“Shit,” I said. “I’m really sorry. . . . I’m out of the loop, I live in a bunker—I’m in the middle of my dissertation—”
“Your parents must be proud.” She said it pro forma.
A few runners passed us, looking haughtily over their shoulders; we were taking up too much space on the path. We stepped aside.
“It’s history,” I said. “They’d be happier if it was computer science, or finance, or something more lucrative. Right now, I’m a little . . . outside their fold. Say. Anita isn’t”—my voice cracked, but I barreled on—“she’s not getting married, is she?”
“Not unless she’s run off without telling me—wherever did you get that idea?”
It felt like a large chunk of air that had settled in my throat was dissipating. Anita Dayal was not—was not—getting married. A slight breeze lifted, kissing my arm hairs, and suddenly the world seemed wide and traversable, and life varied and branching, for I was not being left behind, for not everyone was folding into private couplehood. For there was time, still, time for old figures to reemerge from the past, and to recognize you.
“Erm, Prachi is,” I managed. “Getting married, I mean. And she saw Anita the other day, or, well, thought she did. At a bridal shop.”
“How funny,” Anjali Auntie said, though she didn’t look amused.
“You remember Manu Padmanaban?” I said. “I guess he’s seen Anita a few times. He said she’s in venture?”
“Ah, yes.” Anjali Auntie placed a finger on her forehead, smoothing her furrows, as I’d seen her do when I was younger. It used to remind me of my mother’s hands on Prachi, but this time it made me think of a priest daubing kumkum in blessing. “She left that job not long ago and has picked up some freelance” (she pronounced the word with a grimace, as though its very sonic quality was undignified) “event-planning work while she . . . plots her next moves. Running lots of holiday parties for these big firms, but occasionally odder jobs, too. They seem to take whatever clients come their way, trying to get off the ground. Don’t ask me how it’ll play on a résumé, but . . .” She chewed her lip, considering her words. “Your generation, you all seem to be having these epiphanies, huh; no one thinks they should have to work the way their parents did.”
I pressed: “So, Anita was in that shop . . . for work?”
“Probably. She’s doing, of all things, a bridal expo right now. One of those big desi affairs.” Seeing my confusion, she elaborated: “All the vendors—mehendi and caterers and tailors and photographers and everyone else you need for a wedding—come to hawk themselves. Tamasha. I’m sure Prachi will go to one. Anyway. That must’ve been why Ani was there.”
Two more runners, coming from the other direction, swished by. Anjali Auntie teetered. She lifted one arm as though she was going to fall over, and I stretched mine out so she could catch on to me. Her hand was almost trembling. If she weren’t still young, I might have called the quiver Parkinsonian. For there was something recasting her—not just grief or fading beauty. Nothing about her seemed well. How had time stolen up on us—on her? Did I only notice her age because it had been ten years? Or would anyone notice the spots speckling her fair skin, the gathering slackness around her elbows, the dulling of her once-bright eyes?
“I haven’t talked to her,” I said. “Not for a long time.”
“Yes,” Anjali Auntie said simply. “I know.”
She was still gripping my forearm. Her shakes beat an awkward tattoo on my skin.
“What are you up to these days?” I asked.
She squinted and withdrew her hand. “I was working on a project with this friend of mine, the one who passed,” she said. “Some work on old Hindu traditions.”
“Like, amateur scholarship?”
“Yes, sure. But, well. I’ll have to find something else to keep me occupied, won’t I? Some of us give our whole lives to other people, and without them, we have to start all over.”
“If you need any help, I mean, as academic writing goes . . .” I checked my watch. It was four, and the librarian I had to meet would be gone by five. “Speaking of which,” I said apologetically, “I’ve got to get to the stacks.”
“Go on,” Anjali Auntie said in that still tone. “It was very nice to see you again, Neil.”
I had the sense that by walking away, I’d be shutting some door that had never fully closed. I hugged her, then continued down the redwood-lined path. On my way home, I stepped off the trail at the spot where Anjali Auntie had entered, to see where she’d come from. Outside a brick Unitarian Universalist church was a sign announcing a celebration of life for Professor Lyall Pratt. The steps and the lawn were emptied of mourners. Just a single gardener remained, plucking weeds from the overgrowth beneath the dead man’s name.
* * *
• • •
Anita and I hadn’t spoken since her final night in Hammond Creek. I spent that summer in East Lansing as planned, despite the turmoil I’d caused by admitting to drinking. Quitting debate, it was judged, would sabotage my college chances, so my parents reluctantly released me into the nonsense-filled outside world. And how nonsensical that summer was! Wendi Zhao wrangled a job at the camp, teaching admiring ninth graders. At night, she’d creep into my dorm room bearing beer and drugs and soon dispensing with my virginity. Afterward, I’d write to Anita, woozy with weed and Wendi’s smells. I’d tell her how painful the dull ache of moving from day to day was, how Shruti came to me in the darkness, how I felt tugged sometimes to follow her into the Land of the Dead, not to try to bring her back, but to live down there with her, too. Anita never replied, not even to my most dramatic declarations.
During the intervening years, I’d googled Anita here and there, usually stopping before going too deep. But that evening, after seeing Anjali Auntie, I wound my way through the tornado spiral of the internet. I clicked and scrolled. Neither Anita nor I was on social media. She was always private—having a secret at a young age perhaps does that to you. But I located a blurry image of her playing tennis on the Stanford club team, and another shot of her at a techie event next to a tall Indian guy with a sharp jawline and gelled hair; the caption identified him as Jimmy Bansal, investor at Galadriel Ventures. I wondered if Anita leaving the firm had meant leaving him. I found a site from the year prior featuring her annoyingly impressive half marathon time. I went on, as though pressing harder on the internet would puncture it, send guts oozing onto my fingertips, delivering a visceral reality of present-day Anita.
It took about twenty minutes to stumble upon a YouTube clip I’d never before seen. It was labeled “guest spkr @ 2014 miss india teen new jersy.” I gathered from the text below the video that a twenty-three-year-old Anita had been invited to address the MTI finalists. Someone commented, “this video had gotten taken down few years back thank you for riposting.” Someone below that replied, “she is 1 ungrateful girl.”
The video, taken on a phone camera, was washed out. Behind Anita fluttered the Tricolor and Chakra next to the Stars and Stripes. The phone refocused on a Jumbotron, where Anita’s face had been supersized. There, through a camera on a camera, came the simulacrum of Anita Dayal. Her features looked slathered with too much cakey makeup, and her cheeks were chubbier than they’d been in Hammond Creek. Her hair hung down to her breasts, thick and artificially curled. There were the thank-yous and the lead-ups, and then the meat of it:
“So, why did the Miss Teen India committee choose me as one of your speakers today?
“For one,” she said, “because I won this pageant some years ago, as Miss Teen India Georgia.” A whoop from the crowd, perhaps 2014’s representative from the Peach State. Anita smiled wanly, waiting. She was plainly not there to cheerlead. “But I think I was invited because in the years since, I’ve lived up to the promise of this organization. I went to Stanford. I work in technology. Someone overly optimistic about my future once called me the next In
dra Nooyi.”
Her eyes darted to the wings, as though she was trying to remember her choreography. She took a few long strides. “I keep seeing how successful our community has become. Everyone wants to celebrate that. People like you all, here. And me. And your friends, and cousins, and classmates, and siblings who are getting into good schools and winning quiz team tournaments, and who go off to work at tech companies and consultancies and banks.”
The camera shifted away from the Jumbotron and attempted to zoom in on Anita herself. “I remember wanting so badly to be where I stand now, when I was a teenager. I would have literally killed to be seen as successful. My mother would have killed for me to be seen as successful.
“I grew up in a community called Hammond Creek, outside Atlanta. It was the kind of suburb where immigrants move to give their kids a better life. It’s a beautiful thing, when you think about it. These masses of Asians who all somehow collude to land up in the same place.
“Now, Hammond Creek was still majority-white. We nonwhite kids stuck together, whether we meant to or not. Sometimes you wanted distance, but there was just no escaping other desis.” Titters in the audience; she was feeding the crowd a story of themselves with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation. Anita seemed to warm up at that. She began to pace more deliberately, growing lither and more leonine beneath those dramatic lights. “We sat together in the cafeteria and joined the same clubs. Our parents knew one another, and everyone’s business. There was no room to get in trouble, because someone’s auntie’s cousin’s sister-in-law would hear and tell your mom.” More chuckles, for gossip is an easy vice to cop to.
“But sometimes that hive mind would decide that one person was . . . off. You weren’t smart enough.” She pointed an accusing finger into the crowd. “Or you weren’t normal enough.” She swiveled and did it again. “Or you wanted the wrong things. And that affected whether or not you were fundamentally accepted.
“For instance, what if I told you that I left Stanford for mental health reasons?”
The person holding the camera let out a little hmm. Nearby, people were scuffling, though not all due to Anita’s confession. “When they’re doing awards?” a woman in the periphery of the shot whispered.
“You might not invite me to come talk like this, for one. You’d wonder if I belonged in the community, let alone represented it.
“This was what it felt like growing up. Adults and kids constantly gossiping about one another, judging whether or not you were Indian enough, using I don’t know what kind of standards. And at that point, it’s worse than gossip. It’s actually part of what I wrote my thesis about, at Stanford—because I went back, by the way, and graduated magna cum laude. We’re talking about an organized, systematic form of social exclusion. Perpetrated by everyone in the system. Kids. Parents.”
She tapped the mic clipped to her blouse. The sound rippled, as she called her listeners to more heightened attention.
“I know I’m running low on time. I wasn’t supposed to talk this much. I was supposed to tell you to lean into STEM. But before I go, I want to talk about a young woman at my former high school. She was the kind of kid every immigrant parent wants to have. Such a smarty-smart girl, they’d say.” (She descended into a fobby accent for that one. This time, no chuckles.) “But something happened. Something broke, or broke her. A bunch of forces we can’t entirely understand converged around this young woman. I can put a name to some of them, but not all.”
Only the holder of the phone camera murmured in recognition at that.
“When she took her own life, people talked. Was whatever she had infectious? But within weeks, people boxed it away—boxed her away. When she lived, all the parents held her up as the paragon. She was what the first generation wanted the second generation to be. When she died, everyone told us to treat her as an aberration. But I don’t think she was an aberration. What happened to her was, as the people in my tech world say, a feature of the system. Not a bug.”
Anita began to recite facts and figures, things I’d heard many times by then. That parents were going hungry to pay for kids’ cram schools in Kota and Queens alike. That we, Asian Americans, dwelt in a troubling silence when it came to mental health. These stories had, through the years, filled my mother’s ears: an acquaintance of an acquaintance who had, upon receiving a 1200 on his third SAT attempt, taken himself to the Edison train station, lain down on the tracks, and waited until the Northeast Corridor train rolled in from Manhattan and over him. His father was aboard, commuting home from work. A girl in my aunt Sandhya’s chemistry class at Fremont High, threatened by her parents with a one-way ticket to Lucknow for screwing around with another girl—carbon monoxide in the garage. And others, and others.
“It’s on us,” Anita was saying, speaking with so much urgency that I wondered if someone was coming onstage to forcibly un-mic her. The person holding the phone—the person who’d decided this video ought to be “riposted”—was not steady enough to settle on Anita’s face as she concluded. Perhaps if I had seen a shade of uncertainty in her expression, I would have been less furious. But her voice was so sure as she tied up the speech, as though she were wrapping up the neatest story in the world, and in doing so, gliding into the next era with no ghosts at her back. “By it’s on us, I mean me,” she said, “and I mean you, whether you knew her or not. Us. Our community, our logics, our values. We did that to her.”
* * *
• • •
In the days that followed, I worked manically, drug-fueled, on little sleep. Chidi was still away, and the building was emptied of our frat boy neighbors. The eerie silence of a college town in the summer was mine to fill. In came my alter ego, a Neil who, with the help of an upper, was easily convinced of his own extravagant genius. My pharmacist father meandered around the back of my brain as I fiddled. Him, in that white coat, green Publix badge affixed to his chest pocket. How he had smoothed the starched lapels before leaving for work each morning. When I was young, I’d sit on the bathroom tile and watch him get ready. Years of study for that white coat. Crossing oceans for that white coat. My mother’s voice in my head: Your father is a scientist, be proud. Hell, now I was my own, a homegrown expert in Little Pharma. I did the research, Asian-nerded the drugs, heeded numbers and neurotransmitters.
I wrote with the window open, listening to the creak of beech and gum trees. I poured every personal revelation I had that summer into the Bombayan, braiding my small history with his Big History. Bit by bit, I lent him my story. Imagined that he had lived some version of what we’d been through—what we did—during the Lemonade Period. For wasn’t he also a gold thief? What would he do with his stolen goods? How could he bear them? Memories flooded me as I did tiny bumps in the middle of the day, and I channeled them into the Bombayan. I remembered Anjali Auntie telling me about the Saraswati, that holy river lined with gold, so like the rivers that ignited the California rush; I left the apartment to drive alongside those rivers, through the Central Valley, growing emotional as I imagined transposing our eastern mythologies onto the pioneering West. Could they stick?
In early July, high as the Hindenburg, having spoken to no one besides food delivery people and librarians in about a month, I opened a new page in the Marysville material and saw a dark-skinned man staring back at me from a photocopy of a university-press book. It was taken in 1868. He looked like the black-and-white photos of my nana, posed unsmilingly, almost militaristically, on his wedding day. Below his daguerreotype was a small caption. ISAAC SNIDER, it read. Editor of the Marysville Gold Star, 1865–1885. My eyes flitted between his name and his image and my breath caught. I stood up, stole into Chidi’s room, pulled out his dime bags—I was running low on his party supply—and did a line.
I returned to my desk and stared down at Isaac Snider. Snider was a Midwestern Jewish gold rush migrant and entrepreneur from St. Louis, the page read. Like many Jews in the California gold
rush who opened stores, launched businesses, built Synagogues, and started schools, he helped establish Californian society as something beyond lean-tos and mining towns. He then became the editor of the largest newspaper in the Central Valley region. But I wasn’t looking at his biography. I was looking at his face. His eyebrows were thick and unruly, and his eyelashes girlishly long. His gaze was unsettled, as though he was sure some secret of his was about to be found out.
Snider, my ass. This dark motherfucker looked as Indian as samosas. I almost wanted to cry. I had found him—had I? Or someone like him. Someone enough like him. My gold digger—Isaac Snider. What if he had slunk not out of view, but right into the heart of American history? So what if he stole that gold the night the whites nearly killed him? What if stealing was the only way for him to make a home in this place?
July slipped by; I read as much of the Marysville Gold Star as possible, and slowly something invited me into the period. The paper had printed its fair share of anti-immigrant polemics, blather I was used to from years of studying the period. (In the wake of the frenzy of gold fever, is it not time for the Chinese and the Mexicans and all other foreigners to make their polite egress, so that the new Western states may go about settling into themselves?) But I noticed something. Toward the end of Isaac Snider’s tenure, the xenophobia abated and was replaced by some unbylined columns denouncing the British Raj. They were written with passion—even familiarity? (The brutish colonial presence recalls a period of American history now viewed in revolutionary light . . . )
More of those long drives down California’s endless highways, but nearly always meandering east now, through the Central Valley’s flat, breadbasket landscape. Orchards bearing matchstick tree limbs sprouted up by the highway, along with signs bearing Sikh politicians’ names—Singhs and Kaurs running for school boards. I’d stop for fresh apricots and drive with sticky fingers through neat town squares. And Marysville itself! It persisted—a couple of square blocks, a diner, antique shops, a set of swinging doors beneath a self-consciously styled sign reading sally’s saloon. Behind the saloon rose a red Chinese structure labeled the historic bok-kai taoist temple, and a sign marking the Yuba River, where it met the Feather. Pacing here gave me a sense of being close to Snider, though the Marysville Gold Star had long ago shuttered and there was no evidence of him—no statue, no plaque. But all I had to do was wander the little downtown, and I felt certain I was walking where he once tread.
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