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

herself: You are the wife of a rich man. You are not the help. If she were caught—and she nearly is, a handful of times—she could talk her way out of it. Snooping, someone would gossip. Who would imagine Pranesh Dayal’s wife to be a cat burglar?

In a chemistry lab at the university, she and Lyall iterate the lemonade formula. At night, she fiddles in her kitchen. At last, she gets it. It doesn’t taste quite the way she remembers her mother’s concoction—she still recalls, vividly, that single stolen sip of Vivek’s brew, decades ago. Lakshmi’s potion was ugly, sour. Anjali has made the lemonade sweet. She’s made it a delight to drink. She’s made it craveable.

At this point in the telling, Anjali Auntie’s eyelids looked heavy, like the weight of the story was exerting excess gravity on her. She turned her face to the window. The drapes were still drawn, but her eyes bore through the curtain, like they were witnessing a private play. Lakshmi Auntie was pacing around the motel room with the energy of a much younger woman.

Anjali has the recipe for Anita’s and my lemonade in hand now. She doesn’t need Lyall anymore, not officially; she could make do alone. But she keeps visiting Decatur. To see him. She stands in Lyall’s backyard in his house off West Ponce de Leon Avenue, clinking white-wine glasses while sitar and tabla music plays. A portrait of Lyall’s late wife, Miranda, eyes them from his bookshelves. They talk about gold, its strange properties, its beguiling histories.

“And I wasn’t only interested in him,” Anjali Auntie said now—and this was the first time she had stated it so boldly. “He and I shared a certain fascination. With alchemy.”

“Alchemy promises more time,” she went on. “See? And he and I both felt we had lost things to time. He had lost years watching his wife die, and grieving her, and all that aged him prematurely.

“Me, I suppose I felt something had been taken from me. I had never been given quite the same chances as my brother, or even Anita. I thought—more time . . . well, it seemed my due.” Her voice turned a little bleating at that last part.

Lakshmi Auntie glanced at the basin. The gold congealed at its edges, a duller shade than I’d seen before. She lifted her sari to her mouth, as though to cover some impolitic expression. She closed her eyes. I was not sure how much she understood of the English, word by word—we were moving quickly. I wondered if Anita’s ajji was attempting to hear as little as possible about the events leading to today, reserving her energy for the aftermath; she was not there to condone or analyze what had occurred, only to try to put it all to rest as best she could.

And so the affair begins, and with it, Anjali and Lyall’s shared project.

Hours bent over old texts, hours of his hands unfurling in her hair, of forgetting responsibility and risk. They discover ancient recipes, and something begins to change. Anjali is lighter, happier. Her smooth, bronze-patina cheek presses against Lyall’s lighter one, mildly shaded by his graying stubble, which browns with the potions. They must indeed be cheating time, because how else could she be here, how else could the two of them possess all this life and heat when she is supposed to be raising a daughter, being a wife? This is all she’s wanted, for years, though she never had the language for it: a space apart from expectation, purloined pockets of time where she is permitted the sprawl of youth.

Lyall’s emptied garage in the Ponce de Leon Avenue home: bodies knock into beakers. Strange smells, some pungent as fresh ginger, others hot like chili powder. Eerie columns of smoke rise from the vessels. Blue and orange flames irradiate the windowless bunker. Nothing here is as pretty as her lemonade. Often, it’s gloopy, cinnabar red. Another, like souring milk—it comes up from her mouth in foamy vomit; she is rabid. He won’t let her stop. He pushes the vial to her lips, holds her head back, tips it down her throat. “You have to, darling,” he whispers. “You have to.” For the first time, she wonders, as she swallows her bile, if they’ve gone a little mad.

But she’s come to crave these drinks, just as we crave the lemonade. It’s an addiction—to the brews, and to him. She aches for both equally. Once or twice, he wonders aloud if they should slow up. She never allows it.

Lyall and Anjali have had a year together.

But then Pranesh restarts the old fight. Anjali and Anita must move. To California. He plans to put the Hammond Creek house on the market. He needs liquidity for the company, and claims Anita stands a chance at Harvard from the South Bay public schools. He says it wouldn’t matter, anyway, if she got into Harvard and he couldn’t pay. Anjali fights back. Which causes Pranesh to suspect something. He threatens to cut her off. “I have been patient,” he warns her. “Indulgent.”

And then, Shruti.

When I tell Anjali the news, she thinks bitterly: Perhaps this is why we age, placing a hand on my neck. So that someone makes the right decisions. The world seems to be telling her that leaving Hammond Creek, and Lyall, is the adult thing to do. He tries to reason with her, even arrives at the mustard yellow house on the night the Dayals are hosting a party, the very last night I see Anjali Dayal for a decade. I catch a glimpse of him, pulling up by the Walthams’ house. I walk home while they argue in plain sight. He begs her to consider being with him, not to be so trapped in her own culture. She dares him: Would he pay for Harvard? Parent Anita? His silence is all the answer she needs; her daughter is just a story to him.

•   •   •

Next to me, Anita sniffed. She had been as stony