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

her for alterations. Prachi was to feel (Anita promised all girls feel this way) the creep of recognition as the tailor fitted the cloth to her, that sense that the world wished you to look this way.

Prachi was never to know that her brother had come along to this menagerie in order to stuff golden chains and bangles and tikkas into loose folds and trick pockets in the liner of the skirt, already so hefty one would not notice the extra weight. Anita would tell her, Let Neil take it to the tailor. I would gather it up. Carry it to Anita’s green Subaru parked in the employee back lot, through the doors without metal detectors. I would drive with the windows down on the highway and listen to the airstream whooshes and make straight for Sunnyvale.

We would give most of the bounty to Anjali Auntie, of course, but surely both of us would take a few fated sips. We would be foolish not to accept the blessing it could confer on our little union. Because now we were together. Because gold was what we did. Because I still badly needed it. Which meant she must need it, too. No matter that she claimed otherwise.

The junkie’s plan. The belief that another hit, the right hit, will settle everything.

“If anything goes wrong,” Anita said as she paced, “you do what?”

“Leave you.” I’d recited the words so often they’d become devoid of meaning. “Leave you, take the gold to your mother and grandmother.”

“And I do the same.”

Our eyes met. I rolled over on my stomach so that I did not have to return that stony stare for too long. I did a push-up, feeling strong.

“Your core is flopping.” She tapped me in the protruding belly with her big toe. “So,” she went on. “The lehenga’s down in L.A. with that tailor, and he’s not concerned why we might be tricking it out. People want weird shit on their wedding days. Little holders in dupattas and skirt hems to keep lucky charms, something borrowed and blue, blah, blah. But the point is, none of that matters unless you talk to your sister, you understand?”

She clasped her palms above her, and her stomach tautened. It was not as pillowy as it had been when we were younger. But what was I good for if not softening her?

“Mmhmm.” I reached for her hips, pulling her pelvis to my forehead.

“I’m putting on clothes.” She removed my hands from her flanks.

“No, keep talking,” I said. “Tell me more problems, I’ll fix them all.”

“You used to do this when we studied together. You’d be paying zero attention, and as soon as I said we had to stop, you’d snap to.” She was twirling an Expo marker as she examined the map of which shops and stalls would be located where, along with an estimate of the location of all the Santa Clara Convention Center’s security cameras. I was struck by the sense that she was getting off on the planning, that it wasn’t just her mother’s well-being motivating her. She’d been itching for a challenge. God, she really did need a new job.

The convention center, like many of the industrial buildings in the Bay Area, employed Anita’s father’s technology, meaning it was studded with hundreds of small, beady lenses, each one like a nerve ending connecting to the brain of the whole beast—a cloud server. Every image collected beamed back to it. What the eyes saw, the brain would record indelibly. We had a notion, formed based on Anita’s understanding, which I gathered she’d gathered from a flirtation with one of her father’s old interns: a Wi-Fi interferer could knock out the images streaming to the server, sweeping clean the record of all we would do. As long as Anita could draw the security attendant’s gaze away from the live feed for an hour or so, he’d never notice the signal had gone out. It was one of those oddities of life in the Valley—with so much technology at hand, people presumed its infallibility.

“You really don’t want to taste even a bit of it?” I said. I felt terribly sad, looking around at her life, the granite and the wineglasses and the eerie nothingness of Palo Alto outside. “You don’t miss it?” And didn’t she miss her old self? The one who would have demanded more?

“Sometimes I manage to go months without thinking about it,” Anita said softly. “But then I remember that what we were consuming each time we drank some lemonade was an ambition or energy or power that once belonged to someone else. Which means some people come by this stuff honestly. And I guess I’d like to be one of those people. At some point.”

I swiveled her around to face me. I could do this now—move her, demand her gaze. But she shimmied away, and my palms went cold. For the first time since we’d begun whatever we were now doing, it occurred to me that perhaps we did not fully understand each other.

“I’m getting ready for bed. Just please contact Prachi, like, now,” she added, in a voice a less enlightened man than I would have called shrill.

She excused herself to the bathroom. (That sound of her in the shower in the next room now slightly less extraordinary than it had been when I was fifteen, yet still marvelous.) I began typing a note to my sister: Anita Dayal hit me up the other day . . . Deleted it. So it was Anita you saw . . . Deleted that, too. Clicked forward on the flyer Anita had emailed me a few days before: 15% off everything for vip shaadi expo guests.

Subject line: Fw: Random but . . . The body text: Hey this is random but Anita Dayal hit me up the other day and we’ve hung out a few times. Turns out that was her you saw. Anyway, she’s running this big Indian wedding thing, maybe you can make it? She says you get a discount with this coupon.