The three of them, Shruti and Lyall and Vivek, and perhaps still others I couldn’t even see at all, bent alongside the gold digger and plunged their hands into the river, collecting whatever we were giving back to them.
Our offering seemed meager, but they shone at the sight of it.
The Bombayan began to recede first, like fog lifting, and then the others followed him. In a moment, there was again a sudden shock of crooked yellow light. It came and was gone so quickly, and the night went dark as all the shapes from our past took rest.
I dipped my hand into the now alarmingly cold river, disturbing its stillness.
I didn’t and don’t have a name for what happened that night. In the months that followed, all I got from Lakshmi Joshi and her non-hermeneutical approach to history was that there are some mysteries a person needs to accept, some logics to which we are all subject, whether or not we believe we opted into them.
“We had to give it back,” she said of the gold. “I was not sure. But thought maybe something would happen. To think about gold like some offering.”
Or, like returning offspring to its ancestor.
Perhaps when Anita and Anjali Auntie delivered gold to the river that had run dry of it for so long, they unskewed some sins. Perhaps that night granted Anita’s mother time. For there was time, time during which three generations of women were together, and closer, and known to one another. Time that, over the next few years, came to seem like incontrovertible magic, as Anjali Auntie had good days, days during which she told stories of Bombay in her living room and passed on recipes (to me, never Anita, who was clumsy in the kitchen). Time that, as Chidi would always say, was all everyone wanted—more time for the big and the small, a chance to undo resentments, a chance to witness your child’s future slowly unfurling, a chance to go on another walk around the sun-warmed cul-de-sac.
Then again, perhaps the earth took the gold for itself, sparing us no boon. Perhaps the only magic that night was that a grandmother and a mother and a daughter saw each other more clearly, and that I glimpsed that truth about history, that it flows toward us as we flow toward it, that we each shine sense on the other.
12.
Prachi Narayan and Avinash Kapoor were married on Memorial Day weekend. I announced the matter of Anita to my parents a few months before the wedding. Relations with the Narayan headquarters back in Hammond Creek were chilly, as I’d consulted no one before taking a leave of absence from Berkeley. I needed a chance to write something grounded in the present for a while. I was using the next year to try my hand in the magazine world. History would wait for me.
“We’ve only been seeing each other for about four months,” I reassured my parents. “It’s new.” We’d chosen to begin our count after the expo, rather than before. But I added that it was serious, and that Prachi had invited Anita, and I hoped they’d be welcoming, and that being welcoming entailed not mentioning the Dayal divorce.
My father attempted heartiness: “The whole gang back together again!”
“I’m only saying what everyone’s saying,” my mother said. “Which is that she took him for all he’s worth, poor fellow. Anyway, it is not her fault, that girl growing up in a tarnished home and all. What is Anita doing with herself now? Gotten a good job, I hope? One of you needs to be making some kind of money, what money is there in writing, at least people understand what a professor is.
“Oh! But, Neeraj, have I told you who’s bought the old Dayal house? Third fresh-off-the-boat family moving into the subdivision in six months. I am starting to wonder where all the Americans have gone. Would you believe it, the other day a white family drove into the neighborhood looking for their friend’s house, and they asked some auntie on her afternoon walk if she knew where the Georgemeisters or the Johnsmiths or whoever lived. And this auntie, you know what she said? She told them, ‘There are no foreigners on this street, you are in the wrong place.’ Pah! These new immigrants, very arrogant, they have much more money than Daddy and I did when we moved here, they waltz-faltz into Hammond Creek, and we had to scrimp and save, no idea how hard it was for us . . .”
On the Saturday of the wedding weekend, my father and I vaguely attempted to help with the setup for the mehendi in our backyard but were rendered useless by our masculinity. We stood on the fringes, eating catered samosas, taking in the pleasant chaos playing out in front of us. Cousins and neighbors and the new generation of Hammond Creek Indians gyrated to songs in languages only a fraction of them spoke. Keya and Hae-mi and Maya were all there, having their henna done. Across the grass, Anita was placing one hand on my mother’s shoulder. My mother gestured inside, and Anita entered our basement—which had been finished during the past year, bearing lovely cream carpeting and an untouched exercise room. She came out wielding a flower arrangement in the shape of a heart that read prachi weeds avi. She caught my eye through the mess and gave a small, sweet shrug.
“She is a good girl,” my father said stiffly. “Attractive, too.” I badly wished he hadn’t added that. “Make sure she does not steamroll you. Other than that, I think she may be a very good match.” He belched, a big rippling sound. “Samosas are very oily today.”
I’d been conscripted into folding name cards according to the seating chart, since Prachi had fired her wedding planner at the last minute in a rare fit of fury. This was how I came across a row of Bengali names—cousins of Avi’s sis-in-law, Prachi had written above them on the legal pad. And one name stood out: Ramesh Chakraborty.
It might not be him. Ramesh—a common-enough name. And there were no shortage of Bengalis in Atlanta. But just in case. I moved myself to that table, leaving poor Anita seated with my family.
Sunday morning: a Marriott ballroom inside the perimeter. Prachi, who in the end wore the standard red-and-gold when my mother threatened hunger strike at the prospect of white, led Avi around the fire, which flickered a subdued orange. I found myself scanning the room for the massive shape of Ramesh Uncle. He was such an immense man that I should have seen him if he was there.
On the marital platform there came a hubbub as the officiant—not a priest, but an amateur Sanskrit scholar, a family friend of a family friend—was revealed to have sent Prachi and Avi the wrong way around the fire. My mother’s sister, Kalpana Auntie, hurdled onto the stage, braced Prachi by the shoulders to physically turn her around, and in the process trampled upon the edge of Avi’s trailing sherwani, causing him to knock his forehead against Prachi’s. They righted themselves and laughed, Prachi’s mehendied hand pressing tenderly against Avi’s receding hairline. The error undone, they decided, for good measure, to circle fourteen times rather than the prescribed seven, to plentiful chortles.
I used the commotion as an excuse to stand, making as though I was preparing to help with things up front. I once more swept the bobbling heads. (No tears were visible. This was an unsentimental affair, and besides, too many of us were lost among the Sanskrit. Who knew what promises were being uttered through the untranslated chants?) I thought I saw a knobbed nose, bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows . . . but the profile was too low, belonging to a shorter man . . . oh, but a few rows back, there were Anita’s perennially roving eyes, and she, like me, was glancing about, fidgeting with her old simple gold hoop earrings. Those eyes landed on mine and lit, and lingered, and I momentarily forgot the quest.
One of Prachi’s white sorority sisters leaned over her husband. “Do you throw rice at Indian weddings or is that offensive?” she whispered.
“Why would that be offensive?”
“Because people are starving in India.”
“Sit down,” my cousin Padma hissed. I obeyed. It was the kind of weekend during which one must obey any and all Indian women’s orders. When it was over, Padma and I processed together back down the aisle. Anita smirked gently, for reasons I couldn’t entirely ascertain—maybe at the formalities, or just at how time had landed us in this room now. Pa
dma and I trailed the newlyweds and cousins and Hae-mi and Avi’s best friend from his Hindi a cappella group. The aisle: a facet of the wedding that, during the planning phases, my mother had deemed American nonsense, but that caused her to beam as she, in her emerald-green sari, clutched my father’s arm. For a moment, all the eyes of Hammond Creek were upon her. Her long earlobes sagged from the burden of her jewels.
* * *
• • •
The reception, in the early evening: a buffet line beneath a large white tent in Piedmont Park. Duke white girls stumbled over the hems of their newly purchased saris. Anita was being passed between Hammond Creek aunties who sought news of her mother and, secondarily, her own professional path. She reported to them that she had recently signed up for a computer programming boot camp to become more employable, which garnered her nearly enough favor among the older generation to overshadow the hullaballoo about the divorce. Occasionally, though, she waved me over to rescue her, once even kissing me dramatically on the mouth in front of Mrs. Bhatt. “That’ll give her something else to talk about,” she said, steering me toward the bar for another Mango Monsoon cocktail. “Anjali Joshi’s slutty daughter.”
An hour or so in, I was lurking alone by the buffet, still scanning for the old man. Manu Padmanaban startled me.
“I’ve got literally twenty minutes,” he said, shoving a chunk of pakora in his mouth. He’d moved back to Georgia to attempt to flip the sixth congressional district, which included Hammond Creek. “I’m thinking I’ll live like this for a while,” he said, with a sincerity that felt increasingly rare. “I’ll just go wherever there’s a chance of purpling or bluing a place. It’ll give me a chance to really see America. America-America.”
“Brave of you,” I said, which I meant, though it came out sardonically.
And then I saw him—being led from a maroon sedan parked too close to the tent: an older man, leaning on someone. He had grown smaller. Those intervening years had rubbed away some of his stature, along with the sense I once had of him as standing cosmically outside of time. People parted, seeing only what was visible—an old man being helped to his table.
“Manu!” I shouted. “Best of luck with the blue wave, buddy, but I have to go—”
By the time I reached my table, the son had deposited his father and gone off to the snaking buffet line.
“Ramesh Uncle,” I said, taking my seat next to him.
“Hallo, hallo,” he said, fiddling with the collar of his black button-down. It was poorly tucked into his slacks. He was marvelously underdressed.
“Do you remember me?”
“Very good to see you,” he said, sticking a hand out to shake mine. The knuckles were like ancient tree roots, bumped and ribbed and holding him to the earth.
“We used to talk at the public library, ten—eleven—years ago.”
He blew his nose in a dark gray handkerchief.
“My name’s Neil,” I tried. “You used to tell me all these great historical stories.”
“A very good subject, history,” Ramesh Uncle said, his eyes locking on me. Did any part of his consciousness recognize me?
“I’m studying, well—I sort of study history,” I said. “What I mean to say is that I got into the whole racket in part because of you.”
The other Chakraborty returned. He was all elbows, slight and dark, with handsome white hair. He spoke in the easy Americanized accent my parents had also settled into over the past five or six years.
“Shondeep.” We shook hands. “Cousin of the sister-in-law of the groom.”
“I’m Neil. Brother of the bride. I’ve met your father before.”
Ramesh Uncle’s treelike hands got to work on a mound of white rice and dal makhani.
“We used to hang out, like, over ten years ago, actually,” I said. “At the public library.”
Shondeep’s eyes effervesced. “That was you!”
“He talked about me?”
“Relentlessly! He went on and on about the young man keeping him company in his ‘studies,’ and he was so lonely that summer, my kids had no interest—Baba, do you remember Neil? You two were such good friends!”
Ramesh Uncle looked up from his food. “Quite a long time,” he pronounced.
Indian weddings are memory dungeons. You wander through them and everyone is throwing some version of your past self at you: I saw you when you were sho-sho-shmall . . . sho-sho shweet . . . Remember when you and Prachi did your Radha-Krishna dances and you wanted to be Radha, wore Prachi’s skirt and all? . . . And now, the one person whose memories I hoped would bubble up had, it seemed, no access to them.
“Where did you—where did he go, that summer?” I said. “He just disappeared in July.”
Shondeep thought a moment. “Oh, yes, his brother, my kaka, passed away back in Calcutta, so we left suddenly. He wasn’t so old. But that air, over there . . .”
The woman next to him tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said to me. They began to chat.
Was this just what time did to a person? Would Anjali Auntie look at me soon with those same cloudy, roving eyes? These days, she was prone to long spells of what she called “dreary mind.” She still seemed herself, at least for now—a blessing I privately attributed to that mysterious yellow light flashing above the Yuba River. I wondered, though, if she woke up every morning preparing to do battle with her own memory. If she had to fight daily to hold on to the past, both the precious and the painful parts.
“Ramesh Uncle,” I said. “Do you remember the Bombayan gold digger?”
Ramesh Uncle lowered his dal-encrusted hand from his mouth. “My god, such a tale!”
“You remember?”
“You may find it absurd, young fellow”—I won’t, I nearly said—“but some stories do not leave you alone.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Still, sometimes, it’s quite difficult to reach the past. Almost as though we do not have the right address.” I considered telling Ramesh Uncle that our Bombayan gold digger had likely died months or a year after the beating we’d read about. That no one had known his name at the time of his death. That we were perhaps the only two people who’d sought him. Or that maybe two people looking for you in the past was something, a humble, belated mourning.
A beat, two beats of silence, and I swore I saw something swelling in his expression, but then he trained his attention back on the rice. He glanced up a minute later.
“Good evening, young fellow,” he said. “How is your medical school going?”
A pleasant, dreamy expression took his mouth and eyes. Perhaps it was not frightening to find one’s mind unmoored from time and place; perhaps it was freeing to leave yourself behind.
I felt a hand on my neck, scratching affectionately. Anita. “Your mother wants you,” she said, and I went on looking helplessly at Ramesh Uncle. “Actually, she’s quite annoyed you’re sitting all the way over here, and I am, too. . . . Your cousin Deepak is a nightmare; he’s told me three times how much his Tribeca apartment costs.”
And then I was carted away; hands were on me, and someone pinched my cheeks and told me how much I looked just-the-same, only sho-sho-handsome now, what was I doing these days, writing?! Really?! Well, what did I hope to do with that?! (“Write,” I said, to no laughs.) There was saffron pound cake being shoved in my mouth by fingers adorned with gemstones, and photographers wanted the families here, then there, and then here again. There was my brief toast—I was still known, unfairly, as the public speaker of the family; I read a Neruda poem in lieu of offering original thoughts, in part to keep from choking on the something sentimental that was coursing through the air. Soon, Prachi, feeling empowered on wedding champagne, summoned the Narayan nuclear family onto the dance floor and made us sway in a tiny circle with her to some high-pitched Hindi croon.
The next time I looked, after t
he Narayan family dance and the Kapoor family dance and the Narayan-Kapoor family dances, he was gone.
Anita suffered through several songs, patiently screwing-in-the-lightbulb and patting-the-dog at my mother’s elbow, before tugging me over to the dessert table, where we were hidden from view by the vat of gulab jamuns. Her skin glistened with sweat, nearly as bright as the silver-gray glimmer of her blouse. She mopped her brow with her pale pink dupatta.
She pulled her heels off and rested her wrist on my knee with just enough flounce to indicate tipsiness.
“I’m sorry about the table settings.” I took a breath, preparing to explain all about Ramesh Uncle, and the matter of the Bombayan gold digger, and all that I felt had been lost. The fiction I’d wished was true. But I exhaled, and the words left me along with the breath. “And I’m especially sorry about Deepak.”
“He kept hitting on me.” My face must have puckered. “I told him you and I had been promised to one another years ago and that our families are expecting a suitable shaadi any day now.”
She was rolling her eyes as I stared at her very seriously. “Oh, I was joking,” she said. “Don’t be gooey.”
I brought my face close to hers. Our lives existed in this realer plane now, the one she’d exhorted me to accept. And while sometimes that meant I missed the mysterious patina that had once shrouded her, at other times, times like this, I saw that everything I’d ever wondered about was much closer at hand.
Just then, I looked at her and thought it seemed less that things had been lost than that they were being found, over and over again.
* * *
• • •
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