Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  PRACHI: He’s not a journalist, Uncle.

  MRS. KAPOOR: Why not try it? We could say we know this Pulitzer fellow Neil Narayan!

  NEIL: I’ve considered it.

  MY FATHER [concerned]: Journalism?

  NEIL: A Pulitzer.

  MR. KAPOOR: Point is, Neil, nobody’s telling our stories. I have a colleague, he is a Jew—

  AVI: Dad, say Jewish, not a Jew.

  MR. KAPOOR: Jewish-Jewish yes, anyway, he is a Jewish. They have their own proper magazines, we have just India Abroad bullshit—excuse me, Pinky, but that is what it is. Neil, why don’t you start up some publication for desis! It’s a good a time for starting up!

  MY FATHER: Well, as Prachi is saying, Neil writes history—

  MR. KAPOOR: What is history but an explanation for the present!

  NEIL: I wouldn’t put it like that.

  MY MOTHER: Pinky, you’re talking about gold robberies? This happened in Atlanta, too!

  NEIL: In Atlanta? When?

  MRS. KAPOOR: See, it’s these Colombian gangster fellows. They come and hold Indians up inside their own homes at gunpoint and they make off with all the gold.

  PRACHI: How do they know which houses belong to Indians?

  GOPI: Stakeout, must be.

  MY MOTHER: No, no, see, I have one other theory. From when it happened all over Atlanta.

  MY FATHER: No proof for this theory!

  MY MOTHER: You agreed just the other day, Raghu.

  MY FATHER [genially]: Did I? [to Mr. Kapoor] Sometimes you have to!

  MRS. KAPOOR: What was your theory, Ramya?

  MY MOTHER: See, Pinky. See. It has to be Indians. Who else?

  MRS. KAPOOR: What? Indians with guns?

  MY MOTHER: No, no, in Atlanta there were no guns.

  NEIL: When in Atlanta?

  PRACHI: What do you mean, Amma? What Indians? Neil, don’t sigh so loudly, it’s rude.

  MY MOTHER: It was all very well planned. The person would know exactly when a family was going to India. Savitri Reddy lost her mother out of nowhere, okay? She raced off to Hyderabad, then someone set in on her house the very next day. These people knew exactly where to go; they took all of it from her big suitcase in the guest bedroom, poor thing. They even found the pieces she kept hidden in Godiva chocolate containers in the pantry! Five, ten thousand dollars in all.

  MRS. KAPOOR: No one should have so much in the house anymore!

  PRACHI: Amma, when did all this happen, Neil was asking.

  MY MOTHER: Few years back. Two thousand-leven. You were in college, Neeraj. I told you, you just never listen to me. See, and now only he listens—

  NEIL: It never happened before that? When we were still at home?

  gopi [heartily]: Indians are not heisty-schmeisty material, Ramya.

  MY MOTHER: See, that’s why they were not caught! Who would suspect?

  MRS. KAPOOR [flushing]: I picture them coming in all crowbars and guns sometimes and . . .

  MR. KAPOOR: She gets scared.

  MY MOTHER: I would be frightened, too, Pinky, except we have a very good neighborhood watch.

  MY FATHER: Ramya, I’m sure they have a neighborhood watch here, too.

  PRACHI: Auntie, if you’re spooked, maybe you should get another security system.

  AVI: Actually—that guy we were talking about the other day? [turning to Prachi] Pranesh Dayal? The company he sold does smart devices and stuff. Thermostats, fridges, internet-of-things-enabled security cameras. You can save all the images to the cloud, you know?

  MY MOTHER: How do you know about Pranesh Dayal?

  AVI: He’s well known! Dad, he’s that IIT Bombay dude—Harita Auntie’s cousin?

  NEIL: Actually, I ran into—

  MY MOTHER: It may be that Pranesh Dayal is very smarty-smart, but that wife of his—actually, these days I’m hearing ex-wife—Avinash, just listen . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  My family distributed various tokens of advice before we parted ways again. As we hugged good-bye in Alamo Square, Prachi told me to call Keya, who was capable and cute and had (against all odds) liked me. As I dropped my parents at SFO the next day, my father reminded me about the existence of law school, and I shook it off before he could offer to pay for it with money he did not really have. My mother whispered into my hair that she was going to do some “health research,” which meant she’d go digging through Ayurvedic remedies for malaise; she would fall asleep with her face on my horoscope and implore her cousins in Mysore to visit the family sage. (She had begun to swear on his precognition. “Rusyendra has foreseen this,” she’d said of Prachi’s match to Avi. “He said Prachi would choose outside of her community.” “He’s Indian, Mom,” I said. “Punjabi, Neeraj,” she’d replied. “Entirely different.” “What about me?” “Rusyendra says you are very difficult to perceive, Neeraj.”)

  A few days later, on the eve of my appointment with Wang, I got a terse email from him reminding me that I still had not sent over any new work. Making your adviser chase you down is less than ideal, he wrote. I was forty milligrams of Adderall into my day. I opened my two projects, the sober and the intoxicated. On one hand: Mythologies of Money in the Gilded Age.docx—it was fragments and bullet points, full of my notes to myself, “ADD LATER” and “NEED MORE ON THIS.” On the other: Snider-draft-8.rtf—full paragraphs. Images. A human, breathing on the page, speaking, wanting, accounting for time’s passage. An argument about history. I remembered Wang, during our last meeting, telling me my sentences had an overboiled-spinach quality—tasteless, unappetizing. Remembered him accusing me of having a surface-level relationship to my material.

  I chose the second document, then went out to buy more protein bars, and crashed late.

  When I woke up before our meeting, my head thudded with regret and embarrassment.

  In his office, Wang chewed the inside of his cheek and smoothed the T-shirt he wore beneath a light navy blazer. He pushed his glasses atop his head and frowned as he paged through a printout of my Isaac Snider chapters.

  A few uncannily quiet minutes passed. The only sound was the scuffle of Wang’s archless sneakers on the floor as his feet tapped.

  “I wasn’t aware,” he said, “that you had an interest in writing fiction.”

  “I, well—”

  “It isn’t a terrible side hobby.” He tented his fingertips, the veins in his sinewy forearms popping, and in a nauseating moment, I saw that he was offering me a way out. “I’d be happy to see more people in the academy thinking about art alongside their work.”

  “Yes,” I said, in a very small, very breathy voice.

  “But between you and me, Neil, I wouldn’t make a habit of passing around your fiction until you’ve earned yourself a stable floor as a historian. Yes?”

  I nodded. My mouth was thick with saliva; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

  “And you might explicitly indicate, when you’re sending someone something, that you intend it to be fiction. Otherwise your diligent reader might start looking for citations, and proof, and clear argumentation. Of course, once one lets go of such expectations, this little Tale of Isaac Snider is quite a thrill.”

  “It is,” I said. “It was. A thrill, I mean. To, erm, to write.”

  “You know, I almost did an MFA myself,” Wang said. “Poetry. In Austin.”

  “Really?” Wang always struck me as a hardheaded, practical sort.

  “But. You can’t eat poetry. You can barely eat history. It’s a few chunks of stale bread.”

  “Do you still write?”

  “Of course I still write,” he said, a bit haughtily. “This is a creative pursuit, getting in touch with the past. I used to write letters to the people I was studying, you know? In a journal. I’d say,
TO: EUGENE DEBS, 1883. I’d tell young Eugene everything I thought he might be interested in about life today. Which as it happened, was a whole lot. And then I’d hear him talk back to me. And I’d come to understand where I should be looking in his life, in his story, et cetera. That’s a kind of art, though my colleagues from The Harvard Advocate might not agree.” He chuckled. “If you find that you have extra energy for external, ah, diversions, by all means—but if I were you, I’d be sure it wasn’t coming at the expense of the thing you can eat. Understand? You don’t need me to rehash the requirements for you to keep your funding.”

  I gulped. I did not.

  “Want to catch me up on what you got through this summer, aside from this . . . story?”

  I found my voice and spent the next half hour discussing my incomplete chapter, overstating its readiness and exaggerating my claims about late-nineteenth-century Protestantism; it was xenophobic, capitalistic, a precursor to think-your-way-to-wealth Sandbergian hogwash.

  “Sounds better,” Wang said, a little bemused. He gazed out the window of his top-floor Dwinelle Hall office, at the sea of Mediterranean red roofs that rolled across campus. The slender campanile pierced the sky north of us. Gaggles of undergraduates were pouring out of lecture halls, their first classes back. “I’d like to see that and the new chapter by October.”

  I left Dwinelle, reeling from what I’d promised, and walked through the redwood-shaded trails and along the edge of the north side of campus. I took out my phone to scroll through the texts that had been dribbling in from Anita over the two weeks since I’d met her at the Sonora. She’d gone down to Los Angeles to rustle up some vendors from Little India; this morning, she’d pressed yet again: Do you have an idea? If you’re in?

  My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I traipsed along in the wake of some chattering brown undergraduate girls, around Memorial Glade, toward the life sciences building, not far from where I’d bumped into Anjali Auntie earlier that summer. The campanile sounded again, heralding the fall. All around me, the chattering sounds of new-semester autumnal excitement.

  And then these girls collided with another pack of sorority desis. There were screams that at first startled me; someone was hurt, I thought, from the timbre and pitch of the shriek. But, no—it was just old friends re-encountering one another after a summer apart. Names were shrieked. Ohmigodyouresotan. Priya! Ranjana! Shehzeen! I skirted them, then looked back once I’d passed to see that one throng of girls had blended into the other. They were so packed together, a single amoebic blob, that they blocked the whole walk.

  As they began to move, one girl slipped off the trail and onto the high point of a ravine. In her instant of solitude, I saw Shruti—not the menacing ghost of Shruti stealing this girl’s likeness, but the echo of Shruti, the kind of memory normal people see all the time. I thought of Anita saying, It is way back in the past. Perhaps holding the most abstract version of Shruti, as a blur of my own regrets and the generalized pain of the world, was all wrong. Perhaps I should have been trying to remember her. What she looked like. How she used to gather herself in a beat of silence against the lockers when a swarm of girls pushed past her. The fierce narrowing of her eyes when someone said something harsh to her. The way she searched herself for a retort, and fought her way back into a world that made her life so unpleasant, how she waged that fight over and over again, for years.

  This girl, who was not Shruti, tugged on her fat braid and stepped back onto the cement, jogging a little to catch up.

  I opened a new text to Anita: you free tonight?

  * * *

  • • •

  Anita lived in one of those sandy-colored buildings off Embarcadero Road that put me in mind of a Florida beachside motel, and whose facade belied its exorbitant rent. I found my way to her one-bedroom on the third floor. She’d pulled out the deadbolt against the frame so the door remained ajar. I knocked, heard her call, “Come in,” and pushed it open.

  There were only two pieces of furniture in the living room, a black leather sofa with wooden legs and a gray crocheted ottoman that looked like it had been purchased from a dorm furniture bin at Target. No television. The kitchen—cellblock-gray granite countertops, dark wooden cabinets. A single wineglass on the counter, next to a hardback copy of Sapiens. A three-quarters-full bottle by the sink, uncorked. Not a stain anywhere. I recalled Anjali Auntie’s kitchen—the imperfection of the white grouting always hued a little bit orange from turmeric; the general scent of pungent asafetida and browned onions lingering. This was a sterile, somehow anonymous life, as though Anita wanted to erase herself.

  “I’ve been meaning to move,” she said apologetically, emerging from what I presumed to be a bathroom, wearing a black sleeveless tank top and, noticeably, no bra. Her nipples lifted through the shirt, and the room seemed incandescent. Below, maroon athletic shorts displayed her quads, taut from years of running and tennis. It was so little clothing as to be nearing none at all. “I keep selling my stuff, and then getting stuck on the next step. Anyway, that’s why it’s so empty. I can’t justify staying on here alone much longer.” She bit her lip. “We lived together. Here. But until I figure out where my next job-job is, I don’t know where to look, or what my budget should be, and it’s all one big crazy-making loop, so I end up back in Palo Alto.” She looked around the living room. “I know, it has no personality.”

  “If furniture reflects our personalities, I’m not sure what it says that all my roommate and I have in our common area is a futon and a bong. And these alpaca rugs he brought back from an ayahuasca retreat in Peru.”

  “That says something.” She grinned. “Speaking of weed. Weed?”

  “You’re offering? Sure.”

  She nodded, gestured to the couch. I sat. The leather was cold on my back. Anita went to fiddle in the kitchen, returning with the bougiest piece I’d ever seen, foldable, with a balsa-wood-type finish. She offered me the first hit.

  “So, what kind of job do you want?” I asked.

  “You and my mother and everyone else wants to know.”

  “Sorry.”

  She shrugged. “It was so easy to slide into the tech world from Stanford. I did a training program at a good company right out of school, and then Galadriel happened, and you don’t ask questions when Galadriel wants you. Which means you miss that they believe so intensely in this crazy science-fiction future—we’re all going to live in space and live a thousand years and be married to software, or whatever—they believe in it so strongly that nothing that happens between now and then really matters. Screw privacy, harassment, whatever. You didn’t happen to see our founder address the Republican National Convention, did you?”

  I had. Galadriel also happened to be one of Chidi’s investors, which had been a source of some debate in our home.

  “So. Yeah,” she said. “I’ve figured out I don’t want to help robotic white men build robots, but that doesn’t mean I know what comes next. You’re lucky. I thought you were unfocused as a kid, but you actually just had likes and dislikes.”

  “You were too good at everything,” I said. “I was lucky to only be good at a few things, and no one will pay me for them, which significantly lowers the chance I’m accidentally evil.”

  She handed me the piece again. “I told you all my shit last time. You go now. Who’d you lose your virginity to?”

  “Erm.” I took a pull. “Wendi Zhao.”

  Anita doubled over in hysterics, her legs curved into her stomach. She rolled her forehead on her knees. “Jeez,” she said. “I called that, didn’t I?”

  “You get me.” That seemed to tighten her. I worried that I’d transgressed, moving too quickly to close the nine years that still lay between us. “Got me,” I amended.

  Anita took a hit. “Don’t give me too much credit,” she said, with the smoke still caught in her throat. Exhale. “Any idiot could look at a tape of us back then an
d tell who liked who. It was all so obvious. You especially. You have no poker face.”

  “You always knew?” I said softly. “About me?”

  “Of course I did. Why do you think I was so skittish with you? You had this way of looking at me that was very intense, Neil. Like you were stripping me naked, and not just sexually. Like, existentially. It was a lot for a fifteen-year-old.”

  “That’s embarrassing,” I said. I groped for the piece on the coffee table. Was the indignity of your teenage self always so close at hand, long after you thought you’d escaped?

  She sucked in, held her puff, and then breathed out a slender rope of smoke. “Some girls, all they ever want is someone to look at them that way, you know? And I just ignored you.”

  “Because you weren’t one of those girls.” I waved my hand, refusing another puff. “I drove. I should stop. If I want to drive back.”

  “Those girls, though, they’re happy now. Their lives don’t look like this.” Anita glanced around at the emptiness of the apartment, and I followed her gaze. There was just one shelf across from us, with a few books, Bluetooth speakers, and a framed photo of Anita in cap and gown, flanked on either side by her mother and what I presumed to be her ajji—a fair-skinned woman with light eyes and the same Mona Lisa smirk as Anita. Next to it was her diploma: BA, magna cum laude, double major in economics and sociology. “Want less, and you can have everything you want. I always thought of those girls as unambitious.”

  She was still waving the piece in my face, loopily.

  “I can’t be too baked,” I said. “I have to drive home.”

  “You don’t have to drive,” she said. She scooted closer. Her knee knocked mine. She didn’t move hers away. I didn’t move mine away. “What about you? What do you want? Love? Fame? Fortune?” She folded a heel into her crotch and dropped her bare thigh on my quad. Before I could answer, she added, in a newscaster baritone: “The chance to pull off the biggest known bridal gold heist in American desi history?”