The pounding again. “Sir, sir, sir.” I wondered if an officer of the law would be so respectful. “Housekeeping, sir.”
I gagged and this time made it to the bathroom.
“Not right now!” I shouted after I’d rinsed my mouth.
I plugged my phone in to tap around on the Wi-Fi. What would I search: sanskrit gold smelting rituals? Shooting santa clara bridal expo? As soon as the white light flickered back on, glowing lustrous, the thing freaked, buzzing and buzzing, text after text, voice mail after voice mail, from my parents and Prachi. My eyes stabilized on the last message shuddering on the screen as the phone finally lay limp on the nightstand.
From Anita: Neil. I know you’re okay. I *know* you’re not doing something stupid. We just need to hear from you. I trust you. I love you.
“Marysville?” she said when I called. “Where the fuck is that?”
“I just got on the highway and started heading toward Berkeley and then realized I couldn’t stop there if anyone was, I don’t know, after me? So I kept driving and when I saw Marysville, I thought, oh, yeah—”
“Your mind is a messy place, isn’t it?”
I was crying again, hadn’t in ages and now couldn’t stop, tears of shock or relief or just the slackening of a body tightened by years of time and fear.
“You can’t drive, can you?” She sounded soggy, too.
I sniffed. “I’m crashing. I was kind of high. And then drunk. I think I’m still drunk.”
I could hear her head shake through the speaker. “Marysville?” I began to explain where it was, but someone said something I couldn’t hear on the other side. “Huh,” she said. “Apparently my mom knows where it is. We’re coming to you. Stay put.”
“Ani,” I squeezed out pleadingly. “What happened? Back there?”
“Which part?”
* * *
• • •
Minkus Jhaveri was taken into custody on the count of unlawful possession of a concealed firearm. But first, he went to the hospital for the bullet wound he had inflicted on his own left calf. The utter shock of seeing his new rival, Linda, heroically reaching for what he perceived to be a pistol but was, in fact, a mace gun bearing the empowering label see something spray something caused him to lower his hand a few inches in surprise. He jumped at the sound of Linda’s mace popping, then pulled the trigger, visiting said injury upon himself.
That no one had died did not alleviate my dread or guilt. Regarding the first, there was still the matter of Minkus’s opportunity to out me to the police. And indeed, in the weeks following the expo, a pair of portly disgruntled cops would arrive at my Ashby Avenue apartment to follow up on Mr. Moo-koond Juvvery’s complaints about my odd behavior, his insistent claim that I was a bad guy. But by then, the evidence of our crime had long since been smelted away, and little came of the inquiry; perhaps the cops in the end found the whole thing to be a weird cultural entanglement beneath the dignity of the state.
“What he was doing was illegal either way,” Anita said over the phone, as the three generations of women sped northeast from Sunnyvale. “The guy didn’t have the right permits. He must have just skirted the metal detectors. But, Neil. Call your sister. Tell her you and I had a fight earlier, and that’s why you were weird, and then when Minkus came at you, you just freaked, you’re a panicky guy so you panicked, et cetera. Then we’ll get there and do the thing. It’ll all be over soon.”
I left the television on mute while I called my parents, then Prachi. A crime procedural played. Two detectives surveyed the bloody floor of a New York apartment, traded morbid puns. I was telling my family, then Chidi, that I was okay, that the dude had seemed to have it out for me since I fell down on his cart, that some primal instinct had sent me fleeing.
My mother was weepy, which was infectious, and before I could stop myself, I was crying again. “It’s okay, rajah,” she said. “It’s okay now.” (For a long while after, she talked often, and scathingly, of Minkus, as though critiquing him could undo the horror he had nearly inflicted on her baby boy; she told people this was what happened when you let your brown children go off copying the ways of white people—hunting-schmunting, shooting-wooting.)
I apologized to Prachi—I didn’t have the lehenga, I said. I wasn’t sure where it was.
“Honestly,” she said, after assuring me that what mattered most was my safety. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to wear white, and Amma can suck it up.”
Chidi just whistled. “Fucking A,” he said. “How are we supposed to live forever if you plonk yourself in the middle of shit like this, huh?”
When I was done reassuring everyone, I shoved all the gold under the mattress, left the lehenga on the duvet, and half jogged back to the corner store to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. From the Goodwill next door I grabbed a cheap Hanes T-shirt. Arriving back at the motel, clutching my loot, I found three willowy Indian women, all with the same thick hair, the same sudden widening of the hips, the same swanlike neck, standing outside room 214. One of them was pounding, deliberate and furious.
“Ani,” I said. Three faces turned toward me. Each one a startling inheritor of another. Lakshmi Joshi’s face was lined, but she was curiously youthful in the eyes, which were lighter—wet sand, rather than muddy brown—and more judgmental than Anita’s or Anjali Auntie’s as they assessed me. Anjali Auntie looked the oldest—older even than her mother. Her hair was white and gray in the front, though black around the top and back—it had only been streaked with silver when I saw her in June. It was as though age were imperfectly, somehow unscientifically encroaching.
Each woman had a large bag slung over her shoulder—supplies, I thought, relieved. We could, in moments, eliminate all evidence of the crime.
For a wild moment I had the urge to touch Anjali Auntie’s feet the way my mother once forced me to touch my ajji’s.
“Hi,” I said, and let us all into the room.
Anjali Auntie smiled irresolutely. The frailness of her hand was matched in her face, too.
“This is my grandmother.” Anita lifted her elbow unnecessarily in her ajji’s direction.
Lakshmi Joshi sniffed pointedly.
“Yeah, um. I should shower.” I lifted the mattress up, handed the gold to Anita. In the bathroom, I left the water scalding. Burn me away, I wished it. I emerged, smelling better, to find Anita and her mother watching as Lakshmi swirled some clear liquid in a dish soap bottle.
We gathered into an assembly line, intuitively. I stood at the far edge, pulling tools from bags. Me and the witches three.
The procedure this time was different—a distinct recipe. I laid out on the table several round steel boxes, three long spoons, two more of those dish soap bottles. Lakshmi muttered rapidly, monotonously, trailing through a longer invocation I didn’t recognize. The old woman was efficient, hiking her lavender pallu up her shoulder a few times as it slipped, barely stopping to breathe as she placed each piece of gold in a stone basin. I handed Anita the bottles; she passed them to her ajji. The few times our eyes met I saw that she was as disoriented by the changed procedure as I was. Were we brewing another potion entirely?
Anjali Auntie seemed to need a wall or a chair to hold her up. Once or twice Anita’s ajji looked at her and paused her recitation so the daughter could repeat after the mother in a faint voice. Various liquids were squeezed out, and Lakshmi began to massage the gold. It didn’t liquefy as I remembered. It took on a batter-like quality, thick and jiggly on the surface.
“Light,” Lakshmi Joshi said, breaking her rhythm. Anita extracted a butane canister. I took so many steps backward, I nearly buckled onto the bed.
Anita flicked on the blue flame, which angled steeply over the basin. Then she withdrew the butane. The flame shuddered.
I stepped close enough to feel that halo of heat that still ringed the basin and saw the lavalike b
ubbling of our now-molten gold. There was so little. But at least the stolen goods were one step more alien, one step removed from the crime.
“Where are the lemons?” I asked, pawing through the bags.
“Mama, we forgot them.” Anita’s voice caught.
Lakshmi Auntie’s hand appeared on mine. She steered Anita and me away from the supplies. Her grip was gentler than I’d expected.
“What’s wrong, Auntie?” I said.
“You listen Anita’s mother, now,” the old woman said.
“We won’t need those lemons and all this time,” Anjali Auntie said.
“You’re not going to drink it?” Anita said.
“Come.” Anjali Dayal ran a hand through her strange hair, that weird striping of black and gray. The already stuffy room was suffused with the dizzying smell of the molten metal.
“Sit,” she said. “Let me tell you some things first.”
* * *
• • •
Anjali Dayal treasured the Hammond Creek years when her life was solely hers. Well—hers and her daughter’s. She wanted those precious years to go on forever. She believed they could.
Pranesh, on the West Coast, is at first content to split the family across the coasts. He builds his company in California, while Anjali manages hers (he never thinks of her work as a company, but she does) in Georgia. But after a few years, Pranesh grows tired of living alone, in a rented townhouse, like a bachelor, subsisting on Maggi noodles. His wife and daughter need to follow him west—it’s past time. They rehearse this fight many times.
One night, during the fall of our freshman year of high school, the Dayals snipe at each other over the move for the hundredth time. Pranesh does not want to go on paying a mortgage and rent. Rent, at their age. He is trying to do what he came to America to do, to build something—can’t Anjali see that? And Anjali: Can’t Pranesh see that the thing you come to America to build isn’t software, but a home for a new generation? She invokes Anita. Anita cannot move. Anita’s just started high school. Anjali isn’t sure where her needs end and her daughter’s begin.
They strike a bargain on this fall evening: Anjali tells Pranesh that Anita will have a better shot at Harvard from a private school in Atlanta. “These public schools in the Bay Area, they’re full of too many too-too brilliant Asian kids,” she pitches. Pranesh, who never debates the importance of education, assents. If Anita can get into a private school with a track record of strong Ivy League admissions—a better track record than a South Bay public school—he’ll pay for it, and the women can stay put a few more years.
So, Anjali needs a guarantee. For herself, and for Anita. She knows what a guarantee looks like. She’s seen it bubbling on a stove. She’s even tasted it, once.
Anjali and Lakshmi are not speaking regularly at this point in time. Anjali still nurses the snub of her childhood. That she was never given a dose of the gold her brother drank. That she had to take ambition on Pranesh’s lips, secondhand. She has no desire to humble herself; doing so would mean returning to silenced parts of the past—to Vivek. The Joshis do not talk about Vivek.
But Anjali needs the gold.
So instead she hunts around online. Stumbles upon a few academic publications by a white man, a professor at Emory University, inside the perimeter. His name is Lyall Pratt. He’s written on alchemical and Tantric texts. She decides to seek him out; perhaps whatever her mother did all those years ago belongs to some branch of philosophy or ritual practice that this South Asianist has studied.
In his office, she works up to it, asks him questions about gold, plays a curious, bored housewife. She’s taken with him. He’s a widower, twelve years older than she. Tall, salt-and-pepper-haired, with a background in philology and anthropology and a lithe, yogic body. His eyes are a surprisingly dark brown. By the end of that first meeting, she risks it. Tells him everything she saw her mother do years ago. He is suddenly animated. Keeps saying he heard of these kinds of things when living in the Indian hinterlands. Stories of kings drinking the plunder of their conquered subjects.
He had, he tells her, even trekked with some swamis in search of the mythical gold-laden Saraswati River. The swamis told him that if he brought his wife’s ashes there, the holy water might revive something of what had been lost.
It drove Lyall nearly mad when they couldn’t find the river.
I saw it then: Anjali Dayal and Lyall Pratt leaning into each other beneath the autumn Atlanta sun that year, daring to brush hands as they walk along the old Decatur homes, gold and myth on their tongues, gold and crimson leaves canopying above them.
Lyall helps Anjali confirm Anita’s place at the new school, no gold required. He is from an old Atlanta family; he knows everyone. He makes a call. Anjali listens in as he chats up the admissions committee. She’s in his office, admiring the late-afternoon sunbeams warming the sleek wood of his floors and bookshelves. Dripping from his walls are Indian fabrics, mirrorwork and tinsel, ikat and chungadi prints. India itself is decoration for him. Outside: Atlanta’s Bradford pears are stripped of their foliage. Dead branches rap against windowpanes. Undergraduates scurry to the library. Lyall’s is a security Anjali has never before seen, so free is it of the elbowing and clawing of Hammond Creek. He belongs, effortlessly.
But getting Anita into her new school is not enough. Lyall’s money and power are white. She needs more for her daughter. That spring, the acquisitions begin. Anjali, creeping through suburban homes as onions brown and sabzis simmer in the kitchen. The sizzle and crack of jeera in hot oil as she steals into bedrooms, closets, jewelry cabinets. Choosing the small pieces no one will miss. Reciting to herself: You are the wife of a rich man. You are not the help. If she were caught—and she nearly is, a handful of times—she could talk her way out of it. Snooping, someone would gossip. Who would imagine Pranesh Dayal’s wife to be a cat burglar?
In a chemistry lab at the university, she and Lyall iterate the lemonade formula. At night, she fiddles in her kitchen. At last, she gets it. It doesn’t taste quite the way she remembers her mother’s concoction—she still recalls, vividly, that single stolen sip of Vivek’s brew, decades ago. Lakshmi’s potion was ugly, sour. Anjali has made the lemonade sweet. She’s made it a delight to drink. She’s made it craveable.
At this point in the telling, Anjali Auntie’s eyelids looked heavy, like the weight of the story was exerting excess gravity on her. She turned her face to the window. The drapes were still drawn, but her eyes bore through the curtain, like they were witnessing a private play. Lakshmi Auntie was pacing around the motel room with the energy of a much younger woman.
Anjali has the recipe for Anita’s and my lemonade in hand now. She doesn’t need Lyall anymore, not officially; she could make do alone. But she keeps visiting Decatur. To see him. She stands in Lyall’s backyard in his house off West Ponce de Leon Avenue, clinking white-wine glasses while sitar and tabla music plays. A portrait of Lyall’s late wife, Miranda, eyes them from his bookshelves. They talk about gold, its strange properties, its beguiling histories.
“And I wasn’t only interested in him,” Anjali Auntie said now—and this was the first time she had stated it so boldly. “He and I shared a certain fascination. With alchemy.”
“Alchemy promises more time,” she went on. “See? And he and I both felt we had lost things to time. He had lost years watching his wife die, and grieving her, and all that aged him prematurely.
“Me, I suppose I felt something had been taken from me. I had never been given quite the same chances as my brother, or even Anita. I thought—more time . . . well, it seemed my due.” Her voice turned a little bleating at that last part.
Lakshmi Auntie glanced at the basin. The gold congealed at its edges, a duller shade than I’d seen before. She lifted her sari to her mouth, as though to cover some impolitic expression. She closed her eyes. I was not sure how much she understood of the English
, word by word—we were moving quickly. I wondered if Anita’s ajji was attempting to hear as little as possible about the events leading to today, reserving her energy for the aftermath; she was not there to condone or analyze what had occurred, only to try to put it all to rest as best she could.
And so the affair begins, and with it, Anjali and Lyall’s shared project.
Hours bent over old texts, hours of his hands unfurling in her hair, of forgetting responsibility and risk. They discover ancient recipes, and something begins to change. Anjali is lighter, happier. Her smooth, bronze-patina cheek presses against Lyall’s lighter one, mildly shaded by his graying stubble, which browns with the potions. They must indeed be cheating time, because how else could she be here, how else could the two of them possess all this life and heat when she is supposed to be raising a daughter, being a wife? This is all she’s wanted, for years, though she never had the language for it: a space apart from expectation, purloined pockets of time where she is permitted the sprawl of youth.
Lyall’s emptied garage in the Ponce de Leon Avenue home: bodies knock into beakers. Strange smells, some pungent as fresh ginger, others hot like chili powder. Eerie columns of smoke rise from the vessels. Blue and orange flames irradiate the windowless bunker. Nothing here is as pretty as her lemonade. Often, it’s gloopy, cinnabar red. Another, like souring milk—it comes up from her mouth in foamy vomit; she is rabid. He won’t let her stop. He pushes the vial to her lips, holds her head back, tips it down her throat. “You have to, darling,” he whispers. “You have to.” For the first time, she wonders, as she swallows her bile, if they’ve gone a little mad.
But she’s come to crave these drinks, just as we crave the lemonade. It’s an addiction—to the brews, and to him. She aches for both equally. Once or twice, he wonders aloud if they should slow up. She never allows it.
Lyall and Anjali have had a year together.
Gold Diggers Page 27