But then Pranesh restarts the old fight. Anjali and Anita must move. To California. He plans to put the Hammond Creek house on the market. He needs liquidity for the company, and claims Anita stands a chance at Harvard from the South Bay public schools. He says it wouldn’t matter, anyway, if she got into Harvard and he couldn’t pay. Anjali fights back. Which causes Pranesh to suspect something. He threatens to cut her off. “I have been patient,” he warns her. “Indulgent.”
And then, Shruti.
When I tell Anjali the news, she thinks bitterly: Perhaps this is why we age, placing a hand on my neck. So that someone makes the right decisions. The world seems to be telling her that leaving Hammond Creek, and Lyall, is the adult thing to do. He tries to reason with her, even arrives at the mustard yellow house on the night the Dayals are hosting a party, the very last night I see Anjali Dayal for a decade. I catch a glimpse of him, pulling up by the Walthams’ house. I walk home while they argue in plain sight. He begs her to consider being with him, not to be so trapped in her own culture. She dares him: Would he pay for Harvard? Parent Anita? His silence is all the answer she needs; her daughter is just a story to him.
* * *
• • •
Next to me, Anita sniffed. She had been as stony as a practiced meditator as we listened to her mother; her ajji, across the room, was similarly unmoving. I was afraid to look at Anita, for she had never liked anyone witnessing her vulnerability. I reached to hold her small hand in my larger one, gripped it so my muscles clenched and my ears popped.
Anjali Auntie, drawing me out of myself, just as she used to in the Hammond Creek basement: “Do you know why so many alchemists died, Neil?”
I shook my head—I didn’t seem to know anything at all, in that moment—but then a phrase returned to me, from a college history-of-science class. Mad as a hatter.
“Mercury poisoning is often incurable and often deadly,” she said in a terrible monotone. “And it’s a key ingredient in most alchemical rituals. You end up ingesting fumes. We drank it, too. A lot of it. I thought I’d found some methods the rasasiddhis—the Hindu alchemists—never knew in order to make it safe.” She scoffed. “Lyall believed me. That, or he was too hooked to object. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell when mercury starts affecting you. The symptoms can seem like something else. Depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s.” Her hand—her shaky hand—clutched her kneecap. “Your kidneys fail. A lot fails after that.”
“Why couldn’t you have drunk all the gold we were taking?” I burst.
“So much,” Anita whispered. “There was so much, Mama.”
Anjali Auntie shook her head, a professorial reprimand. We knew better. “Alchemy is bigger than that. We didn’t want to steal someone else’s ambitions. That’s petty, small-time. We were trying to steal from the universe, you could say. Steal time itself.”
Lakshmi Joshi stood, tracing the basin with her finger. Her eyes bore into that lumpy smelted metal. More than ever now, she seemed deaf to what we had just listened to; she was pacing some other plane, a plane where it was not too late.
“I didn’t see symptoms for a while,” Anjali Auntie said.
In Sunnyvale, she is miserable. She cannot find work. Her daughter hardly speaks to her, blaming her for Shruti’s death. Pranesh says he’s heard things. Says he knows what she is. He has learned the phrase gold digger—it’s on every radio station, on all the airwaves that year; even Pranesh cannot avoid it. He pushes, he pounds things, he shouts.
Slowly, Anjali starts to notice she is growing older. Lines and spots and a need for reading glasses and a back that twinges, sometimes spasms. She thinks at first that it is just the natural process. But then it seems to speed up. Isn’t she too young to have these tremors? To be forgetting things with enough frequency that she loses multiple jobs? She develops abstract suspicions: that time, in a way, is having its revenge on her. And then finally she admits it to herself. The mercury—and a few of the other untranslatable substances—are extracting their particular biochemical price. She researches chelation therapy, but what would she tell the internist when the lab work comes back?
She does not know how much damage she did to herself. Is she dying, too? Well, we’re all dying; is she dying faster, sooner, now? Is it the quality of time she’s ruined? Is it why she has a prescription for sleeping pills, why she sometimes shakes them out on her bathroom counter to imagine all of them clunking against one another in her stomach?
Anita inched away from me and placed her head in her mother’s lap. Anjali Auntie ran one hand through her daughter’s hair, her gaze fixed on the wall opposite, as though she was reading what came next on the sickly yellow motel wallpaper.
“Lyall got back in touch two years ago. He showed up at the house.”
Pranesh: answering the door, belly protruding, eyebrows grown into one long caterpillar, facing this man in horn-rimmed glasses with now fully white hair. Lyall was always slender but is now emaciated. A neighbor in a sun hat fiddles in his garden, pausing his spade at the surface of the soil, craning his neck to gauge what juicy scene is playing out at the Dayals’ front door.
Lyall tells Anjali he’s at Berkeley now. He, too, is sick. He blacks out, hallucinates. He is aging unnaturally. Anjali speaks with him in the backyard, beneath the citrus trees. She stays feet away from him, her back against the sliding glass door, while Pranesh harrumphs in the kitchen, eyes on them both. Anjali suspects Lyall has gone on drinking the brews from the Hammond Creek days, that he never detoxed as she did. Which explains why he looks so much worse, as though he’s survived a war.
After that, she goes to see Lyall at Berkeley a few times. They aren’t together-together. He needs tending. At this point, it’s a battle for months, maybe a year. “There must be something I can do,” she insists, because this is something she knows how to do—to orient her life around another person’s problems.
He says he has one hope—part of the reason he came to California. He still thinks about the promise the swamis made him. About the placer-lined Saraswati River, containing the holiest gold. Gold untouched by human madness and cravings. Gold that’s pure enough to extend one’s time. He knows there are only meager flecks left in Californian rivers. But he prays these waters can heal him. He and Anjali drive out to the American River, to the Sacramento, to the Trinity, to the Feather, to the Yuba.
She is always at the wheel, while he sits in the passenger’s seat. His forehead bounces against the glass as he dozes. Rainless clouds obscure the Sacramento Valley sun. Cornfields reach for the dry gray sky. Each time they arrive at a riverbank, they remove their shoes and wade into the water, splashing each other, copying gestures described in texts. Once, a historical reenactor in suspenders and Levi’s warns them not to keep their mouths open if they don’t want the worst fucking runs for weeks.
And?
And, nothing. The rivers are just rivers.
There is a moment, though. Once, at the South Yuba River State Park. When they step toward each other in the water. They swivel their heads to the far bank to see a white woman and a brown man. Lyall sobs. Anjali breathes heavily. The woman looks so like Miranda. The man reminds Anjali of Vivek. They paddle across the water.
When they reach the other side, their bare feet slip on the slimy rocks, and the woman is laughing and the man is not Indian but Hispanic. “What are you guys doing in there?” the woman asks. Her accent is all middle America twang. Miranda was English. “You really meet some crazies in California.”
Lyall dies. There wasn’t enough pure gold left in the waters to undo the mercury poisoning. It’s nearly all sapped up, by pans, by Long Toms, by barges, by dredges, by hydraulics, by the interminable yearning we share with so many other players in the long drama of history.
* * *
• • •
Anjali Auntie lifted her shirtsleeve to her eyes. “I’m sorry you put yourselves a
t such risk. If I’d known—if my mother had clued me in, or one of you . . . I would have told you, there’s no point. It’s too late for whatever blessing that wedding gold might’ve given me.”
Anita began to dig in the bags. “Mama,” she said metallically, “you need ibuprofen. A hot water bottle? Or, no. Is there an ice machine?” Her hair fell over her face, obscuring her features. Here she was, taking refuge in the hard edges of efficiency. Never one to dwell in grief or fear, or love. Then she looked at the basin next to her, at the gold that had settled into something pudding-like. “What do we do with this?” she muttered.
Which was when Lakshmi Joshi rose from her position perched on the desk chair. Her light eyes flicked themselves alive. Had we reached her plane now? A plane where something could be done?
Lakshmi Auntie said, matter-of-factly, her English clear but tentative, “We put it in river.”
Like dumping a body.
“That’s it?” I said.
Anita’s grandmother rapped the vessel. “You take. Neeraj, you take.”
“You didn’t know about any of it?” I asked her, hoisting the basin to my hips obediently. “The alchemy, the—the affair?”
“Absolutely I did not know. If I knew, I would not have said go chase bridal gold. I would have done some other thinking.” She took my elbow, unconcerned about overburdening me, and shuffled beside me. “So last night after Anita’s mother tells me all this, I sit and think for a long time. New rite I am trying. Let us see.”
“Where did you learn all this, Auntie?”
She pursed her lips and smacked them a few times. “You pick up things from mother, mother’s mother, mother’s sister. Like recipes. Cannot remember who starts it all.”
Behind me, Anita carried out the Manish Motilal lehenga. We descended the stairs to the parking lot. I placed the basin in my passenger’s seat, covered it with my dirty T-shirt.
Anita was in an authoritative mood now. “Drive. We’ll follow you, Neil.”
We squeezed through the narrow streets in that neatly gridded downtown and arrived at Sally’s Saloon, with its swinging doors. We parked and passed the red Taoist Bok-Kai temple. I was holding the basin against my belly like a large pumpkin. Anjali Auntie stopped for a moment in front of the temple’s high red gate. Anita was helping her grandmother up the steps that preceded the slippery gravel slope down to the riverbank.
Anjali Auntie turned from the red pillars of the temple.
“Do you know . . . ?” I began, and then stopped myself.
“How long I have?” Those white-gray streaks framing her face were handsome.
“Yeah.”
“No.” Her voice didn’t break. “It’s been bad since moving here. But the last few months, since Lyall died, have been even worse.” Above us were the two dark shapes of Anita and her ajji, blending into each other. Anjali Auntie’s eyes flitted a few centimeters to the right, locking on the taller, slimmer figure. “Ani must be furious at how little I told her.” Her bark-colored eyes locked on mine. “But I haven’t seen much of her in the last two months. She has secrets, too.”
I looked away, flushing.
So up the steps we went, Anita’s mother’s elbow crooked through mine, until the four of us stood looking down at the sand-and-pebble bank. We were alone, us and the slow, gurgling rapids.
“Ajji won’t be able to make it down,” Anita said. Lakshmi Auntie spoke quickly in Marathi, gestured, and then tapped the basin.
Anita blinked very fast a few times as though to beat back emotion. I had almost forgotten my own heightened pulse from earlier in the day when I’d seen three words beaming up from my phone: I love you. It seemed wrong that the declaration had not been followed by a sudden stabilizing of the world.
“Anita,” I said, still gripping the basin. The gold clotted at its edges like dairy left in the heat. It seemed eons away from what I’d been stuffing into my pockets and bag at the expo. “Can I have a word with you?”
She glanced over the water, at the lowering sun, and said, “Yes, but quickly, Neil.” And I was consumed with a version of the feeling I’d had all the time as a child, that sense that privacy draped her, that she could not or would not lift it long enough to look directly at me. Except this time she turned, followed me a few paces away from her mother and grandmother, and let her lips briefly brush my clavicle. I felt the hot poignancy of her breath on my T-shirt, on my chest hairs. Her hands gripped the basin; her touch was so light that it was at first just there for balance, but then, before I knew it, she had taken the full weight of it out of my hands and into hers. The air felt icy on my palms.
“I just wanted some help,” I said. “From this gold. I know it’s too late now, I know it’s probably not potable, or whatever.” She was shaking her head rapidly. “I’m not asking for it. I’m not. But I want you to understand why I let it make me crazy. I just wanted something to make everything less scary. Sometimes I can’t imagine ever feeling at home anywhere in the world, or with anyone at all.”
“I know,” she said. “Everyone’s afraid, Neil.” Then she whispered, “Would it be so wild to try to do this relationship on realist terms?”
The evening was going dark around us. “Look at them, my grandma and my mom,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at her two progenitors. Her mother was looking decidedly away, while Lakshmi Auntie’s gaze remained on us. “Look how far they’ve had to travel in their lifetimes. We don’t have to do those distances, Neil. We just have to figure out how to be at home right here. That’s so much easier. That’s so lucky.”
There were her lips on my clavicle again, and everything was both the same as always and also entirely, infinitely, promisingly new.
* * *
• • •
I waited at the top of the hill with Lakshmi Auntie while Anita and her mother picked down the slope together. Anita with the gold. Her mother, holding her wrist. The two of them faded into each other in a single shared form. I had that sense I’d had about them when I was a teenager—that some part of each one was indistinguishable from the other. I felt awkward and tongue-tied standing next to Anita’s ajji.
“So. You are writer,” she said.
“Oh! No. Just a grad student.” I turned to see that her lined face was impassive.
“Anita says you are writer. You’re writing book.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Only a dissertation no one will ever read.”
She folded her arms. Surveyed the beach. Anita and her mother were now lost to the darkness. “You should write book,” she said. “That is how you make career.” I imagined Lakshmi Joshi looming over Vivek as he turned wraithlike from all the swotting. She was so small, and yet imposing, and had that older-Indian manner about her that refuses excuses.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Write a big book. Adventure story. Mystery story. Sell many copies. I tell Anita these things, too. Your parents did not come so far for you to write nothing-things, for her to plan parties.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Good boy.”
Then the sound I’d been waiting for rose up from the bank—a splash, like a bundle of heavy bricks puncturing the surface of still water. The gold, in the river. And I remembered then, that story Anjali Auntie had told me years earlier, about King Midas. How he shook his fingers into a river to wash away the curse he’d wished upon himself, which he’d first believed to be a blessing. How when the water took the golden touch from him, the earth earned back some of its precious stores. How other people panned for it, amassing little synecdoches of Midas’s fortune for generations. How the burden was lifted and shared, and in that way turned back into a gift.
“Hai Raam,” whispered Lakshmi Joshi, which meant she saw what I saw. “I hoped. Something to happen.” Right at the spot where the two rivers forked into each other, the twin waters shuddere
d, briefly, like a fault line had been activated. And then came a flash, soundless, and the river turned a pale yellow, the hue of the dregs of lemon juice.
I raced downward. The sky above was still alight. The river, still that lemon shade. I approached the riverbank, where I dipped my fingers into the yellow water. I kicked my shoes off, rolled up my jeans, and stepped in. It was not as cold as it should have been.
I thought I saw, to my left, Anita and her mother standing ankle-deep in the river, but my eyes were not on them. I was looking instead across the water.
Crouched on the far side of the river was a dark man. His hair was rumpled and full of cowlicks. I recognized him. I might have called out, but I did not know his true name. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and his arms were partially submerged in the water, as though he was collecting something.
A trickle of gold—brighter and bolder than the yellow of the rest of the water—was swimming neither downstream nor upstream but from our bank to his. Briefly, I tore my eyes away to see if Anita and her mother were looking, too. They were. I snapped my head back, half-afraid he’d be gone. He wasn’t. He bent over, arms in the water. We all stood there like hunters watching a deer pad through brush. After a minute, or a few, the yellow began to fade, and the stream of gold grew distant until it all seemed to gather on the other side. My Bombayan gold digger was standing and shaking a pan.
And from the pan drifted the misty shape of a man; his white hair caught the moon’s glow. His head was turned in the direction of Anjali Auntie, as though he could not see me at all. And another figure: a young man, early twenties at best, whose impish smile I could see even from here; he, too, looked at Anjali Auntie, his younger sister. And then a third: a girl with frizzy hair and a glower that I couldn’t see from here but that was surely there, wrinkling her face. I waited to make out her expression—if I could just see how she looked upon me from death to life, then maybe I’d know if I had been or would be forgiven, one day. But it was just the shape of her, distinct yet cloudy, so all I knew was that she was regarding me. I didn’t know if I’d ever know how to parse that regard. I took one step toward them on the rocky bank, but their figures seemed to quiver, as though at risk of dissipating if I got too close, so I stayed where I was.
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