Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  I’d never had an urge to muse on my roots in the way Prachi and the girls in the Miss Teen India pageant liked to obsess over their heritage, like, What does it mean to be both Indian and American? That kind of thing seemed simpering, and I suppose if I were to ruminate honestly on it years later, such questions only magnified certain inconvenient truths: that despite our bubble of brownness in Hammond Creek, we were, in fact, the minority. That the white kids were still, on average, considered more attractive, more popular. More essentially at home in themselves. That sometimes America baffled us teenagers as much as it did our parents. That every emphasis on achieving a certain future came from the anxiety of simply not knowing, none of us knowing, what life here could be. There was no room to imagine multiple sorts of futures. We’d put all our brainpower toward conjuring up a single one: Harvard.

  But. If I had roots in American soil, if we had not all so recently crossed oceans, if our collective past was more textured than I’d been led to believe, then, well, maybe there were other ways of being brown on offer.

  Of all these historical yarns, I most remember the one about the Bombayan gold digger.

  It was the middle of the afternoon in late June, and I was growing drowsy. A Jenga tower of books was piled on the old man’s table that day, and he rapped the top of it as though to announce something. The tower collapsed, sending books skittering.

  “Neil,” he whispered, unfazed by the thudding of books landing on his table. I yanked my headphones out. “I have found something incredible. Would you like to hear it?”

  I said I very much wanted to hear. He shuffled through the fallen books to find the original, but then swatted the air, giving up. He leaned back in his wooden chair, stretching his legs in front of him. Through the window, the bloom of brown and green, hickory and pines, darkened. A midday Georgia storm began. As Ramesh Uncle talked, the thunder rolled on.

  The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger

  The man in question goes unnamed, known only as the Bombayan or, otherwise, the Hindu. The Bombayan has been in California for some-odd amount of time in the summer of 1850 and has picked his way to the goldfields, where he, along with Americans, Australians, Chileans, and Chinese, has been trying his hand at panning. This Hindu may be one of the only—if not the only—men of his race in the region. Solo, he must survive by wits and ambition.

  Having had some luck in the goldfields, the Bombayan has on his person about nineteen hundred dollars’ worth of gold in the form of dust and nuggets. One night, he makes camp beneath an oak tree in the valley of Douglas Flat, a region where more fantastic tales of riches mount every day, where ravenous men come seeking that sight—the yellow-gold flash in the shallow pan as the silt falls away. Come one early, blue-black morning, he awakens in his canvas tent after a night of raucousness to find that his gold has gone missing. Frantic, he uses his limited English to flag down a passing caravan of whites, some of whom claim connection to local government, though “government” of any kind in 1850s California is scarce. It’s an unformed place, Calaveras County, full of unformed men.

  “I have lost everything! Everything!” he weeps to the whites, who at first wonder at his origins—his skin is nearly as dark as the Natives’, but his dress is thoroughly European. Establishing that he hails from the port city of Bombay, that jewel of the British Empire, they at first pity him—“So far from home . . .”

  But then discussion commences. The whites form a briefly united nationhood: Germans, French, Scottish, Irish. Between them they purport to comprehend the colonized world. On horseback, gazing down at this peculiar Hindu, they review what they know—the Indians burn their widows over there, don’t they? And is there not some decree prohibiting Asiatics from touching gold at all? Was there not a scuffle in the Deer Creek mines of late, against those impudent Chinese? They must not be fleeced by such a wretch, who himself may have gotten this gold by unsavory means. They decide to distrust the foreigner. But they do not tell the Bombayan this. They invite him to come along while they attempt to find the thief who stole his gold. They will collect the goods themselves and deliver the Hindu to justice for violating this ban: no brown or yellow fingers to touch sunny gold.

  He traipses alongside the party as they ride, but then, suddenly, something gives him a fright. Perhaps he looks at them and suddenly, blisteringly, grasps their suspicion and disdain. Perhaps he possesses some last stores of gold on his person and fears these strangers might take it from him. Perhaps he is just made existentially aware of his aloneness in this land—a Hindu: not a white, not a Negro, not of the Natives or of China, but a man out of place and out of time. A man who becomes incomprehensible to history because he is an aberration.

  He begins to run for his life. This sprint the whites take as proof of guilt—“He was trying to trick us! It is he who’s stolen gold.”

  They catch him. A trial follows, and people arrive to testify against the Hindu. He’d been seen drinking brandy, growing rowdy, in someone’s tent the other day; count him a black rogue, to be sure. In the end, the judge decides to spare the man his life but to have him whipped and banished. “How’s a person supposed to get back to Bombay from here?” the whites wonder. But that isn’t their concern. They beat him efficiently and search him for gold. As he is hunched over on the earth, his face and gestures obscured from view by splatters of blood and kicked-up dust, he begins to wail something in a horrid foreign tongue. Having found no metal on him, they decide they will let him loose and warn him with a few shots in the direction of his uncomprehending rump.

  They untie him from the pole where he has been kept for the duration of the trial. He flees into the wilderness, and they shoot after him, one, two, three. He disappears into the woods. He should get himself home as soon as possible, the whites agree to one another. Otherwise, he’ll earn himself a bullet or a noose, soon enough.

  • • •

  “Found that one in a German travelogue . . . but I can’t for the life of me remember which . . . it was green, I think,” Ramesh Uncle said, scratching his head, watching the mess of books with bemusement. “But. It sticks with you. I had thought the first Indians showed up much later—but think: the gold rush! Such an American phenomenon and one of our own kind running about in the middle of it. Makes you a bit proud, doesn’t it?”

  I saw him, the Bombayan, a small-built man, sinewy from years of labor, snapping his suspenders against his billowy once-white shirt, pushing open two big clanging saloon doors. Something primal that I never knew was in me suddenly came alive. Recognition, is that what it was? Kinship? I had never much cared about ancestry the way my parents spoke of it when we went back to India. There, ancestry meant unpronounceable names and impenetrable orthodoxies. But this gold digger felt viscerally like my forebear. What if this was my land, after all?

  “I wonder if he survived.”

  Ramesh Uncle shrugged. “I shall to try to find out. Sometimes it takes luck and magic to track down someone history has ignored or gotten wrong. This German fellow didn’t know a lick about the poor man. We would never call him a Bombayan, for instance. To us, he’d be a Bombaykar.” Ramesh Uncle tapped one knobby forefinger on his right eyebrow. Then he turned to the window. “Do you know? There was a gold rush here in Georgia before California.”

  I remembered a class field trip to the Dahlonega gold mines in middle school. It was one of those strange Southern vacation towns that insisted on peacocking its heritage at you. Kitsch and crowds and turkey legs and gold (chocolate) bars, the past shrugged on as costume—not what Ramesh Uncle meant when he said eternalism, not the real resurrection of history, but the echo of it. I recalled getting in trouble for pocketing a glittery fool’s gold rock that the tour guide passed around; the memory of my childhood gullibility and greed still stung.

  “They ran out, out here,” he continued. “Then they heard about more in the West, and off they went. Kicked out all the Indians�
��the other type—along the way. Same old arrogance, no matter where you look in history.” I had the distinct impression that he was, in fact, looking in, or at, history, as he peered out into the pines and the sunny ravine. Like the past was within sight for him.

  By the Fourth of July, Wendi separated us. She said, “Sir, I need Neil here to do his work, and you’re distracting him,” and set me up on my own. Ramesh Uncle winked on his way to and from the bathroom, but Wendi stood and coughed if he lingered too long.

  Then, in mid-July, he vanished. I did wonder where he had gone. The truth is, though, that I was young, and preoccupied with myself. I began to google pictures of Jessica Biel and Lucy Liu in the study carrels, both of whom served as a fine replacement for history at the time.

  * * *

  • • •

  At night, I continued to keep an eye on the Dayal house. Anita and Anjali Auntie frequently got home late, often clutching things as they debarked, perhaps leftovers from catering events. I kept watching, unsure of what I might see, but hoping for an explanation to account for Anita’s metamorphosis.

  Anita’s world had changed before. Pranesh Uncle had started “traveling for work” to California when we were in fifth or sixth grade. A few years after that, he founded a company out there, and was gone more often. Anita and Anjali Auntie spent most of the summer before ninth grade in the Bay Area. When Anita got home, we met up at the pool. Everything about her was different. She kept her arms folded awkwardly around her stomach, like she was trying to hold her intestines in. The gesture emphasized her new breasts. I would have gladly observed them all afternoon if Anita hadn’t also been teary-eyed and tenuous the whole day, finally admitting as we lay on our towels during an adult swim that she might have to move. “I don’t like him,” she’d said fiercely.

  “Your dad?” I was bewildered. “Can you say that?” It was the wrong response. But how could I have known that Anita had never seen, up close, two adults making a happy life? That her ignorance of the domestic stability I took for granted in my own home was a blank spot in her otherwise assured worldview?

  Anyway, that was all I grasped about change: that it occurred above me, around me; that by the time I noticed it, it was too late; that I would always be catching up to it.

  Case in point: after more than a month of being grounded, I remained unsure why my parents had reacted so restrictively to the insolence I’d displayed at the Bhatts’. I got my answer when an invitation arrived for Shruti Patel’s birthday pool party at the YMCA. She was turning fifteen, and her parents had called around inviting everyone on her behalf. A sad existence, having grown-ups handle your social calendar. But I’d been isolated for weeks and I thought I’d go.

  My mother shook her head. “I don’t trust what goes on at these parties.”

  “At Shruti Patel’s birthday?” I contorted my features into a Shruti-esque expression to remind my mother who we were talking about here. I pulled my hair up and out from both temples and bared my teeth like a gopher.

  “Anyone can get into all kinds of nonsense these days.”

  My mother wanted Prachi and me to endure apart from the corrupting influences of American society—drinking, drugs. And dating: “Americans learn how to break up with each other very easily, all of them with endless baggage, exes upon exes. . . .” I first received the dating diatribe on the eve of Gabby Kaufman’s bat mitzvah in seventh grade. “Mrs. Kaufman, I have called her on the phone,” my mother had said, wagging a finger. “There will be no close-close dancing.” I spent that night being taught how to grind by Gabby’s spunky cousin from New Jersey, who informed me that she had kissed two Indian boys already and liked the chocolate look of us. In order to keep in contact with the thrilling Jersey Kaufman, I created an ill-fated screen name that followed me into high school: neil_is_indian. It would be years before another girl displayed interest because of my race, rather than despite it.

  Some of these topics came up with my father one afternoon that summer, after he had finished pushing the lawn mower across our front yard. He surveyed his work with a sense of defeat. The grass looked like his back, little tussocks of fur sprouting here and there, unevenly.

  “Mom’s being insane,” I complained, standing barefoot in the driveway, feeling the heat scald my foot soles. “She’s, like, pre-grounding me for stuff I haven’t even done yet.”

  He lifted his Braves baseball cap, one of those articles of clothing that my immigrant parents had amassed unthinkingly through the years, part of the assimilationist wardrobe; my father could not have recited any of the players’ batting averages, or performed the fans’ highly questionable “tomahawk chop.” The southern sun knocked against his bald spot, reflecting merrily. He wiped the ring of his sparse hair with a hankie, deliberately, then shook the cloth out in front of him, as though looking for a premonitory guiding pattern in the sweat.

  “You know what they say on the trains in India when it gets very crowded?”

  I sighed to make clear my disinterest in whatever parable that was to follow. “What?”

  “Ad-just.” He pronounced each syllable separately. “Ad-just. No matter how many people are there, someone wants to sit; they’ll say, ‘Ad-just, sir, please ad-just.’”

  “Uh, okay?”

  “We are all still ad-justing to this place, see?”

  “I’m not. I’m American.”

  “Your mother—she’s protective.”

  “I don’t get into trouble, though.”

  “What do you mean, trouble?” my father said.

  “You know. Drinking, whatever.”

  He inhabited a grave silence for a moment. Then he said, “That is hardly the only kind of trouble.”

  That was a loquacious exchange between my father and me.

  * * *

  • • •

  Nothing would excuse me from attending the Miss Teen India pageant in July, which was held in the convention room of a Ramada Inn in Duluth. I’d not been forced into a kurta this time, but I shriveled inside to think of stepping into a lobby full of white people as a member of the Indian pageant caravan. It turned out the hotel was owned by desis, and the only non-Indian in sight was the paunch-bellied Black security guard who kept asking, “Are y’all having some kind of festival or, like, traditional thing here?”

  The ways in which the pageant was traditional were more American than Indian. The owner of the MTI Georgia was a Gujarati businessman with beady, roving, salacious eyes, proprietor of a chain of liquor stores across Alpharetta and Gwinnett, who introduced the twenty-some pageant competitors as they filed from the crimson-carpeted hallway into the yellow-wallpapered room: “Give it up for our contestants, beautiful inside and out, isn’t it,” he said, his vowels those mutt noises, folding in on themselves in an effort to keep the speaker from rolling the ensuing r’s or clacking the t’s too hard.

  There were perhaps fifty chairs laid out for the audience, surrounding a long judges’ table. About half were filled. A toddler in a gold-and-maroon lehenga waddled laps around the seats. Some auntie leaned over me, her sequined dupatta falling on my face, to say hello to my father. My mother stood in the hallway with the other mothers, armed with bobby pins and safety pins and concealer. I hadn’t spotted Anita or Anjali Auntie when we came in.

  The pageant opened with a column of brown girls balancing on spiky heels as they runway-walked a makeshift stage about two feet off the floor. Last in line: Anita, wearing a lemon-lime, yellow-and-green number splattered with mirrors and tie-dye. Her whole belly was visible—it was a little soft, like an inviting pillow. I caught her eye for an instant and noted nerves there, in the wideness of her gaze, the way all her concentration seemed to be devoted to stilling her facial muscles. I mouthed hi, and then regretted it. Applause sounded and the contestants retreated. The MTI owner was muttering to someone next to him, but the mic had not been removed from his lapel, so we all
heard him hissing, Tell that very fat one to cover up little more. It echoed, and a shushing auntie came to unclip him while we awaited the next episode.

  A scrawny man manifested beside my father and pressed a pile of glossy magazines into his hand. My father, ignoring, passed them to me. They were those diaspora rags, the kind piled up in the front of Indian restaurants and salons, which stay afloat through advertisements that purvey immigrant necessities and nostalgia: an article featuring a profile on the Scripps National Spelling Bee champion (can you spell juggernaut? indian americans dominate bee!) running next to an advertisement for kajol best ladies’ fineries and mega desi wedding expo, all shaadi needs: orlando, dallas, san jose.

  I flipped through and saw one of Anita’s mother’s catering ads—anjali dayal: all types desi khana! and a black-and-white picture of her that stretched her out dishonestly, making her look pleasantly plump, turning her into another safe auntie. An insert labeled ace college application season fell out, featuring an interview with the Chinese mother who had authored the bestseller Harvard Girl. In the back, a column ran from a “Hindu activist” under the headline we must be more like the jews.

  My father prodded the college insert. “Keep that aside.” I did. Later I would find it contained a workbook to help you build your college essay “Mad Libs–style.” My name is . . . My dream is . . . When not studying I . . . My most important experience between ages 10 and 18 was . . .