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

MR. KAPOOR: Neil, this is a story for you. You must write this. Get him a notebook, Pinky.

PRACHI: He’s not a journalist, Uncle.

MRS. KAPOOR: Why not try it? We could say we know this Pulitzer fellow Neil Narayan!

NEIL: I’ve considered it.

MY FATHER [concerned]: Journalism?

NEIL: A Pulitzer.

MR. KAPOOR: Point is, Neil, nobody’s telling our stories. I have a colleague, he is a Jew—

AVI: Dad, say Jewish, not a Jew.

MR. KAPOOR: Jewish-Jewish yes, anyway, he is a Jewish. They have their own proper magazines, we have just India Abroad bullshit—excuse me, Pinky, but that is what it is. Neil, why don’t you start up some publication for desis! It’s a good a time for starting up!

MY FATHER: Well, as Prachi is saying, Neil writes history—

MR. KAPOOR: What is history but an explanation for the present!

NEIL: I wouldn’t put it like that.

MY MOTHER: Pinky, you’re talking about gold robberies? This happened in Atlanta, too!

NEIL: In Atlanta? When?

MRS. KAPOOR: See, it’s these Colombian gangster fellows. They come and hold Indians up inside their own homes at gunpoint and they make off with all the gold.

PRACHI: How do they know which houses belong to Indians?

GOPI: Stakeout, must be.

MY MOTHER: No, no, see, I have one other theory. From when it happened all over Atlanta.

MY FATHER: No proof for this theory!

MY MOTHER: You agreed just the other day, Raghu.

MY FATHER [genially]: Did I? [to Mr. Kapoor] Sometimes you have to!

MRS. KAPOOR: What was your theory, Ramya?

MY MOTHER: See, Pinky. See. It has to be Indians. Who else?

MRS. KAPOOR: What? Indians with guns?

MY MOTHER: No, no, in Atlanta there were no guns.

NEIL: When in Atlanta?

PRACHI: What do you mean, Amma? What Indians? Neil, don’t sigh so loudly, it’s rude.

MY MOTHER: It was all very well planned. The person would know exactly when a family was going to India. Savitri Reddy lost her mother out of nowhere, okay? She raced off to Hyderabad, then someone set in on her house the very next day. These people knew exactly where to go; they took all of it from her big suitcase in the guest bedroom, poor thing. They even found the pieces she kept hidden in Godiva chocolate containers in the pantry! Five, ten thousand dollars in all.

MRS. KAPOOR: No one should have so much in the house anymore!

PRACHI: Amma, when did all this happen, Neil was asking.

MY MOTHER: Few years back. Two thousand-leven. You were in college, Neeraj. I told you, you just never listen to me. See, and now only he listens—

NEIL: It never happened before that? When we were still at home?

gopi [heartily]: Indians are not heisty-schmeisty material, Ramya.

MY MOTHER: See, that’s why they were not caught! Who would suspect?

MRS. KAPOOR [flushing]: I picture them coming in all crowbars and guns sometimes and . . .

MR. KAPOOR: She gets scared.

MY MOTHER: I would be frightened, too, Pinky, except we have a very good neighborhood watch.

MY FATHER: Ramya, I’m sure they have a neighborhood watch here, too.

PRACHI: Auntie, if you’re spooked, maybe you should get another security system.

AVI: Actually—that guy we were talking about the other day? [turning to Prachi] Pranesh Dayal? The company he sold does smart devices and stuff. Thermostats, fridges, internet-of-things-enabled security cameras. You can save all the images to the cloud, you know?

MY MOTHER: How do you know about Pranesh Dayal?

AVI: He’s well known! Dad, he’s that IIT Bombay dude—Harita Auntie’s cousin?

NEIL: Actually, I ran into—

MY MOTHER: It may be that Pranesh Dayal is very smarty-smart, but that wife of his—actually, these days I’m hearing ex-wife—Avinash, just listen . . .

•   •   •

My family distributed various tokens of advice before we parted ways again. As we hugged good-bye in Alamo Square, Prachi told me to call Keya, who was capable and cute and had (against all odds) liked me. As I dropped my parents at SFO the next day, my father reminded me about the existence of law school, and I shook it off before he could offer to pay for it with money he did not really have. My mother whispered into my hair that she was going to do some “health research,” which meant she’d go digging through Ayurvedic remedies for malaise; she would fall asleep with her face on my horoscope and implore her cousins in Mysore to visit the family sage. (She had begun to swear on his precognition. “Rusyendra has foreseen this,” she’d said of Prachi’s match to Avi. “He said Prachi would choose outside of her community.” “He’s Indian, Mom,” I said. “Punjabi, Neeraj,” she’d replied. “Entirely different.” “What about me?” “Rusyendra says you are very difficult to perceive, Neeraj.”)

A few days later, on the eve of my appointment with Wang, I got a terse email from him reminding me that I still had not sent over any new work. Making your adviser chase you down is less than ideal, he wrote. I was forty milligrams of Adderall into my day. I opened my two projects, the sober and the intoxicated. On one hand: Mythologies of Money in the Gilded Age.docx—it was fragments and bullet points, full of my notes to myself, “ADD LATER” and “NEED MORE ON THIS.” On the other: Snider-draft-8.rtf—full paragraphs. Images. A human, breathing on the page, speaking, wanting, accounting for time’s passage. An argument about history. I remembered Wang, during our last meeting, telling me my sentences had an overboiled-spinach quality—tasteless, unappetizing. Remembered him accusing me of having a surface-level relationship to my material.

I chose the second document, then went out to buy more protein bars, and crashed late.

When I woke up before our meeting, my head thudded with regret and embarrassment.

In his office, Wang chewed the inside of his cheek and smoothed the T-shirt he wore beneath a light navy blazer. He pushed his glasses atop his head and frowned as he paged through a printout of my Isaac Snider chapters.

A few uncannily quiet minutes passed. The only sound was the scuffle of Wang’s archless sneakers on the floor as his feet tapped.

“I wasn’t aware,” he said, “that you had