Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 Sanjena Sathian

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sathian, Sanjena, author.

  Title: Gold diggers : a novel / Sanjena Sathian.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020022222 (print) | LCCN 2020022223 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984882035 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984882042 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: East Indian Americans—Fiction. | Magic realism (Literature) | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.A8187 G65 2021 (print) | LCC PS3619.A8187 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022222

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022223

  ISBN 9780593298671 (export)

  Cover design: Stephanie Ross

  Cover illustration: Misha Gurnanee Gudibanda

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Usha, Krish, and Tejas Sathian

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Golden Children

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: Panning

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Research

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  In the middle of Bombay there was, for many years, a certain squat building that served as a beacon for the city’s ambitious. It was smog-licked and wedged between a halal butcher and a chai shop, with a sign that flickered neon blue: the goswami classes. Underneath, in faded lettering streaked with bird droppings: physics studies chemistry studies maths studies | best choice for scholars. A practiced eye could spot the sign from the Dadar flyover, or from the pedestrian bridge above the train station.

  One evening in 1984, thirteen-year-old Anjali Joshi pressed herself against the balcony of her family’s fifth-floor flat and examined the neon from her elevated angle, fiddling with her two long plaits and smoothing her plaid school uniform. Anjali hoped to glimpse her older brother Vivek exiting the school after his extracurricular tuitions, his figure knocking shoulders with the clever neighbor boy, Parag. All the strivers shaded blue.

  Vivek had lately stopped paying her much mind, and the world had become suddenly lonely. Once, her brother and his friends in the housing society had played cricket with her behind the building, bowling the ball with noodly and forgiving arms. But now, Vivek’s afternoons were reserved for studying, often with the wolfish, swarthy Parag, who was overgrown for his age, with a habit of grinding his teeth as he did problem sets, as though chomping hungrily on tough meat.

  Anjali did not see Vivek, so she returned to her own chemistry papers—ordinary papers, unblessed by the legendary Ratan Goswami, who handpicked his students, anointing those who would matriculate at the Indian Institutes of Technology and later make their way to the highest echelons of the nation’s industry—or to America. Anjali’s parents had not entered her into such a pool. She was a daughter. It had never occurred to the Joshis that Anjali might want for herself what they wanted for Vivek. It had never occurred to Anjali to want very much at all.

  On this particular day, she chewed on an eraser, lying on her stomach on the dusty floor and wishing for some relief from the heat. Even the drench of the monsoon would be preferable to the dryness of April in Dadar, where you could forget that Bombay bordered the sea, that a few miles away the air might salt your skin and you might see something like a beyond.

  Anjali’s eyes drooping, she righted herself so she could see the highest curves of the letters in the cram school sign. Inside, the bulky figure of Ratan Goswami would be rat-a-tatting his chalk on the board as he drilled students. Young’s modulus is? Atmospheric pressure is? External torque is? At this hour, Vivek would be scribbling his last lines on graph paper before trudging home to inhale a small molehill of rice, then plunging back into his bedroom for more swotting. His body was growing slender, like a mongoose’s, the longer he studied.

  Anjali lifted her head at the click of a key in the lock. Her mother glanced at her daughter only briefly, then made for the kitchen. In the afternoons, while Vivek was under Ratan Goswami’s supervision, Lakshmi Joshi mingled with the other ladies in the housing society, bragging about her two sons—Dhruv, who was in America, and Vivek, who would soon be abroad, too. Anjali heard her mother coming and going, the boys’ names always on her tongue, her own name never uttered.

  In the kitchen, Anjali’s mother reached into her sari blouse and deposited something on the Cuddapah stone counter. As Lakshmi squatted to fidget with the rusty petroleum gas cylinder, Anjali padded closer to see the glint of the furtive object: a small, plain gold coin, the sort a family member might give a young boy for good luck.

  “Ithna nigh, out of the kitchen while I’m doing this,” Lakshmi snapped.

  Anjali obeyed, retreating with her chemistry papers to the dining table, but stealing glances. Her mother boiled water in a saucepan, reached for the masala dabba, shook some soil-brown powders into the hot liquid, and began to sing something like a prayer, passing through each phrase as though passing the beads of a mala from finger to finger. At one point, Lakshmi left the kitchen and stepped into the alcove in the hallway, where the family kept their altar—pink and blue gods and haldi and kumkum and bells on a bronze plate. She returned to the kitchen pressing two figurines against her breasts and set them on the shelf above the stove. The sandalwood eyes of the goddesses of prosperity and education surveyed the proceedings.

  Lakshmi tilted the pot, just enough that Anjali could see the coin slip from her fingers and splash on the surface. Anjali stood on her tiptoes in time to see the liquid in the pot react—a little yellow whirlpool formed and swallowed the gold, as though the brew had been awaiting this addition.

  “Aiyee,” she ventured. “What is it?”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Lakshmi said. “This is for Vivek.”

  With practiced ease, her mother lifted the pot with tongs and held it high above a steel tumbler, like a street tea seller. Liquid ribboned out between the two vessels: a perplexing, deep-yellow flicker. It caught the muted evening sunlight streaming through the flat.

  The door opened, and there came the sounds of scuffling in the hallway, Vivek and Parag, briefly unburdened of their studies. Anjali heard them making plans for a round of cricket, then lowering their voices before a burst of conspiratorial laughter. There would be no cricket; she knew Vivek would fall asleep over his coursework before there was time for games.

  “Aiyee!” Vivek called, kicking off his street-dirt-streaked chappals. Lakshmi swiveled, hand still inches from the fire, and her flinty gaze fell on Vivek. He straightened, and Anjali swore he shuddered as he saw what swished in the tumbler. He glance
d back over his shoulder, as though hoping Parag might call him away. But Parag had gone. The open door swung on its hinges. At the drift of outside air, the gas stove shuddered. Its flame hued the same witchy blue as the Goswami sign. Lakshmi switched it off.

  * * *

  • • •

  Many years later, Anjali stood in her own kitchen in Hammond Creek, Georgia. Her daughter slept upstairs. Her husband was miles away. In the suburban somnolence, the only noise was of a long metal spoon clinking against a glass pitcher as she stirred. She brought just the edge of the spoon to her mouth. A small pink tongue darted out to taste the thing that still seemed forbidden. Was it tangier? Too sour? She had tried her mother’s drink only once, briefly, surreptitiously. But she suspected her iteration was not yet right. That seemed to happen in migration. The old recipes were never quite the same on this side of the world.

  Part One

  GOLDEN CHILDREN

  May this gold which brings long life and splendor and increase of wealth, and which gets through all adversities, enter upon me for the sake of long life, of splendor, and of victory.

  —from the Grihya-Sutra of Hiranyakesin, Vedic text

  As in metal, so in the body.

  —Rasarnava, Hindu treatise on alchemy

  1.

  When I was younger, I consisted of little but my parents’ ambitions for who I was to become. But by the end of ninth grade, all I wanted for myself was a date to the Spring Fling dance. A hot one. The dream was granted, by chance. Finding myself unaccompanied in the final days before the event, I begged my neighbor and childhood best friend, Anita Dayal, to take pity on me. Fine; I could be her “escort,” she allowed, putting the word in air quotes as we readied for that rather fateful night.

  Before the dance, I was set to meet Anita and our crowd at the mall. We’d take photos outside the TCBY, all trussed up in our Macy’s finery. My mother deposited me on a median in the middle of the parking lot, early, then sped off to my older sister’s picture party. Prachi had been nominated for Spring Fling court and was living a more documentable high school life. Prachi, the Narayan child who managed to be attractive and intelligent and deferential to our cultural traditions to boot, was headed to Duke, we were all sure. Earlier that day, cheeks blooming with pride, my mother had fastened a favorite, slim gold chain of her own, gifted by our ajji, around Prachi’s neck. My sister kissed my mother’s cheek like an old, elegant woman and thanked her, while I waited to be dropped into my own small life, in an ill-fitting suit.

  I waited on the median, growing anxious. There was no sign of Anita. I paced and fidgeted, watching the others pin corsages and boutonnieres, and readied myself, after fifteen minutes, then twenty, to give up and trek down one of those horrible sidewalk-less stretches of great Georgia boulevard back home to Hammond Creek. I was already turning away from the fuss, attempting to loosen my father’s congealed-blood-colored tie, when Anita and her mother screeched up in their little brown Toyota. I knocked my knee against the concrete dolphin-adorned fountain and shouted, “Shit!”

  A wall of mostly Indian and Asian parents regarded me with a collective glare. Yes, I consisted largely of my parents’ ambitions, but some part of me was also made of the ogling, boggling eyeballs of the rest of our community.

  And another part—a significant part—was Anita, who was now stepping out of the double-parked car, smiling blithely. Anita had bright eyes: muddy brown, lively, roving, liable to flick over you quickly, as though there was something else more interesting or urgent in your vicinity. It made you want to stand squarely in her line of vision to ask for her full attention; when you got it, it felt like the warming of the late-morning summer sun.

  “Neil, I told her we were late, but stubborn girl wouldn’t listen!” Anita’s mother, Anjali Auntie, said. She was dressed like she planned to attend the dance herself, in a bright green sheath framing her breasts, a dress that reminded me she was unlike other mothers.

  “I got invited to Melanie’s picture party first,” Anita said. “I IM’d you!”

  A betrayal: cherry-cheeked and universally admired Melanie Cho had laughed off my invitation to the dance weeks before, leaving me itchy with self-loathing. Anita’s grin—the grin of the newly anointed popular—matched the crystal studding along her bright blue bodice.

  Anjali Auntie positioned us shoulder-to-shoulder. Anita linked her arm through mine so the insides of our elbows kissed. This was how we’d been posed in Diwali photos as kids, when our families got together and Prachi dressed Anita up as Sita and assembled a paper crown for me, her spouse, Lord Rama. The posture suddenly seemed foreign.

  There was no time to be angry. I smiled. In the photos, I am washed out. She, in electric blue and crystal, beams, her eyes settled somewhere just above the camera lens.

  The dance: People were learning to inch closer to each other, and some girls didn’t mind the short guys’ heads bobbing below theirs, and some guys didn’t mind the girls with braces. The teachers on chaperone duty patrolled the bathrooms, where kids who were not my crowd might engage in “nonsense,” as my mother put it, nonsense that was inaccessible to me at the time.

  As with any other event at Okefenokee High School, the room was semi-segregated. A handful of white kids mosh-pitted in the middle of the party; others made their way to those nonsense-filled bathrooms or the parking lot. The good-looking Indian and Asian girls hung by the long banquet table. The debate, math Olympiad, robotics, etc., Indians and Asians were the likeliest ones to be bopping around, because though none of us could really move, the dancing offered a prescribed activity for the evening, a script. I depended on scripts in those days, before anyone asked me to invent my own life.

  I followed Anita onto the floor, expecting to join the circle dancing around Hari Chopra, who was attempting to prove his B-boy abilities to the Kanye song that was ubiquitous that year, flicking a finger across an imaginary flat-brimmed hat in the warm-up. But Anita veered toward a cluster of girls that included my sister and Melanie. I stopped at the edge of the squeaky gym floor in my dress shoes, which were vast, boatlike, slippery, and made me sweat.

  “Anita,” I whispered frantically, but she mouthed, Just a second, and darted into the girl cluster—as though she was crossing the finish line in a race I hadn’t known she was running. She’d grown spritely and uncatchable lately, always squinting at a secretly looming horizon line.

  I didn’t see my date again until the end of the evening, let alone dance with her. The ghost of her touch on me—the inside of her elbow against the inside of mine—lingered on my skin. I felt insubstantial.

  I spent the party with Kartik Jain and Manu Padmanaban and Aleem Khan and Jack Kim and Abel Mengesha (who was Ethiopian but clocked most of his time with the Asians), avoiding Shruti Patel, with whom Manu had agreed to come, and whose electrified bristly hair and eager gopher teeth discomfited us. Jack was counting the girls he’d made out with at computer camp the year before, in an effort to overcome the fact that he was here tonight alone. I had been at that camp and knew the single kiss he’d received was dumb luck, the result of a double dog dare.

  I was supposed to return home with Anita and her mother at ten—their house sat catty-corner from ours in the Hammond Creek cul-de-sac. Ten; I only had to last till ten. I watched the egg-shaped clock on the wall above the banquet table tick. I drank the sugary punch; it stained my tongue Coke-can red.

  Just before nine thirty, people began to gather for the announcement of Spring Fling royalty. At the swell of a tantalizingly sex-infused slow song—Crash into me, and I come into you—I went looking for Anita. I wound through the gym, all elbows and too-long hair that curtained the top of my vision. No Anita. No Prachi. I sidestepped out of the gym and down the hallway carpeted in green and gray—the swampy colors of Okefenokee High School. It occurred to me that I might find the girls in the parking lot. The parking lot, full of nonsense.

  I
pushed open the first door I encountered, missing, in my annoyance, the sign that read emergency exit. The alarm wailed. People’s hands flew to their ears, and heads turned toward me. A white guy gripped a handle of some clear verboten substance. Someone cursed. Someone shrieked. Someone laughed. I stood mute as they scattered. When Coach Jameson came striding outside to bust up the party, he noted my presence, held up a large, meaty finger, and said, “Wait there.” I froze, darkened by the shadows behind the gym.

  Girls were crying. Not Anita, I don’t think. It took a lot to make her cry. From somewhere came my sister’s voice, in the buttery lilt that never failed her: “Coach, I just came out here to find my necklace, it fell off, it’s my grandmother’s, you know I don’t drink—”

  “I’ll ask, missy,” he said. “What were you doing to cause you to, ahem, lose a necklace?”

  I shuddered and didn’t catch Prachi’s reply because Anita stood behind me, propping open the door whose alarm had at last been killed.

  “Neil, get inside, you’ll get in trouble,” she whispered. Her glossed lips quivered and for a moment I was suffused with a premonition that something phantom wished to be spoken aloud but that no one—not me, not the people around me—could find the language. Anita clamped her mouth shut and blinked very fast, as though beating back that ghost, and there we remained, still rooted to our finite asphalt selves.

  I said Prachi was out there and it didn’t sound good. “The coach already saw me,” I added. “I’m not supposed to move.”

  “Are you kidding me, Neil?” Anita was framed in the doorway as the hallway light streamed out around her. “My mom’s waiting, like, right now.”

  “I wasn’t drinking.”

  “I know you weren’t drinking,” she said. No, more like—“I know you weren’t drinking.” I wondered how she had come by all her new wisdom, how she had grown so fast, so far ahead of me. “Did you set off the alarm?”