Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  I nodded miserably.

  “Dude,” Anita said. “People go out the food delivery door.” She pointed. She spoke rapidly, percussively, with a bravado that might have masked her nerves at being so near trouble.

  “C’mon, kid.” Coach Jameson led his small troupe of prisoners inside, beckoning me with that meaty finger, holding the alcohol pinched in his other hand like a used rag. The captured students followed, heads bowed—two white guys I didn’t know, Katie Zhang, Mark Ha, Prachi. My sister mouthed, What? at me while Coach Jameson looked Anita up and down and added, “And you, rubbernecker.”

  “I just got here, Coach,” Anita said. Her voice caught in her throat before she switched to a clipped tone like the sort my mother used on work calls. I could feel her straining to be someone with whom she had not yet become fully acquainted. “Actually, we were trying to leave. My mom’s outside, you can ask her—”

  “Y’all well know not to be in the parking lot.”

  “I just got worried, see,” she tried again, in a slightly sharper pitch. “Because—”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Anita Dayal.”

  “And yours?”

  “Neil Narayan.”

  He repeated. “Anita Dial. Neil Nay-rannan. Y’all’re freshmen?”

  “Yes, sir,” Anita said.

  “Stay away from this crowd,” Coach Jameson said grandly. “Getcherselves home.”

  He escorted his captured cool kids past us. The scent of our innocence—or mine, anyway—was strong enough to overpower everything else.

  Some kids my age drank alcohol, but I was afraid to, not because of the things the health class teacher cautioned would happen to your body and brain but because of my mother’s warnings that engaging in nonsense could abort all you were supposed to become, could in fact abort the very American dream we were duty-bound to live out. Take the case of Ravi Reddy, whose parents had shipped him to Hyderabad to finish high school upon smelling beer on his breath. No one had heard from Ravi since, but my mother had hinted that she and my father were not above taking a leaf out of the Reddys’ book.

  I would not have wished such a fate on anyone, let alone my sister, so I said to Anita, “Can you get your mom to wait two minutes? My sister lost our grandmother’s gold necklace, and she’ll be even more screwed.”

  Anita bit her lip. Something shifted in her posture, brought her into a new alertness, like when she was asked a question to which she knew the answer in algebra.

  “Oh.” She retrieved her pink flip phone from her fake-pearl-encrusted purse. “Mama. Coming. But Prachi lost this gold necklace, and Neil—” A pause. She hung up. “My mom says be quick.”

  “My sister doesn’t drink.” I held up a flashlight that connected to my Swiss Army knife and house keys. Nothing showed itself on the asphalt, just the black Georgia ground beneath the black Georgia sky. Puddles of yellow lamppost light revealed the riddled texture of the parking lot. There were no secrets here; in this stupid place, what you saw was what you got.

  “All of them drink,” Anita said, peeling away. “You can’t run in that crowd and not drink.” Did Anita drink? A pang in my chest—for wasn’t she now in that crowd? “She ditched with Hudson Long because she knew she was going to lose Spring Fling Princess.”

  “She lost?” I sighed. Even if Prachi escaped Coach Jameson, she’d be smarting from defeat. I didn’t fancy enduring one of her performances of grief, wherein she refused to make eye contact with us for days, or ensured I overheard her vomiting in the bathroom. “See anything?”

  “Nah,” Anita called, a little nasally.

  I cast my light beneath the dumpster, knelt and got a smashing stench of cafeteria chili and old bananas and a number of other smells both animal and human. I covered my nose, stood, ran the beam in a long line like a searchlight hunting a fugitive in desolate farmland, sweep, one, sweep, two, but nothing on the asphalt glinted like gold. “Nothing?” I called.

  “Nothing.” Anita was kneeling by the wretched emergency exit door and reaching for something on the ground.

  “Is that it?” I half jogged over.

  “Nope,” she said. “It’s not here.”

  I was right next to her now. “You didn’t find it?”

  “I just said I didn’t. My mom’s gonna be mad; we have to go.”

  “Your mom’s never mad.” I waved my hand dismissively. Anjali Auntie was different—a given—and Anita could not believably invoke her as a threat. “What’s in your hand, Anita?”

  For her fist was clenched, her knuckles bloodless. She looked ready to slug me.

  Her jaw tightened. Then she growled through her teeth, as though she’d been trying to tell me something and I’d been too dense to hear it. “Neil, you are such a freak! Prachi lost her necklace because she’s drunk and making out with Hudson Long, and I’ve got enough to worry about without helping you fix her shit.”

  She opened the door and stomped over the green-and-gray carpeting. I followed. I couldn’t do anything but slide into the back of the Toyota. Anita and her mother sat in wooden silence up front. Anjali Auntie’s eyes landed searchingly on mine in the rearview mirror a few times before settling sidelong on her daughter’s taut expression. Her own face remained impassive; I could not tell if she was surprised at the coldness between Anita and me.

  Back home, in my room, I wrenched myself free from my father’s tie and tried to fall asleep as the landline rang and heels sounded below me—Prachi coming home, Prachi in trouble, my parents’ voices rising. (“Who were you with?” “Open your mouth, show your breath!” “Where’s Ajji’s—?” “Ayyayyo!” “You’ll jolly well tell us—!”) Prachi, the golden child, fallen from grace, some essential blessing lifted from her.

  I dreamt in shards, and I encountered Anita in my sleep—an Anita who had Melanie Cho’s red lips and was wearing a bright green dress like her mother’s, an Anita who removed said dress to display the body of one of the porn stars I had become familiar with, which meant a white body, ivory skin, and dime-sized, pert nipples. I woke up and found that my boxers were wet. In the bathroom, I tried to scrub away all that had happened that night.

  * * *

  • • •

  I sat at the dinner table one evening the following week, poking my bisibelebath around with my fork, listening as Prachi stood in the kitchen and called our grandmother to issue a formal apology with regard to the necklace. (“Ajji!” Prachi overarticulated, glancing pleadingly at our mother, who had mandated the call. She wound her fingers through the cream-colored curlicue phone cord. “Ajji, it’s Prachi! Can you put your hearing aid in?”) I looked up to see my father poking his food around, just like I was. My mother furiously scrubbed the white Formica countertop, which was irrevocably stained with splatters of hot oil and masalas, and glowered at Prachi.

  In our house, it took only one gesture in the direction of India to compound an already grave situation. The accusation was that Prachi had flouted her responsibility as a daughter, a sister, a former Spring Fling princess, and yes, a granddaughter, too. She had imperiled the very nature of the sacrifice of crossing oceans. My parents relished that phrase, “crossing oceans,” as though they had arrived in steerage class aboard a steamship instead of by 747, carrying two massive black suitcases with pink ribbons tied around the handles and the surname narayan written in blocky letters on masking tape along the side.

  My father, miffed, gestured at the two empty plates on my mother’s Walmart imitation-Indian paisley-print place mats. The bisibelebath and reheated aloo sabzi were all growing cold. I reached for some potato, but my father shook his head, and I got the sense that poking food around was the way we were going to ride this out, so back I went to that.

  As Prachi continued her breathless apology, I looked out the breakfast room window, toward the Dayals’. Anita might step outside at any minute.

&nbs
p; “It just got lost at a dance, Ajji,” Prachi was saying. “It was a very bad mistake, and I’m really sorry about it.” I could picture widowed Ajji on the other end of the line in Mysore, her long graying hair pinned against the nape of her neck, puzzled, perhaps unable even to remember what had been lost—she was forgetful these days—or if she did remember, thinking: Why are you calling me about a lost necklace when bigger things were lost in the move to America? Prachi signed off. “Love you, Ajji, see you soon. No, I don’t know when, but soon, right.”

  We could now start dinner, which had gone completely cold.

  Heroically, Prachi began to talk about the summer’s pageant as she heated everyone’s plates. My sister planned to be Miss Teen India Georgia and then Miss Teen India Southeastern Region, and then Miss Teen India USA. The prior November, she had placed second in the region, narrowly missing out on a spot at nationals, and was a favorite going forward. Prachi truly believed she was on her way to solving the riddle at the heart of the MTI: What does it mean to be both Indian and, like, American? One more shot at the tiara and she’d have the answer at last. She would communicate all this, and what it signified thematically and emotionally, on the Duke application she was to spend the summer filling out.

  “Who’s Miss Teen India-India?” I inquired.

  She glared. “The point is to empower Indian girls in America. Incidentally, your girlfriend’s going in for it, too.”

  My parents’ eyebrows furrowed. They could not comprehend the utter impossibility of Prachi’s accusation that I, at five feet five, as brown, as me, could have a girlfriend.

  “Who?” I said. My fist tightened around my fork.

  “Anita Dayal.” Prachi sniffed. “She’s trying for MTI, too. Not that she’s ever been interested in exploring Indian American identity before.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, feeling a revolting feminine blush beneath my skin. “We’re barely friends anymore.”

  “What happened?” This was my mother, surveying Prachi and me.

  I twitched, looking not at my family but at what I thought was a figure stealing up the driveway of the Dayal house. I blinked; she, or it, was gone, or had never been.

  “She’s a little climber,” Prachi said, accounting for my silence.

  And my mother said, forgetting her anger for a moment, “Just like her mother.”

  My father remained stoic the rest of the meal, but my mother thawed; that banter reunited the Narayan women. Gossip is to my mother what South Indian classical music is to my father—the virtuosic amalgamation of years of a community’s becoming. For as long as I can remember she has been a connoisseur of gossip, of the sounds it makes, the musicality, the overall gestalt, which is one that causes her to use the pronouns us and them, and the phrases these people and our people and such people, with confidence. One might call her ears—which are extremely large and loose lobed, with openings to the ear canal the size of a thumbnail—the place where the Indian immigrant public sphere gathers. In between wax and bristly dark hairs, the diaspora unscatters and lodges itself in my mother’s oversize hearing organs.

  When I was younger, Anita and Anjali Dayal were held in perfectly fine favor at my house. Our two families mingled pleasantly; as a latchkey kid whose mother was less prolific in the kitchen than Anita’s, I often let myself into the Dayals’ house to rummage around in the fridge. The key beneath the watering can behind the azalea bush was mine to use. Our parents—the four brown adults in a largely white subdivision—collaborated to create a simulacrum of India in a reliably red Georgia county.

  But over the past few years, Anita’s father, Pranesh Uncle, had grown conspicuously absent, discomfiting the other desi mothers. No one pronounced words like separation; it was stated only that Anita’s father was working in California, where he had founded a company with his classmates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. The official reason for Anita’s father living across the country while her mother remained in Hammond Creek was the daughter, and a desire not to interrupt her schooling. Which is why my mother was overtaken by a frisson of judgment when I came home at the end of May, weeks after Spring Fling, with the news that Anita would be leaving Okefenokee and, in fact, interrupting her schooling.

  “California?” my mother said.

  I could almost see the RE/MAX realty signs in her eyes as she dreamt of an open house, overdone chewy sugar cookies and fruit punch and information on the neighborhood’s property values. My mother adored open houses, their mild festivity, the red balloons, the way the houses were held in presentational limbo—vacuumed carpets and potpourri in the powder rooms—until the owners’ current unsatisfactory life had been traded out for a better one.

  “To Buckhead,” I said.

  Anita had been accepted to a posh private school in Buckhead, one of the neighborhoods inside the perimeter. The perimeter, referring to Interstate 285, which neatly locked the suburbs away from Atlanta proper, was one of those things to which my mother sometimes mystically referred while in that open house headspace—a state of mind that I swear caused her very large ears to droop and soften, implying that she was listening to something otherworldly, something more splendid than terrestrial gossip. Someday, we might live inside the perimeter, she suggested. My father scoffed; in Hammond Creek we were close to my parents’ jobs, good public schools, and other immigrants. Inside the perimeter, he grumbled, were crumbling houses that white people would spend a million bucks on because they seemed Margaret Mitchellian.

  Anita’s destination was a school I’d faced at debate tournaments a few times. They never failed to intimidate, showing up with four coaches from the best college teams huddled around them. They strutted about in blazers and ties and pearls and heels, while we mopped our sweat with our swamp-green Okefenokee High School T-shirts. Her school sat near the long low lawns of country clubs and the governor’s mansion. Its female students would be debutantes, and its alumni seemed—from my position outside its brick-winged gates, anyway—to waltz into Harvard and Princeton and Vanderbilt and Georgetown.

  It made sense. Anita’s only plan in life, as long as I had known her, was to attend Harvard. What followed Harvard was a vaguely crimson-tinged blankness; Harvard was sufficient, would propel her into some life thereafter. The first step in achieving that life seemed to be leaving Hammond Creek, Okefenokee High School, and me.

  Anita and I had been avoiding each other since Spring Fling. She now traipsed around the hallways ensconced in Melanie Cho’s pack, making it impossible for me to catch her eye. But I had not forgotten the dance. I wondered if by ditching me—or by stealing a queen bee’s coveted piece of jewelry?—she had completed some hazing ritual. I sought signs of change in her. Did her hair shine more than it used to? Had she grown lankier? I looked for her on AOL Instant Messenger, one of our regular sites of communication. She logged on only once. I began to type: wtf where u been? Then I deleted it, trying the softer, r u mad @ me? I cleared that out, too: sup, I wrote. Then came the heartrending sound of a door slamming. She’d signed off. Her avatar never reappeared. I guessed she’d blocked me.

  So I did not learn the news about the school from her, but from Shruti Patel. Shruti was in all the gifted classes, and already taking Advanced Placement Physics as a freshman. She told me during Honors American History, the only class where she did not regard me as a flailing moron. (I liked English and history and scraped by in most other subjects.)

  “How do you know?” I whispered as Mr. Finkler handed back the previous week’s tests.

  “Ninety-four, good job,” Shruti said. Mr. Finkler had written the number in red and circled it twice on my blue book. She waved hers.

  “Ninety-eight,” I conceded.

  “Her mother told my mother at Kroger,” Shruti said. “I didn’t even know she was applying to private schools.”

  I shrugged.

  “You didn’t kno
w either?” Shruti pressed. “Aren’t you two, like . . .” And she pulled an appalling face, aping something she had seen on television, a knowing-teenage-gossip face.

  Desperate to put a stop to the way she was pouting her lips and raising her eyebrows, I said, “No, definitely not,” and it was true—we weren’t, like, anything. Not anymore.

  * * *

  • • •

  Anjali Dayal did not work in the way my parents worked. My mother was a financial analyst. My father spent eight hours a day on his feet, in a white coat behind the counter of a Publix pharmacy. He had suffered years of study for that job, in India and in America, but in my eyes as a kid, I had a father who “worked at the grocery store.” When I said that once in front of my mother, I was swatted on the butt and duly corrected. My father was a pharmacist. The word clunked in my mouth—but never again would I say he worked at the grocery store.

  Anita’s mother, on the other hand, would tell you she ran a “catering business.” She filled in for working Indian mothers who wanted to serve their families proper home-cooked fare but who lacked either the time or the skill in the kitchen to do so. Occasionally she would do a graduation or birthday party, but for the most part, Anjali Auntie answered calls placed in response to flyers she hung up at the temple and in Little India strip malls—those two-story off-the-highway structures housing Kumon math tutoring centers and restaurants called Haveli or Bombay Palace or Taste of India and threading salons where women pruned themselves of excess ethnic hair. She drove all over the suburbs and did much of her cooking in other people’s homes, as though the women hiring her wished to think of her the way they thought of the help back in India. To admit that the prettier, younger mother was the “proprietor of a small business” would have been strange and modern and white.

  Surely Anjali Auntie did not need this job—based on everything my mother said about Pranesh Uncle, money was flowing from the West Coast. But she did it nonetheless, perhaps because she was afraid, herself, of being left to do godknowswhat.