Gold Diggers

  Before the forty-niners, in California, were the twenty-niners, in Georgia. They stole the land first from the Cherokee Nation, and then they stole and stole the gold until it was nearly all tapped. And then, after the Cherokee had been forced out, after home itself was purloined, many of those twenty-niners caught wind of Sam Brannan’s call and went West. It was that loud: Gold, gold, gold in the American River! It was the same call my parents heard across oceans, over a century later; the same one Prachi followed to her Victorian on Alamo Square; the same one that had made me both at home in this country and responsible for a great evil.

  The morning after the wedding, I had a few precious hours, and a small pilgrimage to make. I gunned my mother’s car north toward Lumpkin County, and pulled over at a diner near the Dahlonega public square. I ordered sweet tea and a cinnamon roll, and I took out my notebook. I began writing a letter, the kind Wang had told me about. To: Shruti Patel, 2007. I remembered Ramesh Uncle’s philosophy—eternalism. That the past lies just around every bend in the mountain highway. That you can spy it from the right summits. That if the fog lifts without warning, you might find yourself face-to-face with its most vivid outline in the sudden sunshine. That if you kneel by the right stretch of land under the right constellations, it might even rise from a river and acknowledge you.

  To: Shruti Patel, 2007. I wrote to her, as I always do, about the day-to-day rhythms of my life at a given moment. I write until it leads back to her, as it always does. I told her I was sitting in North Georgia, near the place where she and I had been on a field trip during her first years in America. I told her about Prachi’s wedding, about Manu leaving California to try to make Georgia a better home, about how little Anita and I still understood about how to make use of all we’d taken, but about how we were trying to figure that out these days. About how it seemed the most important question we could set our minds to.

  I told her she would have been good at journalism, which was still new and intimidating to me, or at coding, which stumped Anita every day. I wrote to her about how the hardest thing about adulthood, for her, would not have been work, or money, or even making friends, or finding love—she would have met her tribe in college or graduate school, I was sure. You would have had to forgive people, if you’d gone on, I wrote. You would have had to believe that idiots grow up and change. You would have had to be big enough to accept that, or the bitterness might have eroded you. But you would have. You would have found a way to be generous to everyone who was never generous to you. You would have figured out that thing historians and politicians and all the world today is struggling with—the moral weight of the past, how to hold it.

  I finished, signing as I always do: I’m sorry, still sorry, will never not be sorry, your friend, Neil.

  I shut the notebook and got back in the car.

  The historic downtown area was all kitsch and crowds. Pink-skinned people, turkey legs in hand; children on parents’ shoulders, faces painted and stickered. All around, the jangling sounds of the Dahlonega Gold Festival, and the burst of the summer green foliage.

  A man on a stage in high boots and Levi’s was narrating a drama. “That gold fever, kids,” he was telling his audience of openmouthed children, “it just gets into ya and it won’t leave ya. It’s always there.” A family band strummed banjos. People were clapping and dancing beneath the early June sunshine, elbows linking elbows. A few women in laced faux corsets and men in panners’ trousers meandered, passing out brochures for gold hikes and ghost tours. The day, terribly easy. History on everyone like a shrugged-on costume.

  Peals of children’s laughter behind me, as an older sister chased her brother. He toppled, and a decked-out miner raced to help him up, offering the handle of his pick, and life persisted like this, blithe.

  I drove northwest from the square, tailing a station wagon with two bicycles affixed to the top. At some point the wagon pulled off and I followed signs to a trailhead. I set out, hands in pockets. The path was deserted but for a few runners and one old woman walking her regal husky.

  Above, a flutter of warbling birds flapped together, then suddenly split apart, disturbed by something I couldn’t discern. The husky barked. And soon, I found myself on a ridge overlooking the splay of the North Georgia mountains, those rich evergreen summits that rolled out into distant blue shapes just shades away from the sky. Runners’ voices echoed behind me, but I couldn’t make out their words. Cotton ball clouds ringed the higher peaks.

  Below plunged the valley, the state sinking low and deep. Through the trees came an interrupting vein of murky water. A river—perhaps one where, as in the American and the Yuba, someone waded two hundred years ago, caught a bounty in his hands, shouted, Gold, gold, gold in the river, shouted something about the American promise, and intoxicated the world.

  I squatted low on the trail so that the river bled out of view, becoming just a ropy shape hanging between the trees. I knelt, teetering on the precipice, gravity threatening, and dropped my head as in accidental prayer. My vision was filled half by the dimming blue sky and half by the trees blooming verdant before autumn’s hot flare-ups, before winter’s dulling.

  I still want, sometimes, to stand in front of time, to dam it up, halt or reroute its current. But as I pressed myself to that earth, I thought about Anjali Joshi shrinking under the weight of time and Anita beginning to grow larger in it and me, about to take some important strides toward a tomorrow that had long seemed elusive, and I thought that perhaps all this was good, or at least natural. Because I suspect that if I were to change the past, I would have to trace its river back to its primordial estuaries, to some place where all desire began, to the universe before neutron stars rained gold onto Earth. I don’t think I would find, even in those elemental waters, the pure beginning of history, but instead the future already rising up, silt and gold and sweat, slicking across the surface of the water like oil and then drifting on.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe many thanks. Here are some. To Gita Krishnankutty, for the literary genes.

  To Andrew Ridker, who believed in Gold Diggers first and fervently. Without his wisdom and friendship, it would not exist. To Ayana Mathis, for lending her considerable intelligence to an early draft. To Gold Diggers’ other pivotal readers: Lee Cole, Pooja Bhatia, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Wes Williams. To Janelle Effiwatt, who lived with and tended to this book, too. To Charlie D’Ambrosio, for pointing to where the story lay.

  To Amy Parker, Ariel Katz, Diana Saverin, Patrick Doerkson, Ren Arcamone, Sib Mahapatra, and Ted McCombs, for years of literary friendship. To Ginny Fahs, for unswerving support.

  To Varun Nagaraj for furnishing details on 1980s Bombay and IIT. To Shivani Radhakrishnan for shedding light on academic life. To Malathi Nagaraj and Tyler Richard for Sanskrit assistance, Arati Nagaraj for Marathi, and Ishita Chordia for Hinglish. To Rajesh Jegadeesh for lending Neil his old screen name.

  To Sam Chang for making the Iowa Writers’ Workshop what it is. To all those who make the Workshop run, and who funded me there and immediately after, including the Maytag Fellowship, James Patterson, and the Michener-Copernicus Foundation. To the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. To Daisy Soros and the PD Soros fellowship team.

  To Lasley Gober, who made me at home in American literature. To John Crowley, for reading mountains in 2013 and encouraging me after. To Anne Fadiman and Fred Strebeigh, whose teachings remain the cornerstone of my writing education. To several more teachers: Aaron Ritzenberg, Charlie Finlay, David Drake, David Heidt, Emily Barton, Gavin Drummond, Jenny Achten, Josue Sanchez, Justin Neuman, Rae Carson, Rick Byrd, and Tiffany Boozer.

  Finally, to my brilliant agent, Susan Golomb, for her faith, advocacy, and warmth; to Mariah Stovall for the careful reads and for seeing something in the manuscript, and to Writers House Literary Agency. To Ginny Smith Younce, my astute editor and fellow Georgian, whose deep and generous understanding of this book was a boon, and to C
aroline Sydney, who read shrewdly and kept everything running smoothly. And to everyone else at Penguin Press: Ann Godoff, Scott Moyers, Aly D’Amato, Matthew Boyd, Shina Patel, Katie Hurley, Kym Surridge, Juli Kiyan, Sarah Huston, and Mollie Reid. There was no better team to give Gold Diggers a home.

  A Note on Research

  I made use of many books while researching this novel. Epigraphs come from the following sources: The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 30, edited by Max Mueller (1892); The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India by David Gordon White (2012); Manu Smriti via the Sacred Texts archive, and The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands (2002).

  The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger is based on “the Hindu,” one of the chapters in a German travelogue by Friedrich Gerstäcker called Scenes of Life in California, which I accessed via the Library of Congress online. The San Francisco Call announced the death of a “Hindostan” in Happy Valley in 1850. I have borrowed some of its language directly here.

  I further relied on the following texts about the gold rush and its ensuing eras in California, in addition to Gerstäcker and Brands: Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush by Susan Lee Johnson (2000); Foreigners in the California Gold Rush by Seville A. Sylva (1932); Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration edited by Michael Kowalewski (1997); Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Law Men, and Vigilantes by John Boessenecker (1999); The Rush: America’s Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848–1853 by Edward Dolnick (2014); California as I Saw It by William McCollum (1960); Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World edited by Kenneth N. Owens (2002); Returning Thanks: Chinese Rites in an American Community by Paul Anderson Chace (1992 via ProQuest dissertations), and the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.

  On alchemy, in addition to White, I referred to The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton edited by Stanton J. Linden (2003); Indian Alchemy: Soma in the Veda by S. Kalyanaraman (2004); “Alchemy: Indian Alchemy” by David Gordon White in Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Lindsay Jones (2005); and Chinese Alchemy: the Taoist Quest for Immortality by J. C. Cooper (1899).

  I also read and learned from The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein (2000) and The Early History of Gold in India by Rajni Nanda (1992).

  The history Ramesh Uncle refers to comes from many sources, but I want to thank Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee for running the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Anirvan surfaced the San Francisco Call article. Thank you as well as to Samip Mallick and the South Asian American Digital Archive.

  About the Author

  A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more. And her award-winning short fiction has been published in Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Master's Review.

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