Gold Diggers
Page 7
3.
Anita held the pitcher above me. I heard her step away and place it on the counter. I knelt, bearing my knees to the floor, as though it alone confirmed my existence. Sharp, icy knuckles pressed against my forehead.
“Neil.”
I was losing all sense of time; I could not tell if I’d been there a minute or an hour.
“Am I dying?”
“No.” She waggled her fingers in front of me; her nails were painted a bright cherry red. She wore black Soffe shorts and an oversize Harvard shirt. “How many am I holding up?”
I blinked. “Ten.”
“You’re not dying,” she said. “But the answer was four.”
“Should I barf?” I folded my arms into my stomach and leaned forward. I wanted to rest my cheek on the cement—it looked so refreshing.
“It won’t come out. If you don’t listen, you’ll feel worse.” I looked up, and there was my oldest friend, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. She waited for my eyes to settle on hers.
“How’d you know I was down here?”
“I was in the living room. Working. I don’t sleep well.”
“It’s summer.”
“My new school sent over summer homework, so I can ‘catch up.’ They don’t think much of OHS.”
I nodded, unable to respond verbally. The cement floor smelled damp; even basements sweated in the Georgia summer. I spoke to the floor: “Is this what’s made you . . . so weird?”
Anita snorted, an unseemly sound she would never have made in front of someone like Melanie. She knelt. Her hand hovered above my head as though she were going to stroke my hair.
“I had too much once,” she said. She didn’t touch me. “I know how it feels, all acidy, your heart is racing, you’ll be sick and jittery for weeks if you don’t—”
“Weeks?”
“Get up.”
Still dizzy, seeking support, I stood, stepped over the shards of broken glass by the door, and settled myself on the staircase landing. I lifted my forearm to show Anita the blood.
“That’s not too deep,” she said. “I’ll get some Neosporin in a second. But listen to me. Just—just do what I say. Otherwise it’ll be a total waste.”
My head was drooping between my legs as I heaved like a spent athlete at the end of a trying sprint. Anita’s hand rested on the nape of my neck. At any other point in my adolescence, that touch would have been miraculous.
“I think I can do this,” she said. That furtive glance back toward the ceiling, like she was taking permission from her mother’s sleeping form. “Okay. You should, um, close your eyes.” I did, and watched strange neon fractals form behind my lids. “So, uh—focus on something you want.” The first thing I thought of was her hand on my neck, how it was a continuation of her hand shaking my shoulder all those weekends of our childhood: You’re supposed to make it up! You’re supposed to imagine! She amended: “Something you want to achieve.”
A series of those fractals passed before me, and then something settled. I was in the car with my father, holding a golden trophy, which kept me rooted to the car seat, to the earth. My father, next to me, radiated not his usual stoicism, but rather something I can only describe as supreme understanding. I was known. The world stilled, turned briefly safe.
“You’ve got it,” Anita said. I wondered how she knew. “Your breathing’s steadier.”
She was right. My pulse had slowed. But beneath my stabilized heart rate was an elevated energy that made me want to open my eyes and welcome back the world. The room came into view. Everything quivered at its edges before erupting into brighter, more saturated color.
“You’re okay.” Anita sounded both surprised and relieved, and then stepped onto the stairs, walking softly on the balls of her feet. “I’ll get you the Neosporin and—”
“Anita!” I spoke louder than I meant to. “Tell me what I fucking drank!”
She glanced at the ceiling as toward some higher power, or maybe just toward her mother’s room again, and there was distress on her face. “Technically, lemonade—but a special lemonade. Ah. Well. Gold, Neil. You drank a shit-ton of gold. Half our best stock, which is honestly pretty infuriating.”
Before I could reply, Anita raised a shaky finger to her lips and hissed shhh. It was too late. The basement door was swinging open, and Anjali Auntie was standing in the hallway, darkened by the bright lights she’d flipped on around her. Anita stepped not up toward her mother, but down, closer to me.
“Ani? Anita Joshi Dayal, what are you doing down there?” Anjali Auntie always said Anita’s name the Indian way, with a soft t—Anitha—but I heard that th with special resonance that night. Our parents could do this in anger, jerk us back from drawly Anita to terse Anitha, from mild Neil to positively spicy Neeraj. And Anjali Auntie reminded me of my own parents in another way just then: her voice resembled their shouts the night of the dance; running through their fury at my sister had been a vein of fear.
“If you’ve been meddling with my supply,” she went on, “I’ll—”
Anjali Auntie stepped onto the top stair and into the light, which was when she saw me. She was wearing powder blue pajama shorts patterned with dancing penguins. Her mouth was slightly agape, and her face looked puffy.
“My god, you two,” she sighed. “What have you done?”
* * *
• • •
Before she was Anjali Dayal, my neighbor, she was Anjali Joshi, just a middle-class Bombay girl.
Bombay, a city where Gujaratis and Maharashtrians and Tamilians and Parsis become Bombaykars, allegiances shifted to contemporary urban existence rather than to the regions that created them. The Joshis considered themselves modern, but in one respect they rang a bit of the bygone days: the parents—an excise tax officer and a housewife—privileged their sons’ education over their daughter’s.
Anjali grew up flitting about with friends in the housing society, playing with her two older brothers when they were free, reading English novels. She did fine in school, though not spectacularly, and no one told her to put in more work. There was an understanding: her brothers were to one day become somebodies; she was to one day become married. When Anjali was in fifth standard, she watched her eldest brother, Dhruv, sweating through entrance exams, mortgaging his adolescence for a chance to study at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. He made it to IIT’s Delhi campus, setting the bar high for the younger brother, Vivek, who did not display the same innate brilliance or work ethic as Dhruv. As Anjali crested into her teenage years, in the mid-1980s, Dhruv was accepted to graduate school in a place called North Carolina. Vivek came under even more pressure to follow in his brother’s footsteps.
The parents enrolled Vivek in the renowned Goswami Classes, the cram school meant to prepare him for the IIT exams. Dhruv had done without these courses, but Vivek needed help.
Anjali Joshi perceived something mysterious about the Goswami Classes, because they pulled Vivek toward some inexplicable newness. She used to spend hours eyeing the blue neon sign advertising the courses, waiting for Vivek to get home, hoping he might spare a few minutes to flick around the puck on a carom board.
In the height of monsoon in 1984, Dhruv came home from America for a visit, wielding gifts like arms, breaking through the barricades of the closed Indian economy. For his father, Dhruv brought a ceramic mug reading nc state dad. For Vivek, a Butterfly aluminum-frame tennis racket and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape. For his mother, melamine plates and Tupperware; she systematically emptied their steel vessels in favor of the foreign imports. For Anjali: Jolen hair-lightening cream. “For your face,” Dhruv explained, pressing a pinky to his upper lip.
The women in the housing society came to ogle Dhruv. Though ungainly, he was not bad-looking, and they wanted to hear how his accent had evolved. (“You sound just like the people on the TV,” said Parag.) They were
ravenous for America. America: metonymy for more. A vast place full of all the things Dadar lacked. Nonstick cookware, Chevrolet Corvettes, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, small leather purses, Mary Kay cosmetics, Kraft cheese. And something all those trinkets added up to—another way of being in the world.
“A lucky girl, whoever marries him,” the neighbor aunties said. But Dhruv was in no hurry to be married. He left still a bachelor.
One afternoon, before Vivek arrived home, Anjali saw her mother return from Parag’s house, where the society mothers had been gathering, and set to work in the kitchen. What she saw baffled her. Had her mother melted gold? Boiled it? Anjali would learn the proper names for the processes later, in adulthood, reinventing some of them herself. But at the time, she gathered this much: her mother had somehow liquidated Parag’s gold coin and served it to her brother. When Lakshmi lay down for her afternoon nap, young Anjali crept into Vivek’s bedroom and found him there, sipping this strange drink.
Vivek, hunched over graphing paper, drawing numbers in pencil so small that he had to squint to make out his own markings. His skin blooming with dark shadows of sleeplessness. A devil’s bargain, this route to America.
“Can’t you tell me what it is?” she whispered, pointing at the tumbler.
Vivek folded his arms, glanced at the clock on the wall, and sighed. “I have to get back to this in three minutes,” he said, his voice full of the new lonesomeness that had frosted it in recent months. But he told his sister what their mother had told him the first time she gave him a glass of brewed gold to drink, some weeks earlier.
“Gold,” he said, “is a wise metal. It contains people’s dreams and plans.”
“How, bhau?”
He sighed. “Think, Anju. Think what all reasons people buy gold.” She thought. At the birth of a new baby—gifts of gold. As a backup in case the cash economy failed. It appeared in poojas, at weddings. “Everybody puts many hopes and plans on gold, see?”
“Why go drinking it?”
“If it’s brewed properly, it seems to give us . . . some sort of power.”
“To do what?”
“To, na, achieve those plans.”
“You’re . . . stealing somebody’s . . .” Anjali fumbled for the word. “Ambition?”
“Don’t be dramatic. Skimming off the top, really.”
Anjali stood to examine the tumbler, but she saw only the dregs of whatever her mother had been brewing earlier. She tilted it back into her mouth. It was bitter, and it stung.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Well, you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to go to IIT,” her brother replied.
“What if I wanted to do something else?”
Vivek rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock meaningfully. “Like what?”
Anjali squatted on the ground and fiddled with her plaits. She felt very small down there, curled in that semi-fetal position. She did not know what else there was to do, or to want.
* * *
• • •
I’d been led up to the den and deposited on the plaid sofa while Anita ran off for Neosporin and Band-Aids.
Her mother was pacing in front of the television and bookshelves. The only sound was her occasional deep sigh.
“I’m sorry about the window,” I said.
“The window,” she said, disbelieving. “He’s sorry about the window.”
Anjali Auntie paused in front of a row of framed black-and-white photographs above the television. I’d never noticed them before. She reached out to touch one. It showed a young girl in a starched salwar kameez, with fat braids running down her torso. She was chubbier than she would be when she grew up, but the striking cheekbones and compelling eyes were recognizable through the puppy fat. She scowled at the camera. Next to her was a gangly boy in pleated shorts and a collared shirt. He grinned widely, as though to compensate for young Anjali’s grouchy demeanor.
“This is a massive fucking secret, Neil,” Anita said, stepping into the room, bearing a black first-aid pouch and waving the tube of Neosporin. Her mother didn’t flinch at the swearing.
“What Ani means is that I would be in some trouble. If anyone were ever to find out.”
Anita sat next to me and began mopping my bloody forearm with gauze. Her gestures were dispassionate, as though I were a stranger. The gel was icy on my skin.
Anjali Auntie looked again at the photo that had made her pause. It would be some years before I knew how many memories passed over Anjali Dayal that night. She seemed to resolve something in her mind. “It’s all already been set in motion for you, hasn’t it, Neil?”
She was correct. I already belonged, irrevocably, to this particular history.
Anjali Auntie paused and went to the kitchen for water. Gold. It was everywhere in our world: around my sister’s neck, dripping from my mother’s earlobes, adorning the statues at the temple. Even I had a few gold possessions—pendants and rings gifted by relatives, all stored safely in a box in my mother’s dresser. I recalled a white babysitter who’d worked for us a few times when I was small, and how curious she’d been about parts of our lives I considered normal. She interrogated my mother: Where did she get her spices? And the steel plates with Prachi’s and my names etched into them? And the gold—especially the gold—she wore every day? “You can’t get good pieces like this here,” my mother told Kimberly proudly. “Maybe at Jhaveri Bazaar Jewelers in Decatur. But even then, nothing like India.” Gold—now it ran in my bloodstream.
“I want in,” I said.
“In?” Anjali Auntie carried two glasses from the kitchen and pressed one on me. “What do you think in means?”
“Anita takes regular doses,” I said after sipping.
Anjali Auntie turned to Anita. “You’ve told him all that?”
“I guessed,” I said, as Anita opened her mouth in outrage.
“Oh. Well.” Anjali Auntie rubbed her forehead. “Yes. I give this to Ani regularly. But this works for her because she converts the energy very quickly. She knows she has to.”
Anita’s jaw clenched. “You have to make use of this stuff,” she said, then, more gently, “It’s only worth it if there’s something you want to do with it.” In this response lay the thing that divided the two of us these days. Anita knew what she wanted. Every day, she worked toward it.
“What if I did something?” I said. “What if I used it?”
They were sitting on the same seat across from me, Anjali Auntie in the chair itself, Anita on the arm, posed like two actresses in an ad for a television drama. Anita’s head turned slightly to the right, and her eyes met her mother’s—they were united again. Neither replied. Perhaps it was just too incongruous—that Neil Narayan might want something other than a video game, or a girl, or a nap.
“Can I at least ask some questions?”
Anjali Auntie made a small hmm-ing noise.
“Have you only been stealing from Indians?”
“Who else has good gold?” she said. “White people make and buy shoddy stuff. Ten-, fourteen-karat—you’re a boy, you won’t understand this. But the kind your mother has, certainly the kind your grandma would wear—that’s all usually twenty-two-karat. Handmade, hallmark, created with intention, beautiful filigrees, intricate designs, see, by superb artisans. Some of these aunties will even buy it on particularly auspicious days, increasing its power even more.”
“So, it’s good gold because of how it’s made? Because of who owns it? Wears it?”
“All of that. It starts with the quality of the metal—that has to be top-notch,” Anjali Auntie said. “It has to be made by the best artisans, people who have an almost sacred relationship with the gold. And then, on top of all of that, if it’s owned by people who possess the kind of energy and ambition we need—”
Anita cut in. “And point is, who else i
s really, truly ambitious? This is immigrant shit.”
I nodded, slowly, absorbing. “You get it when you go on catering jobs?”
Anjali Auntie nodded. “Mostly.”
“Prachi,” I said. “This is how you beat her?”
Anita’s chin lifted defiantly. “It was only an assist—”
Anjali Auntie interrupted. “What Anita’s saying is that all of us replenish ourselves. We borrow, but someone healthy and motivated keeps regenerating. Prachi, I think, was not recharging. She may have stopped wanting to win. So, Anita acquired some of her desire. But if Prachi’s ambition had gone deep enough, she’d have stood a chance. See?”
I wasn’t sure I did. But I went on: “And Shruti? What do you want to beat her at?”
Anita gave one of her jerky headshakes, the sort that made her resemble a malfunctioning android. “She’s smart, super driven. It’s not all about winning a specific competition or test. There’s this larger race we’re all running, you know?”
I did. “Why not hit jewelry stores?”
“That might work,” Anita’s mother went on, raising her voice to talk over something snarky Anita seemed on the verge of articulating. “But I’m not cut out for such a big, er, criminal operation. My job has made it possible for me to do these small . . . acquisitions.
“And secondly, we want something specific, yes? We don’t just want generally auspicious or lucky gold, which we’d surely get from a store. We want something someone has invested with very specific ambitions. For the future. For their high-achieving children. We want something someone has owned already. You see?”
I felt the excess of that energy prickling along my skin again. I was trembling as I spoke. “I need something,” I said. I looked at Anita. If I told her about the summer—flunking Kumon, flailing through debate research, flitting around with historical tales—she’d chastise me. “I’m afraid I’m not going to make it,” I went on. “Through high school. Without some help. If you let me in, I promise, I won’t waste it.” My voice cracked.