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

a row of Bengali names—cousins of Avi’s sis-in-law, Prachi had written above them on the legal pad. And one name stood out: Ramesh Chakraborty.

It might not be him. Ramesh—a common-enough name. And there were no shortage of Bengalis in Atlanta. But just in case. I moved myself to that table, leaving poor Anita seated with my family.

Sunday morning: a Marriott ballroom inside the perimeter. Prachi, who in the end wore the standard red-and-gold when my mother threatened hunger strike at the prospect of white, led Avi around the fire, which flickered a subdued orange. I found myself scanning the room for the massive shape of Ramesh Uncle. He was such an immense man that I should have seen him if he was there.

On the marital platform there came a hubbub as the officiant—not a priest, but an amateur Sanskrit scholar, a family friend of a family friend—was revealed to have sent Prachi and Avi the wrong way around the fire. My mother’s sister, Kalpana Auntie, hurdled onto the stage, braced Prachi by the shoulders to physically turn her around, and in the process trampled upon the edge of Avi’s trailing sherwani, causing him to knock his forehead against Prachi’s. They righted themselves and laughed, Prachi’s mehendied hand pressing tenderly against Avi’s receding hairline. The error undone, they decided, for good measure, to circle fourteen times rather than the prescribed seven, to plentiful chortles.

I used the commotion as an excuse to stand, making as though I was preparing to help with things up front. I once more swept the bobbling heads. (No tears were visible. This was an unsentimental affair, and besides, too many of us were lost among the Sanskrit. Who knew what promises were being uttered through the untranslated chants?) I thought I saw a knobbed nose, bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows . . . but the profile was too low, belonging to a shorter man . . . oh, but a few rows back, there were Anita’s perennially roving eyes, and she, like me, was glancing about, fidgeting with her old simple gold hoop earrings. Those eyes landed on mine and lit, and lingered, and I momentarily forgot the quest.

One of Prachi’s white sorority sisters leaned over her husband. “Do you throw rice at Indian weddings or is that offensive?” she whispered.

“Why would that be offensive?”

“Because people are starving in India.”

“Sit down,” my cousin Padma hissed. I obeyed. It was the kind of weekend during which one must obey any and all Indian women’s orders. When it was over, Padma and I processed together back down the aisle. Anita smirked gently, for reasons I couldn’t entirely ascertain—maybe at the formalities, or just at how time had landed us in this room now. Padma and I trailed the newlyweds and cousins and Hae-mi and Avi’s best friend from his Hindi a cappella group. The aisle: a facet of the wedding that, during the planning phases, my mother had deemed American nonsense, but that caused her to beam as she, in her emerald-green sari, clutched my father’s arm. For a moment, all the eyes of Hammond Creek were upon her. Her long earlobes sagged from the burden of her jewels.

•   •   •

The reception, in the early evening: a buffet line beneath a large white tent in Piedmont Park. Duke white girls stumbled over the hems of their newly purchased saris. Anita was being passed between Hammond Creek aunties who sought news of her mother and, secondarily, her own professional path. She reported to them that she had recently signed up for a computer programming boot camp to become more employable, which garnered her nearly enough favor among the older generation to overshadow the hullaballoo about the divorce. Occasionally, though, she waved me over to rescue her, once even kissing me dramatically on the mouth in front of Mrs. Bhatt. “That’ll give her something else to talk about,” she said, steering me toward the bar for another Mango Monsoon cocktail. “Anjali Joshi’s slutty daughter.”

An hour or so in, I was lurking alone by the buffet, still scanning for the old man. Manu Padmanaban startled me.

“I’ve got literally twenty minutes,” he said, shoving a chunk of pakora in his mouth. He’d moved back to Georgia to attempt to flip the sixth congressional district, which included Hammond Creek. “I’m thinking I’ll live like this for a while,” he said, with a sincerity that felt increasingly rare. “I’ll just go wherever there’s a chance of purpling or bluing a place. It’ll give me a chance to really see America. America-America.”

“Brave of you,” I said, which I meant, though it came out sardonically.

And then I saw him—being led from a maroon sedan parked too close to the tent: an older man, leaning on someone. He had grown smaller. Those intervening years had rubbed away some of his stature, along with the sense I once had of him as standing cosmically outside of time. People parted, seeing only what was visible—an old man being helped to his table.

“Manu!” I shouted. “Best of luck with the blue wave, buddy, but I have to go—”

By the time I reached my table, the son had deposited his father and gone off to the snaking buffet line.

“Ramesh Uncle,” I said, taking my seat next to him.

“Hallo, hallo,” he said, fiddling with the collar of his black button-down. It was poorly tucked into his slacks. He was marvelously underdressed.

“Do you remember me?”

“Very good to see you,” he said, sticking a hand out to shake mine. The knuckles were like ancient tree roots, bumped and ribbed and holding him to the earth.

“We used to talk at the public library, ten—eleven—years ago.”

He blew his nose in a dark gray handkerchief.

“My name’s Neil,” I tried. “You used to tell me all these great historical stories.”

“A very good subject, history,” Ramesh Uncle said, his eyes locking on me. Did any part of his consciousness recognize me?

“I’m studying, well—I sort of study history,” I said. “What I mean to say is that I got into the whole racket in part because of you.”

The other Chakraborty