Gold Diggers
Page 19
Anita sighed. “I knew someone important to her had died. And I suspected he was more than just a dear friend, or however she kept putting it.” Anita clenched her fist a few times, like she was warming up for something. “Whatever’s going on with her,” she said, “that’s what I need to talk to you about. I need your help. She needs our help.”
* * *
• • •
Anjali Joshi met her husband-to-be on the green IIT Bombay campus in 1988. Her brother Vivek, in his second year at the elite institution, was earning C’s and D’s in everything save the joke class, Indian philosophy.
“Mama told me Vivek swore off the gold as soon as he got to IIT,” Anita said, swirling her wine. “He never forgave himself for what he saw as stealing his neighbor Parag’s spot, and he refused to acquire gold from his batchmates. He must have been very strong to white-knuckle his way through the withdrawal. I sometimes imagine that he wanted something else enough to make it bearable. He loved theater, and music, you know. Maybe he would have ended up an artist.”
Happy, or average, or artistic, or whatever he was, Vivek was enjoying himself for the first time in years, playing guitar, sustaining flirtations with girls from nearby schools.
“I’ve pieced all this together over the last few months,” Anita went on. “Talking to my mother, and my grandmother.”
Anjali, who lived at home and commuted south to a women’s college, used to visit Vivek sometimes. The Joshi parents abided this; they considered IITians harmless and presumed Vivek looked out for his baby sister. He did. He wouldn’t let her near the minority cohort of boys who smoked ganja or got drunk, but he did let her pass rowdy evenings as a guest in the mess hall while he and his friends had endless conversations about American rock and roll. She was always packed off home before the real raucousness began in the hostels. Vivek was developing quite the foul lexicon, trading friendly insults in rough Marathi and Hindi late into the night. For now that he had reached this vaunted place, there was joy, and a chance to be young, at last.
Anjali—who’d grown into a striking woman—felt more comfortable among the IIT boys than with her female classmates. The others at her college, where she was a scholarship student (having been encouraged for the first time by a chemistry teacher in her final year), were products of upper-crust schools in Malabar Hill and Fort. They spoke in Oxford-tinged accents; some had boyfriends with whom they flitted into the Royal Willingdon Sports Club or the Bombay Gymkhana. The school’s pink walls and the surrounding streets of foreign consul general offices, even the name of the neighborhood—Breach Candy—all rang of a place beyond sealess Dadar, its ruck, its clamor.
The first time Anjali visited IIT, she debarked from the paint-peeling city bus and spied a single female passing into a boxy beige building. “Are there any girls here?” she asked Vivek’s Bengali roommate. They were filling up metal trays with mess hall vada pav. “Thirteen,” the Bengali replied. “Of two hundred fifty.” Perhaps those thirteen had been raised by mothers who brewed them the right drinks at the right hours.
The Bengali excused himself to join a scruffy curly-haired boy wearing glasses and a khadi kurta, messenger bag slung across his chest. They were off to protest one of the evening socials being held at a hostel; women from colleges like Anjali’s were bussed up to keep young men company. “Socials are an American imperialist form of engaging!” the comrades chanted, pumping fists as they filed out. Hardly a catchy slogan. Which was when a plump young man with thick eyebrows adjusted his spectacles and cleared his throat.
“His hostel couldn’t get anyone to come if they paid for it,” he said. His voice sounded like an out-of-tune violin, but it was also hefty. He spoke as though he’d been practicing the line.
“They’re communists,” Anjali offered. “I don’t think they want to pay.”
The plump boy began to spout more insults about the Bengali, likely less because he disliked him than because the chap had served as a conversational entry point.
Anjali interrupted. “He’s my brother’s best friend.”
“You’re Vivek Joshi’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, god,” Pranesh Dayal whimpered. “Oh, god, don’t tell him I harassed you or something, na.” He scuttled away.
When Anjali sat down across from her brother and inquired about the boy, Vivek and his friends laughed as they slopped up bhaji.
“Sad fellow, what to do,” Vivek said. “Too studious, total pain. Gets ragged.”
“Class topper, though,” one of the friends said. “Got to respect it.”
“You don’t rag him, do you, bhau?”
Vivek mussed her hair with one large mitt of a hand. “Don’t be bothered, Anju.”
Anjali pictured a table of her classmates having this sort of exchange about her: Anjali Joshi, sad girl, don’t talk to her, her father is just an excise tax officer. . . . And so when she came to visit Vivek every month or so, she kept an eye out for Pranesh. She’d notice him crossing the grass with a robotic gait, and she’d jog to catch him up.
“What do you want from me,” he once demanded, in that voice of his that did not seem to contain in its repertoire question marks. She was taken aback. Gone was the boy who’d approached her to impress, replaced by a defensive creature. They stood in the shade of a flame-of-the-forest tree, but still they sweated. Fat brown pods dangled above them. Anjali tore one off.
“I hear you’re the class topper,” she said, fiddling with the pod. She took a finger to her loose hair and twirled it, as the Malabar Hill girls did. “I’ve never been much good at school.”
She was not sure what had come over her. Maybe it was that Pranesh seemed harmless, someone to practice on. Likelier, she was genuinely curious about his intellectual prowess. She was standing in the vicinity of the thing she’d been trained to recognize as power: academic achievement. She thought of how Vivek had described ambition years earlier, as an energy that runs in some bodies and not in others. She had begun to wonder what would happen if someone drank one of her gold earrings. Nothing, she suspected. Her wants were too nebulous.
“I used to use those as swords, when I was small,” Pranesh said, pointing at the pod. He took it and stabbed the air. He was so like a child. All that studying could not grow you up.
Slowly, they became friendly. Anjali shared a milky-sweet chai with him a few times. He reminded her of a teenage Dhruv, who had also been plump and bookish, to the extent that he barely existed outside his turning pages, his pencils on graphing paper. She felt for Pranesh when she learned he had been orphaned at fourteen; it explained—did it?—his coldness. Was there romance? There was a thrill in discovering that men harbored secrets, and that this thing called love might consist in part of teasing such privacies out, learning to hold them yourself. The fact that he told her so little gave her labor to perform, made her feel useful.
Vivek and his mates found the friendship odd. Particularly perturbed by Anjali’s affection for dumpy Pranesh was Rakesh Malhotra, a good-looking Punjabi with a reputation for being the hostel’s worst ragger. He dragged first-years from bed and made them march naked, gripping each other’s penises. When Anjali failed to notice Rakesh, he began to talk about her as a calculating manipulator of male attention—a portrayal that would make its way to my mother’s ears through his family, the Bhatts of Hammond Creek. Gold digger.
But things rolled on with Pranesh. When they strolled around the lake, she grilled him on his plans. He was going to get a PhD, in America.
“It’s cutthroat,” he told her expertly. “They do not let just anybody in.”
She began to tell him about Dhruv in North Carolina, the Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes, the Jolen hair cream. Pranesh asked where Dhruv had been in school.
He shook his head. “I will go somewhere better. Do not worry. I’ll do much more than all those people.”
She felt, for the fir
st time, included in the fringes of someone else’s future.
* * *
• • •
In the spring of his final year, Vivek went on holiday. He was riding with friends on the roof of a train from Bombay to Kanyakumari. They had their guitars up there, and they were strumming Dire Straits the whole way south. There was a disconnect between landscape and soundscape—their twangs did not match the dry fields laden with yellow-green brush, baking beneath the cloudless sky. They felt thick with the possibility of what awaited them over the next several years, as some of them prepared to cross oceans, to make lives of their own.
The car passed under a low electrical wire. All ducked but Vivek. Beneath the relentless Andhra Pradesh sun, having brushed twenty-five thousand volts, he sustained third-degree burns. He died atop the train, miles from his parents, from his sister, from the elder brother who had set such a standard for him.
“My dad used to call Uncle Vivek’s death very Indian,” Anita said. “A third world way to go, that’s what he’d say. He had a lot of anger against India for things like that. His parents died in a terrible bus crash in Himachal Pradesh.” She shivered and continued.
The following months were brutal at the Joshis’. Dhruv did not come home. He was waiting for his American residency to go through and claimed leaving the United States would boot him to the back of the queue. Lakshmi Joshi never forgave her firstborn. She was territorial about her grief, snapping at anyone who tried to join her weeping. “My child, my child,” she wailed. Anjali could not help thinking that her mother’s overwhelming woe was another sign that she, the daughter, was inadequate.
As the year went on, Anjali completed her exams, earning poor marks. All auspicious events, engagements included, were postponed in the wake of death, so she had some time. But soon, she would be noticed for what she was—a daughter who needed to be married off. And who could say to what type of man? It seemed a horrible fate to have to live your life with someone whose mind was smaller than your own. She wanted someone who was more than she was.
So, she had an idea. To take what she needed. A few weeks after her exams, she rode the bus to Powai with some of her classmates to attend Mood Indigo, the big music festival hosted each year by IIT Bombay. Vivek had played with his band on those stages. It was stomach-clenching to be back in his territory, but she’d arrived on a mission. She skirted the edge of the party, passing greasy-haired communists. One of them handed her a bright flyer reading ban rock show: american imperialist tradition before sighing, shoving the rest of his papers into a cloth messenger bag, and moseying back to his hostel, defeated that night by cultural globalization. A doomed student band from St. Xavier’s began to play George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” and as the frank roar of boos followed, Anjali knew it was only a matter of time before someone began throwing rotten bananas and tomatoes onto the stage.
Then, at the fateful swell of a Police song, she found herself blinking at Pranesh Dayal. They had not seen each other since Vivek’s death. “I’m sorry,” he shouted through the noise.
Their recommenced walks along the lakeside in Powai were longer now. Lakshmi believed her daughter to be studying in town with her posh friends. Pranesh told her stiffly, as though he’d copped the line from a film, that she was the very picture of beauty. For his part, he had begun jogging and doing push-ups; he was, briefly, almost handsome.
When he graduated and told her he was moving to a place called Atlanta, where he had been accepted into Georgia Tech (he’d wanted Stanford), she told him to write. His letters rolled in. There are no good rotis to be found. I hope you are learning your mother’s/chachi’s recipes etc because all of us students are homesick for proper food. She held on to them as her parents began to trot grooms through the living room, each one promising her a smaller life than the last. Finally, she announced the fact of Pranesh and his correspondence. A love match to a foreign-dwelling boy was a surprise, but acceptable. There was little to arrange between families, given that Pranesh was an orphan. He came to marry and collect her. As they circled the wedding fire, she watched smoke obscure the back of his head and imagined there was more inside him she did not know.
It turned out that behind Pranesh Dayal’s plump belly and thinning hair there was no secretly compassionate man. Anjali decided the remedy was a daughter. She learned to drive so she could take herself to the Hindu temple in Riverdale and make offerings of fruit and flowers. Kneeling before the stone Venkateshwara, she named Anita long before she was conceived. She would have had three, five more children if she could have—yes, she wanted a son, too, whom she imagined naming Vivek. But Pranesh got a vasectomy one summer when Anjali took Anita back to Bombay, telling her later that he did not plan on funneling his money to support a whole brood.
On the occasions Anjali considered her domestic situation, she developed a castor oil taste in her mouth. America: once metonymy for more. Here, was there more? She possessed a life of her own. Her husband left for California and she could breathe. It was something. She wanted more—infinitely more—for her daughter. She would do anything to give it to her.
* * *
• • •
About a year before this reunion at the Sonora, Anjali’s father died. She and her brother Dhruv had, over the years, remitted enough money that their parents could shift to be near some better-off relatives in Navi Mumbai. But after Mr. Joshi’s death, the relatives whispered at how Lakshmi’s wealthy children neglected the old woman, whispering of the disloyalty America bred. Anjali and Dhruv discussed things. Dhruv’s wife did not want to take in Lakshmi. “You have much more than we do,” the sister-in-law told Anjali—which was true, because Pranesh had recently sold his company for, as Chidi said, a fuckload. (Anjali did not contribute financially; she’d never restarted her catering business out west and struggled to hold jobs. She was an unreliable employee, forgetful and scattered.)
At any rate, the domino effect of family obligations and rivalries began, and Lakshmi came to live in Sunnyvale. How ironic to find that a doted-upon son would, in adulthood, kowtow to a cold wife. But the daughter didn’t dwell on ugly history. Daughters had forgiveness in their bones. Up into the dry California sky went the resentments that might have been spoken about Dadar, about Parag the neighbor, about Vivek, about how Lakshmi had allocated love.
Lakshmi arrived in California just as Pranesh instigated divorce proceedings. Over the years, Anita’s father had grown angry with Anjali for doing too little domestically, for why should a man like him be married to a woman like her, except for the sake of the household? But these days, she was not cooking, she did not work, they had nothing to say to each other. And sufficient money had led Pranesh to a conclusion that would have been unheard of some years earlier: he could afford now to exit the inconvenience of his marriage.
He nabbed the best lawyer in the region and met with many others, barring them from working with Anjali. Pranesh’s attorney was arguing Anjali’s irrelevance to her husband’s company, litigating her out of a decent settlement. And the stress was taking its toll—“as you might have noticed,” Anita said.
Anjali initially tried to pass off the fact that Pranesh was living in Portola Valley as temporary—she told Lakshmi that he wanted a retreat up in the hills, with fewer distractions, to begin ideating a new company. Lakshmi knew better. “I have seen things change in Bombay,” she informed Anjali. The relatives in Navi Mumbai had a divorced son; the daughter was not even married to the man she lived with. Lakshmi was not unwise to the changing of the times. Perhaps she surprised herself with the expandable scope of her motherhood, how it swelled to make space for things previously unacceptable.
Lakshmi summoned her granddaughter to Sunnyvale, where Anjali had remained. (Anita’s mother’s sole victory in the divorce would be getting to keep the house she’d never wanted, in the suburb she’d always hated.) Anjali was asleep when Anita arrived. She poked her head in to
see her mother breathing shallowly, her sharp wristbones and vertebrae visible through her oddly papery skin.
“There is something very wrong with your aiyee,” Lakshmi said sternly, bustling over the stove. Anita tried to make the chai, but her grandmother scorned her attempts.
“She’s depressed,” Anita said, taking her tea.
Lakshmi clicked her tongue to dismiss the Western psychobabble. “What is wrong, see, is this. I made a very big mistake. I fixed up your uncles’ lives. Got all their studies in order. Gave your uncle Vivek all kinds of special boosts. All this you know.” Anita nodded. “But I did not arrange anything proper for your mother. She needed some kind of boost, too. Understand?”
“Ajji,” Anita said. “Isn’t that all in the past? You can’t fix it now.”
They were quiet for a while, drinking their chai, and then Anita began to wash their emptied mugs. From behind the sink, she could see the Sunnyvale cul-de-sac, cousin to the Hammond Creek cul-de-sac, only with squatter houses and more citrus trees. The sight gave her hot pangs between her ribs. Her mother had spent so many years here, in this place meant for certain types of families, certain types of lives. Was there no way out for Anjali Dayal—no, Anjali Joshi? No other way of being on offer?
“What could you do now, Ajji?” she said.
“I would not have given your mother the same-same kind of gold drink I gave your uncle,” Lakshmi said. She came to stand by Anita. Together they surveyed the street. “What I should have given was a good gold tonic to ensure her marriage and home life were happy.”
The blatant inequality of the statement made Anita roll her eyes. But she couldn’t deny that those things—marriage and domestic life—were exactly what were going wrong for her mother now. It was far too late for Anjali to attend IIT. But maybe it was not too late for her to be, in some way, settled. Adjusted.