” my father said.

“Convenience factor, very important,” my mother agreed.

The third or fourth Redwood City house: lemon yellow, squat. A wooden slatted fence ringed a small yard, on which a tricycle currently lay, its front pink wheel spinning slowly. Sesame-colored walls, polished appliances. The floral smell of the potpourri in the pink-wallpapered powder room elicited coughs. Prachi and Avi said, “Is this it?” “This is it,” quietly to each other, as we stepped into a final room, painted seafoam green.

I’d gone out with Chidi’s crowd two nights earlier: MDMA at a warehouse party in Oakland. Forty-eight hours later, I was in the depths of cold, abject nihilism. Suicide Sunday. It hit me just then, as Prachi and Avi said This is it, and the comedown darkened until I was in the throes of one of my occasional panics.

“Is it a home office?” my father asked.

“No,” Prachi said very quietly, and my mother took her hand.

“It’s perfect for kids?” the strawberry-blond real estate agent uptalked.

“Yes,” my mother said.

“Oh,” my father said.

“Wow,” Avi said.

“Uh,” I said, “I have a headache.” I dropped to my knees and pushed my face to the ground. Footsteps moved away—the real estate agent, excusing herself; I was making a scene. Everyone’s ease was galactically distant. I wanted to disdain this prescribed life and yet I could not help it, I regretted that it seemed so out of reach; I wanted what it gave everyone else. I lifted my head from the floor. The carpet looked to be breathing as the indentation my forehead had made in it unflattened. My throat was growing smaller; now it was the size of a dime. Somewhere nearby the Caltrain rumbled, and I thought of the people who lay down in front of it every year, how their gray matter and organs and eyelashes and fingernails salted the tracks for miles.

I remembered the fizzing relief of a fresh glass of lemonade. I was parched with the memory.

My mother knelt next to me. Put a hand between my shoulder blades. Rubbed.

“Breathe, rajah,” she said. “Breathe.” She kept her hand there until the worst of it abated.

•   •   •

Everyone was still eyeing me nervously at dinner, except that it was a festive occasion, the melding of two families, the mutually achieved immigrant dream hanging like a plump cloud over us.

We sat beneath the wooden trellis in the Kapoors’ backyard. The domed sky was flecked with constellations. This was why people loved Northern California; its buildings did not pollute the sky. You could remember the stars, their dead light, their gold dust.

“You have to move fast in the Bay Area,” said Mr. Kapoor, agreeing with someone that it was a good idea for Prachi and Avi to snap up the Redwood City house.

“Everything one big race here,” Mrs. Kapoor supplied, with the even breathing of someone who has not been running it herself.

My father sniffed his red—it was the first time I’d seen my parents not scorn alcohol outright, because we were in the company of wealthy Punjabis who took drink seriously. Mr. Kapoor swirled his whiskey. The dinner conversation swarmed with swapped gossip. One can fill in the rest of the clanging of glasses and clacking of silverware and pass-the-paneer-phulka-tacos, how’s-your-cholesterol exchanges that formed the backdrop to the evening’s entertainment:

MY MOTHER: . . . So, see, first Indian I ever heard of coming to America, this family sent him off to college here when he was maybe sixteen.

SANDHYA: So young!

PRACHI: Too young.

MY MOTHER [head shaking]: Much, much too young, yes, anyway! So he’s sixteen and in college, somewhere, say, Maine, maybe Nebraska, I don’t know. And he has no friends. Until these Christian fellows come catch hold of him.

MRS. KAPOOR: They do that.

MY MOTHER: Yaa, yaa. So they say Jesus saves Jesus saves, whatever they say, and then he goes along and becomes one devout Christian. His poor Brahmin mother, so confused when he came home shaking crucifixes and whatnot! Strict vegetarian, she was! And now he’s eating chicken-schmicken. So they took him out of college. And now they decide ki he needs some job. Off he goes to work in the Gulf.

MY FATHER [with affable recognition of the pattern of my mother’s stories]: Ayyo, Ramya.

MY MOTHER: But then guess what happens! These Muslims he’s working with, they catch hold of him and give him beef and all and abhi? He’s one devout Muslim.

[A chorus of laughter. Affectionate eye rolls. Prachi and Avi catching each other’s gazes with stifled giggles. Sufficiently a part of this, sufficiently apart from it.]

MR. KAPOOR: Now, think, such a fellow would not even get into these American colleges.

AVI: What do you mean, Dad?

MRS. KAPOOR: Avinash, he’s just saying, these colleges have it out for our kind now. Very hard for Pratyusha’s children; you can only get into Berkeley as some other minority.

AVI: What do you think, Neil? You TA for all these Berkeley kids, don’t you? Prachi says you’re always writing them letters of recommendation and stuff.

PRACHI [glowing]: My brother is a very popular teacher.

NEIL: I don’t think there’s a shortage of high-achieving Asians at Berkeley, Auntie. Honestly, I wonder if someone told them, “Stop racing, there are too many of you,” if they’d wind up having to do something more interesting with themselves.

SANDHYA: Pinky, I teach, too, you know, eleventh grade, and Neil, they want it for themselves. You tell them they can’t do it, their eyes pop out of their heads.

MRS. KAPOOR: You’re in Fremont,