There were the question-and-answer sessions, during which the ladies skirmished to offer the inanest possible response to that platitudinous question and its many manifestations: What does it mean to be both Indian and American? To wit: How should this generation ad-just to the New Country? Prachi faltered trying to explain why we didn’t speak an Indian language at our house; we had Kannada and Tamil and Malayalee roots, and a mother who’d grown up among Hindi speakers, so settling on any regional identity had never been an option—“My mother, see? Speaks about six languages? And my father two? But when they moved here, they wanted us to only learn English?”
Better was Uma Parthasarthy’s response to a question posed by judge Manisha Fruitwalla: “Miss Uma, which place would you most like to visit, and why?”
“Um, for me, to Tirupati, because God has, um, been very calling on me, recently . . .”
There were the talents: too often Bollywood-infused hip-hop or Kathak-infused tap. Prerna Mallick, fifteen, of Clay County was the highlight of that year’s program, as she twirled a folded umbrella about like a cane to some old filmy monsoon song, which subsided into “Singin’ in the Rain.” As the English interrupted the Hindi, Prerna snapped open the umbrella to face us: Ah! The instrument! It was patterned in the colors of the Indian flag. She rotated it in front of her, legs lifting into many chubby Rockette kicks. Then she began to do Kathak chakkars, twirling and twirling to a beat not audible within “Singin’ in the Rain.” Finally, Prerna set down her umbrella, stumbled, covered her mouth, and ran out of the room, having dizzied herself into nausea.
A few people followed her anxiously into the hallway. The judges went on making notes. The audience kept elbowing each other, eyeing the glossies, undertaking college-application Mad Libs. And my father began to emit deep, ursine snores.
The most important part of the pageant, apart from the (known but unstated) primary point of judgment, the quality of its contestants’ features and curves, was the Charity Presentation. That was where Prachi lost. Her charity project for the past six months: a clothing drive that gathered discarded T-shirts and sent them to villagers in Karnataka. But the room shifted when Anita took the mic, her Sprite-can-colored outfit jangling with mirror work, and began to talk about her fund for battered South Asian women in Queens.
I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase South Asian before. I definitely hadn’t heard of battered women, nor did I know of Queens. I had the sense Anita was not relying on her own knowledge of the world. How could she have suddenly come into such an adult, global perspective?
“I had this desire,” she said, “to do something here, in America, because people have this idea that when you get to America everything is all of a sudden okay.”
She launched into a barrage of statistics, speaking in a practiced staccato reminiscent of Wendi Zhao’s debate voice. I craned my neck to see where she was looking. In the very back of the room stood Anjali Auntie, wearing a tatty gray T-shirt that read iit bombay. Her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. All of her attention seemed to have gone into Anita’s looks rather than her own that day. Her hands were pressed over her heart in a gesture that might have looked loving if not for the furrowed brow, the clenched jaw, the neck tendons bulging. I suddenly felt bad for Anita. The intensity of Anjali Auntie’s focus on her daughter just then seemed obliterating, like a too-bright spotlight. Anjali Auntie’s lips trembled as though she was reciting some enchantment to cast victory over her daughter.
It worked—something worked. Anita sounded unlike the other competitors. No one else had arranged a charity in the US. It was all send this or that to the third world. It was as though Anita had suddenly convinced the judges that there was such a place as Indian America, that she’d drawn up its borders and rerouted the foreign aid to the new domestic front; they had no choice but to honor her patriotism.
When the businessman placed the dinky crown on Anita’s head and informed her that she’d be going to the regional pageant that November in Charlotte, she lifted her hands in a namaskar and said thank you to the community and to her mother, who helped her see all the ways in which the Indian immigrant experience is complicated.
As she gave her valedictory, people were dispersing, mothers bitterly helping daughters from the stage, daughters pulling off heels and looking relieved to be barefoot. A photographer knelt, snapping shots from a lewd angle. A hotel employee stood in the doorway, eyeing her watch. But Anita was untroubled by her lack of audience. She turned, her bargain-basement tiara winking, and looked at Prachi, who had begun to unpin her dupatta.
“Thank you also,” she said, “to the fellow contestants, who have been such an inspiration, and whose best qualities I will try to incorporate into myself.”
On the ride home, my mother went in on Anjali Auntie’s activities backstage. The moms had been in close quarters all afternoon, pinning and making up, and now my mother reported that Anjali Dayal had been “behaving like one cow, only.”
Prachi sat glumly, her made-up face pressed against the station wagon window. She drew back. Whatever cakey stuff she was wearing left behind a ghostly print. Through Prachi’s window I made out a looming church sign—stop, drop, & roll does not work in HELL—and past it, silhouettes of two buildings on the meager Atlanta skyline. But they were smeared by that makeup stain, so I felt I was seeing the city as through a shaken snow globe.
“Not only that,” my mother was saying. “When Prerna Mallick got sick, no one could find water for her, na? Someone’s asking those hotel employees, water please, water, and no one’s coming, and poor Prerna Mallick’s mother is asking Anjali, ‘Can you just give her some of your daughter’s water?’ and she reaches for this bottle, and Anjali grabs it and says, ‘Germs, she did just get sick,’ and everyone back there, we’re all thinking, ‘Just let her pour it in her mouth, no lips-touching, like a proper Indian.’ Shameless woman.”
The car went quiet. I was developing a migraine, and leaned forward, pressing my forehead into the back of the driver’s seat.
“What is it, Neil?” my father inquired, feeling me headbutting him. “Why so sullen?”
“I’m so tired,” I croaked. “I’m just so tired.”
My mother whipped her head around. I feared a shouting match would begin, that she might demand to know what right I had to be tired, that she would recite all she and my father had been doing when they were my age. Instead she reached her hand back and cupped my kneecap, and then did the same to Prachi. “You are both working very hard,” she said.
She switched on the CD player. A bhajan filled the car, “Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram.” My parents hummed along to the prayer song, both off-key. Where it all went, what gods might have been listening in that land of church signboards, I couldn’t have said.
Next to me, Prachi stared out the window toward the Spaghetti Junction, where the veins of Atlanta converged into a Gordian knot of concrete and cars. The shape of Prachi’s forehead remained on the window, the self she had worked so hard to become left behind on the glass.
* * *
• • •
I did not make it to Shruti Patel’s pool party. The night of the event, as I lingered on the doorstep waiting for Kartik’s mom to pick me up, my father stepped outside, waving the cordless phone, a rare fury on his face. He had just gotten off the phone with Mr. Lee, my Kumon instructor, who informed him that I’d failed to turn in any work at all for the past two weeks. What I had completed, Mr. Lee went on, was abysmal. I’d wasted hundreds of dollars of hard-earned immigrant income.
And so, I found myself spending my evening futzing with trigonometry at the dinner table. My father sat next to me, trying to teach me mental math tricks. I absorbed nothing. After two or more hours, I finally begged for a break. He softened.
I took a Popsicle from the freezer and tried to walk off the night as I made a loop around the cul-de-sac. I wished everyone would give up on me.
Their gazes were too forceful, their hopes for me too enormous. For it felt, back in Hammond Creek, that it wasn’t our job just to grow up, but to grow up in such a way that made sense of our parents’ choice to leave behind all they knew, to cross the oceans. I couldn’t bear to be the only one among them—Prachi, Manu, Anita—who failed to achieve anything, who ultimately became nobody at all.
I sat fiddling with the gluey part of the Popsicle stick, on the curb a few feet from the Walthams’ red bush/cheney: four more years sign—which had remained staunchly on their lawn for two of the four years. Just then, Anita’s mother’s Toyota rose over the crest leading to our cul-de-sac. Anita stepped out of the car. She didn’t see me at first; I was sitting beneath the out-of-commission lamppost, in the dark. She wore a crimson tankini. A blue towel was slung around her hips. Her birdlike, still-childish shoulder blades pinched together as she stretched her arms wide. They looked like a hinge beneath her skin, opening something behind her sternum. In there, somewhere, was the Anita I’d grown up with.
What had we played? House. It wasn’t, with Anita, a game of cooking or cleaning, but a game of arranging the components of a neat life. She’d grill me: Name? I’d pick Ben or Jake or Will. One day I said, Neil, and she said, That sounds like Neeraj, so she made me Neil. Age? she’d ask. Occupation? Having nailed down the particulars, she’d then grow wistful. Look outside, she’d say. Tell me what you see. What I saw: the loops and twines of our neighborhood and neighborhoods like ours—trees and asphalt and medians and sedans. Hot southern sky. Hot Georgia asphalt. Suburbs, endless suburbs. I’d remain frozen, afraid of making a mistake. As a child, I feared mistakes. In the face of my paralysis, Anita would lay a small hand on my shoulder and shake me. Neil, you’re supposed to make it up! You’re supposed to imagine!
Other times, she would decide we needed to be productive. Once, she had us publish and circulate a newsletter for the neighborhood, reporting on the Walthams’ church and her father’s business. When we sadly counted out the money from that endeavor—a measly few dollars—Anjali Auntie, hovering over a pot of dal on the stovetop and looking on, bemused, weighed in. “Don’t kids here make lemonade stands?” Like she was playing, too. All three of us straining, against the heat, to figure out what American kids did. Then she boomed, her voice like a used car salesman on television: “It’s a great day for a lemonade!”
That afternoon, we made lemonade. Anjali Auntie switched between stirring the dal and helping us. Our hands were too weak to eke all the juice out of the lemons, so together we pressed each fruit against the ceramic and watched the acid consume the sugar.
All this I remembered, and mourned, at the sight of those girl shoulders. Whatever was entering Anita through that open hinge was obliterating the child I had known.
She turned, squinted, spied me.
“Oh, hi, Neil!” she called, in a voice that was, miraculously, the inheritor of the voice that had once said, You’re supposed to imagine! All the life that had gone into imagining the landscape outside our shared house now went to . . . what? The Harvard pennant above her bed? “Were you waiting for me?”
I stood, still in the shadows, and kicked the Walthams’ bush/cheney sign behind me.
“No,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “I just needed some air.”
“All well, Neil? They missed you at Shruti’s,” her mother said, hoisting a bag out of the car. I made a sort of muted noise of assent, confirming I was alive, if not well. Anjali Auntie squinted at me doubtfully.
“Ani,” she said, before making for the door. “You’re going to work on that dance piece tonight? Before you sleep?”
“I said I would,” she said tersely. Her mother went inside, leaving me alone with Anita. “It’s for regionals,” she said, though I hadn’t asked. “The talent part. It’s stupid.”
“Congrats, I guess,” I said, lifting my hands over my head in the shape of a lumpy tiara.
“How’s Prachi?” she said. “I really thought she did great.”
I felt my voice deepening artificially as I snapped: “They’re saying she was robbed.”
Anita looked startled for a moment. Then she smiled. “Shruti really missed you today,” she said. “She’s just too excited to see you in the fall. She’s getting her braces off.” She smacked her lips.
“Have you ever even been to Queens?” I’d googled it after the pageant and learned it was in New York. “Or did you just make up all that charity stuff?”
Her face set back into the practiced public calm she’d displayed at the pageant, and it now occurred to me that perhaps her outer self had smothered her inner life. This thought frightened me only for a moment, before it morphed into envy.
“Some of us have goals. Some of us work hard,” she said, turning away.
Anita was almost at her doorstep, in the unlit part of the driveway; the shadows consumed her, and I did not know how far away from me she’d gone, which made everything more urgent. I felt I had just moments to call out to her, to beg one final time that she bring me along wherever she was going: “Anita,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Wait—please—can you talk a minute?”
I thought I made out the beginning of a reply, but it was only the croak of a cicada, and then the shudder of a firefly, and then the Dayals’ front door thumped shut.
* * *
• • •
I sweated through a strange dream: Ramesh Uncle and I were aboard a ship making for America. I never saw my own face, or his—we were ghostly bodies with splotches of light for heads. We kept pacing the ship deck as the ocean sprayed our faces, and I kept saying, How will we know when we get there? and he said, There’s a big statue, and when we berthed at the California coastline, an enormous oxidized bronze Anita loomed, one hand high in the air, holding not a torch but, instead, a very large tiara.
I woke around two. I could not imagine lying still through the night. I tiptoed downstairs and stepped outside, barefoot, making my way to the Dayals’ front lawn. I stood a moment and considered the facade of that strange house, the mustard yellow and the lively red door, and I thought it was time for me to break something.
I lifted the watering can behind the azalea bush. The key was missing. So I edged around back and found, next to the cement path, a stone. I gripped it in both hands as I approached the basement, where Anita and her mother had been the night I left my knife in the kitchen. I had the sense that some boundary between my dream and my waking life had not yet fully shut.
The bottom square of glass on the basement door window shattered quickly, and I didn’t think about the shards protruding when I pushed my arm through and undid the lock, making use of the digital dexterity I had been developing in hopes of one day removing a girl’s bra. I dropped the rock on the earth outside. No alarm. The only sound was the house itself: the ambient noise of the air-conditioning, the hum of a refrigerator.
Last I’d been in this basement, it was unfinished, with boxes piled up by the water heater. Now, though. The first thing I thought was mad scientist. Three long tables, the kind Anita’s mother might have used while catering, were covered with white plastic tablecloths. A mess of tools was laid out. A large stone basin. A blowtorch. Tongs. A juicer. (I thought of the buzzing I had heard the last time I was here.) A huge plastic jar of sugar. I looked down to see a trickle of blood dripping from my elbow to my wrist. I pressed my shirt to it.
I moved toward the fridge, which was also new. Sometime recently, the Dayals had added a small kitchen—a fridge, a kitchen island on wheels, a wire rack. When I opened it, still tending the wounded arm, I saw the thing altering Anita, like a vast shaft of light, striking her chest, growing her up.
On the top shelf were three round, yellow lemons.
On the second, several small vials of liquid, and on the lowest, a large pitcher filled with the same substance. Each vial was partially covered with a piece of masking tape
, on which something had been written. The plump belly of the pitcher was also covered with tape. I made out two letters—S.P.—and some numbers: 81106. I said them aloud. They were the previous day’s date: August 11, 2006.
I lifted the pitcher to examine it outside the fluorescent interior. A bit of my blood streaked the handle. Through the glass, the liquid glowed yellow gold. That hue beamed through the masking tape. S.P., I read again. S.P. I returned the pitcher to the fridge, lifted the vials. One, nearly drained, read P.N., followed by more numbers—the date (because now I had in my head that these were dates), I realized, of the Spring Fling dance. I picked up a few more until I found the one I’d been expecting to see: J.B., with the date of the Bhatts’ graduation party.
Something taken, from each of those people—from S.P., Shruti Patel. From P.N., Prachi Narayan. From J.B., Jay Bhatt. Was this what had made Anita different that summer? And that gemlike glint. Prachi’s necklace, on the parking lot asphalt. The jewelry cabinet, open in Mrs. Bhatt’s closet.
I leaned over the pitcher, S.P. It smelled like—it was—lemonade. Fresh. Saccharine and sour at once. Not quite the same concoction we’d made all those years ago; it was now laced with something new. Something that had belonged to Shruti Patel.
I drank.
It was tangy, but sweetness followed, and followed. Bubbles were settling in my stomach. I never wanted it to end. As the liquid streamed down my throat, I felt a great sense of purpose.
And then—“Stop, stop, Neil, fucking stop,” came a pinched, panicked voice. Whose? Which one of them? As a throbbing began behind my eyes, Anita’s face materialized before me. Her hair was haloed by the eerie low basement light. A cold nausea set in, and then a fuzzing of my vision. But I was still drinking.
“Neil, you have to stop, please,” I heard Anita say. Her hands closed around the pitcher; she was trying to tug it away from me, with surprising strength. “You’ve had too much.”
Gold Diggers Page 6