Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  “What sort of gold does that come from?” Anita asked.

  She thought she heard her mother shifting in the bedroom. Anjali would be furious to imagine beginning the cycle again.

  “Good happy-home happy-life blessing? Where else? From wedding gold,” Lakshmi said. “Actually, gold given just before a wedding. When everything is all, how to put it, promise. Absolutely fresh wedding gold, understand?” Anita’s eyes widened. Lakshmi went on: “You have this bridal event you are planning, isn’t it? That is what has given me this idea. There you will have good jewelers, with all kinds of handmade pieces and what all? Yes? Come. Let us talk about helping your mother.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “That’s why you called me? After all this time?” I lowered my voice. “You want me to do it again?” I inched my stool away. The intensity of her attention on me earlier in the night, the willingness to confess heartbreaks—all a calculation. To get me on her side. For a ridiculous cause! Anita seemed unperturbed. She signaled to the bartender for water.

  “For a proper Indian wedding,” she explained, willfully ignoring my agita, “you need certain things, as I’ve discovered over the past few years of every brown girl I know shaadi-ing up. You need someone to do mehendi—henna. You need a DJ, a caterer. Someone to tailor your lehenga. Get the point? Yes. And these vendors may not be available if you live in, say, some bumblefuck American suburb. So people come to these big convention centers to do all their wedding shopping.”

  “And some people get jewelry there.” I felt spittle fly from my lips.

  She swigged, then replied. “Yes. Some people have their inherited wedding trousseaus, though not everyone. These days women want modern, lighter gold or they rent. But desi brides always get high quality, high karat. And that gold—it contains—”

  “Well-adjustment.” I remembered Prachi’s party, seeing happily engaged Maya’s earrings and wondering at all they contained, at all I could have if I took them.

  The faith to make it from day to day. Faith to lead Anjali Joshi out of bed, to new life.

  The bartender was mopping up after a clumsy guy who had just spilled his cocktail. I had to imagine last call was soon; it was past midnight. The klutz had been eyeing Anita hungrily. Her bony knee knocked against mine, and she left it there.

  “Don’t you have enough money to buy wedding gold yourself?”

  “You know how this works.” Of course—if she bought it, it’d be her own luck, her own energy, her own ambition. Which was insufficient.

  And then Anita’s hand was briefly—so briefly—cupping my knee, calling on the old me. A shiver at the hand of that girl, the only girl, touching me, needing me. I felt that old Neil jonesing, his wants deep in my tissue. I pictured three generations, Lakshmi and Anjali and Anita, huddled around a huge pot on the stove on some sunny afternoon, a concoction bubbling. I, in the corner, inhaling the fumes. Intoxicated. Wedging between the women. Bringing the pot to my lips.

  “Your mom doesn’t know about this.”

  She shook her head.

  “Because it’s insane.”

  “She’d worry.”

  “Because it’s insane.”

  “To a degree,” Anita hedged. “But I’m in charge of this expo, Neil. I know how to manipulate things, and we’d take so little, out of so much stock—and not all from one store. It isn’t like . . . with Shruti. We’re not going to unhook some poor bride’s necklace on her wedding day. We’ll take it from vendors, a single earring, one bangle. They’ll think they just lost it.”

  “Are you sure the gold would contain—everything we, I mean you, need?”

  Her inky eyes flashed nervously at the bartender, who was still ignoring us. “When we drink the stuff, we’re drinking the intention that the owner has imbued the gold with. Yes? Yes. But the gold’s power begins earlier than that. Remember how my mom explained it years ago? A jeweler imbues his pieces with intentions when he’s making it—when he sources the gold itself, when he starts to design, et cetera. Picture some desi jewelry maker in Bombay or Dubai or wherever. If he’s bad at his job, he’s working mindlessly, and we get shoddy craftsmanship. Drinking that crap is as useless as drinking seltzer.

  “But if he’s a good artisan—and my expo jewelers only stock the best artisans’ work—he’s making it with awareness that someone’s going to get married in this. Indians have a lot of gold made specifically for a wedding. Mangalsutras, big maang tikkas, Mughal-style matha pattis, South Indian–style temple gold, bajubands, kamarbandhs, naths—the big-ass nose rings . . . These are pieces you simply don’t wear any other time. So someone making a high-quality—”

  “Bajuband?” I didn’t know most of the words Anita had just recited.

  “That’s the fat gold armband. Or mangalsutra, the marriage necklace—your mom wears one. Someone making that bajuband or nath is infusing it only and intensely with the intention for domestic settlement.”

  “I get the point.”

  “No, the point, Neil,” Anita said, positively clenching her fists in a way that suggested she did not believe I’d gotten it, “the point is that in India and America, something powerful happens at the start of marriage, something we can take for my mother. The start of the marriage, when two people are optimistic about each other—the American rom-com, love-shuv version.

  “But we also want the old conservative Indian thing. And in some versions of India, the wedding is when the whole community is behind you, aunts and grandmothers and everyone who’s been trying to get you married. For some families, and the Joshis were like this, marrying off a daughter makes her theoretically safe. Plus, historically some desi brides got that gold as a backup in case the marriage went wrong, for their own financial security—”

  I couldn’t help but think of even my thoroughly modern sister, how something in her had stabilized as soon as Avi slid the conflict-free diamond onto her ring finger. How in a rare moment of reflection, she’d told me once that the bulimia had finally ended with Avi, how the ground beneath your feet stopped shaking when you knew you had a partner in all things.

  “Tell me your ‘plan.’” I used air quotes.

  Anita was panting from the exertion of explaining the Indian wedding industrial complex. But she nodded invitingly, in the same fashion Chidi did when he was asked a probing question about his start-up, as if to imply there was nothing he’d rather be doing than assuaging the asker’s doubts.

  “We’ve got to deal with security. Metal detectors, guards, cameras. Then, discretion. How to do it without alerting the jewelers. Plus, getaway.”

  “That wasn’t a plan. That was a list of problems. And who’s ‘we’?”

  “For now, just me.”

  “A crack team, huh.”

  “You’re the only person I’d imagine trusting with this.”

  “You don’t even know me anymore.”

  She was unscathed. “Maybe I don’t.”

  My voice fell to a near whisper. “You really think it wouldn’t hurt anyone?”

  I looked around the room, on instinct. Shruti didn’t step from the shadows to remind me about the unspeakable costs of fulfilling unnameable lusts. It was just me, Anita, and the bartender, who’d turned the TV to a black-and-white Japanese film.

  “Yes, Neil,” she said. “I really think it wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “And would the gold contain . . . actual happiness, you think?”

  “Something close to it,” Anita said. And there her hand was, on my knee again. I was dizzy, as I hadn’t been in years. “But, honestly, I’m not sure my mother’s familiar enough with the real thing to discern.”

  I tried not to move, not to lose her touch. I nodded. A question formed in my throat, but I didn’t say it aloud. Could I have some, too? “I’m not sure I’d know the difference, either,” I said.

  8.


  It had come time for the suitable families to meet. Prachi and Avi were beginning to look for houses, and the Kapoor clan, self-identified Los Altos natives, had taken the opportunity to invite my parents out for a visit. Houses. Homes! These things were my mother’s purpose. She was only too happy to lend her expertise to the hunt. We were to troop around, my whole family and Avi (his parents pled fatigue re: Bay Area real estate), working through as many open houses as could be crammed into one August Sunday.

  I’d been conscripted into joining. “You’ll have to do this one day, too,” my father insisted, just as when we’d toured colleges for Prachi. There, the ever-dangling threat of the future.

  I picked my parents up from my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya’s house in Fremont, then gathered Prachi and Avi from the city.

  “How mad that my brother lives so near your parents, Avi,” my mother said merrily, as everyone squished into the backseat of my knee-knocking Honda. (Avi was lingering on the waitlist for a Tesla, and Prachi had never liked driving, not since her traumatic year of lessons from my father.) And yet it was not mad at all, because the Bay Area is the upper-middle-class Indian American promised land. These sunny small towns, with their citrus trees, their tidy main streets—all these qualities make the place peaceful in a way that promises an end to competition, suggesting (incorrectly, of course) that the game has been won.

  “We should have rented a car,” my father said when my Honda took too long to start.

  Avi attempted to soothe nerves. “We can take my mom’s other car tomorrow, Uncle.”

  My mother fluttered. “Oh, no. No. We would not put your parents out. We can rent.”

  I was exhausted from a week of pushing further into the Tale of Isaac Snider. He’d be back from Indonesia the following week, and we were scheduled for a check-in to ensure I was on track for the proposal defense in November. I was aware that I’d produced more on Snider than on the Gilded Age. I was aware, too, that the sentences pulsed in the former pages, and lay limp in the latter. I still had time, though, to try to breathe some life into my sample chapter on religious messaging surrounding money during the period.

  I’d been further discombobulated thinking about Anita—the new Anita, who’d said she needed me, bringing forth a rocket of old wants. I hadn’t yet given her an answer to her wild pitch. She’d been texting me occasionally to prod my decision along. Each buzz in my pocket drew me further away from this world, of my family, of houses, of the basic arrangements of life.

  To see Prachi’s and my mother’s dreamy expressions upon entering each low-slung on-the-market California home was to feel that I had been locked out of one of the great secrets of the world. Each house shared a few things: a single story with sparse grass marking a front “lawn,” a tinlike flat roof, pale paint—orange sherbet, cotton candy pink. Inside: sunbeams on hardwood, lanky windows. Citrus trees, tomatoes. Discussions of how to keep the squirrels from the plants. These were, by most standards of the country, modest buildings. But here, the land upon which they sat, which had once been dotted with flappy tents as gold hunters fled inland, was worth millions. A century and a half ago, to stand on this terrain would have made Prachi and Avi pioneers; even a well-to-do woman like my sister would have struggled to hire someone to build her a house, for all the able-bodied men would have been in the goldfields.

  Now, though. Now Prachi and Avi would step into a home full of smart thermostats and smart fridges. They would drive Avi’s Tesla, order groceries for delivery, stream any entertainment they liked, while Avi nursed his side-project start-ups, nail-bitingly hoping against hope that one of those could bloom into a lucky billion-dollar idea, the gold in the dirt.

  We considered the city—Glen Park, Noe Valley—but mostly the suburbs on the peninsula: Burlingame, San Mateo, Menlo Park, Redwood City. The latter was the ideal location in Prachi and Avi’s new collective couple consciousness—near their jobs and Avi’s parents in Los Altos. (Who else would watch the future offspring?) Redwood City’s heart: a pedestrian mall, streets lined with Mongolian BBQ and AMC Super 3D Cineplex and the Cheesecake Factory.

  “You will have everything you need right here,” my father said.

  “Convenience factor, very important,” my mother agreed.

  The third or fourth Redwood City house: lemon yellow, squat. A wooden slatted fence ringed a small yard, on which a tricycle currently lay, its front pink wheel spinning slowly. Sesame-colored walls, polished appliances. The floral smell of the potpourri in the pink-wallpapered powder room elicited coughs. Prachi and Avi said, “Is this it?” “This is it,” quietly to each other, as we stepped into a final room, painted seafoam green.

  I’d gone out with Chidi’s crowd two nights earlier: MDMA at a warehouse party in Oakland. Forty-eight hours later, I was in the depths of cold, abject nihilism. Suicide Sunday. It hit me just then, as Prachi and Avi said This is it, and the comedown darkened until I was in the throes of one of my occasional panics.

  “Is it a home office?” my father asked.

  “No,” Prachi said very quietly, and my mother took her hand.

  “It’s perfect for kids?” the strawberry-blond real estate agent uptalked.

  “Yes,” my mother said.

  “Oh,” my father said.

  “Wow,” Avi said.

  “Uh,” I said, “I have a headache.” I dropped to my knees and pushed my face to the ground. Footsteps moved away—the real estate agent, excusing herself; I was making a scene. Everyone’s ease was galactically distant. I wanted to disdain this prescribed life and yet I could not help it, I regretted that it seemed so out of reach; I wanted what it gave everyone else. I lifted my head from the floor. The carpet looked to be breathing as the indentation my forehead had made in it unflattened. My throat was growing smaller; now it was the size of a dime. Somewhere nearby the Caltrain rumbled, and I thought of the people who lay down in front of it every year, how their gray matter and organs and eyelashes and fingernails salted the tracks for miles.

  I remembered the fizzing relief of a fresh glass of lemonade. I was parched with the memory.

  My mother knelt next to me. Put a hand between my shoulder blades. Rubbed.

  “Breathe, rajah,” she said. “Breathe.” She kept her hand there until the worst of it abated.

  * * *

  • • •

  Everyone was still eyeing me nervously at dinner, except that it was a festive occasion, the melding of two families, the mutually achieved immigrant dream hanging like a plump cloud over us.

  We sat beneath the wooden trellis in the Kapoors’ backyard. The domed sky was flecked with constellations. This was why people loved Northern California; its buildings did not pollute the sky. You could remember the stars, their dead light, their gold dust.

  “You have to move fast in the Bay Area,” said Mr. Kapoor, agreeing with someone that it was a good idea for Prachi and Avi to snap up the Redwood City house.

  “Everything one big race here,” Mrs. Kapoor supplied, with the even breathing of someone who has not been running it herself.

  My father sniffed his red—it was the first time I’d seen my parents not scorn alcohol outright, because we were in the company of wealthy Punjabis who took drink seriously. Mr. Kapoor swirled his whiskey. The dinner conversation swarmed with swapped gossip. One can fill in the rest of the clanging of glasses and clacking of silverware and pass-the-paneer-phulka-tacos, how’s-your-cholesterol exchanges that formed the backdrop to the evening’s entertainment:

  MY MOTHER: . . . So, see, first Indian I ever heard of coming to America, this family sent him off to college here when he was maybe sixteen.

  SANDHYA: So young!

  PRACHI: Too young.

  MY MOTHER [head shaking]: Much, much too young, yes, anyway! So he’s sixteen and in college, somewhere, say, Maine, maybe Nebraska, I don’t know. And he has no friends. Until these Chri
stian fellows come catch hold of him.

  MRS. KAPOOR: They do that.

  MY MOTHER: Yaa, yaa. So they say Jesus saves Jesus saves, whatever they say, and then he goes along and becomes one devout Christian. His poor Brahmin mother, so confused when he came home shaking crucifixes and whatnot! Strict vegetarian, she was! And now he’s eating chicken-schmicken. So they took him out of college. And now they decide ki he needs some job. Off he goes to work in the Gulf.

  MY FATHER [with affable recognition of the pattern of my mother’s stories]: Ayyo, Ramya.

  MY MOTHER: But then guess what happens! These Muslims he’s working with, they catch hold of him and give him beef and all and abhi? He’s one devout Muslim.

  [A chorus of laughter. Affectionate eye rolls. Prachi and Avi catching each other’s gazes with stifled giggles. Sufficiently a part of this, sufficiently apart from it.]

  MR. KAPOOR: Now, think, such a fellow would not even get into these American colleges.

  AVI: What do you mean, Dad?

  MRS. KAPOOR: Avinash, he’s just saying, these colleges have it out for our kind now. Very hard for Pratyusha’s children; you can only get into Berkeley as some other minority.

  AVI: What do you think, Neil? You TA for all these Berkeley kids, don’t you? Prachi says you’re always writing them letters of recommendation and stuff.

  PRACHI [glowing]: My brother is a very popular teacher.

  NEIL: I don’t think there’s a shortage of high-achieving Asians at Berkeley, Auntie. Honestly, I wonder if someone told them, “Stop racing, there are too many of you,” if they’d wind up having to do something more interesting with themselves.

  SANDHYA: Pinky, I teach, too, you know, eleventh grade, and Neil, they want it for themselves. You tell them they can’t do it, their eyes pop out of their heads.

  MRS. KAPOOR: You’re in Fremont, isn’t it? Say, what about these robberies and all?

  MR. KAPOOR: Neil, this is a story for you. You must write this. Get him a notebook, Pinky.