I trudged across the cul-de-sac, looking briefly behind me. Anjali Auntie was walking toward the white man, her mouth open, her hands lifted as though starting an argument.
My father was waiting for me in the breakfast room. He watched me unlacing my shoes, trying to read me. My mother and sister didn’t appear to be home yet. I made for the stairs, but he stopped me on the landing.
“You have been up to something, Neeraj,” he said. I noticed again the shimmer of his bald spot, and I thought of the tender part of a baby’s skull that makes it vulnerable, and had a vision of me holding my father and accidentally dropping him on the crown of his head.
He approached me. “You have been drinking alcohol, isn’t it?” His nose wrinkled.
I nodded. Perhaps it was the wine or perhaps it was honest new wisdom, but I could see everything he did only as a kind of inept performance by a B-grade actor.
“Do you like looking like this? You look like a big mess. You do not look like my son.”
“Yeah. I like it.” I loved it, actually, when he put it like that.
A button of moonlight shone between the clouds. Through the staircase window, I could see the still-bright lights of the Dayals’. I had the mad thought that if I got up to my room, alone, before the buzz wore off, I might find Shruti waiting, prepared to talk with me.
“I wanna go to bed,” I said.
“Have you been doing this regularly, Neeraj?”
My father’s eyebrows, already only barely separated from each other, looked to be one long fat caterpillar.
The garage door creaked.
“Raghu!” My mother pushed the side door open. “Raghu, those Dayal guests have parked everywhere all up and down the cul-de-sac. Didn’t think to invite us, did they?”
“Daddy,” Prachi said. She was undoing her sandals in the doorway. “Daddy, please tell Amma I can’t go to the temple every time we buy something off the college checklist, okay? Just for shower curtains, I mean—”
“Your shower will keep you clean and healthy, Prachi,” my mother said. “It can stand to be blessed.”
The Narayan women were padding into the kitchen, were within feet of me, would see me like this, however I appeared—sweaty, blaze-eyed, looking not like my father’s son.
“Go up,” my father whispered. “I will not tell Amma. You drink water, and you sleep.”
“What’s that, Raghu?” my mother called. She and Prachi were pawing through the Target bags and wondering if they’d bought too many hangers.
“Neeraj is going to bed,” my father said firmly.
“Tell her,” I said, and then I said it again, louder.
Prachi was hoisting the bags onto her shoulders. Her forehead was smeared with the warm sunset hues of haldi kumkum. She looked ruddy in the cheeks, terribly hale.
“Neil, what the shit is wrong with you?” Prachi said.
“Prachi!” my parents both said.
“Why talk like that?” my father said.
“Tell what?” my mother said.
The three other Narayans, the three functional Narayans, stared at me, still as wax museum figurines. They appeared much better, more sensible, the three of them, without me. Upstairs, Shruti was waiting, pacing by my bed, ready to chide me: A two on the chemistry exam, really, Neeraj? I would accept all her reproofs, and then when she was preparing to depart, to slip once more into the underworld, perhaps I would ask her to take me with her. I would tell her that, as usual, she’d gotten it right, found the best answer to the complex problem we were all locked inside.
“Tell what?” my mother said again.
Across the way, the Dayal house had gone mostly dark but for two squares of dim light on the top floor, like the drowsy eyes of a beast preparing for sleep. And all around, that early-June Georgia night, the sultry swell of change in the air. I had been waiting to arrive somewhere for so long, and now that I was here, I wanted only to roll backward in time, to swim upstream until I sat at the font of something, to avoid ending up as this unbearable me.
“I’m fucking drunk,” I said.
There were no secrets worth keeping anymore.
Part Two
PANNING
He who steals the gold (of a Brahmana) has diseased nails.
—Manu-smriti, Hindu legal text
Had the immigrants known what a task the gold-hunting would be, their spirits might have failed.
—H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
6.
Something strange was happening to my family. Of late, the Narayan definition of success had morphed. This was not to say my parents supported my professional choices—in the summer of 2016, I was piddling around as a student of history, suffering their disdain. No, rather, they had accrued additional expectations, ones I did not discover until Prachi fulfilled them.
“Shaadi-shaadi-shaadi!” my mother kept squealing—the Hindi word for marriage. She declaimed the triplicate in times of both exuberance and distress, in much the way my ajji used to utter the name of the Lord—narayana narayana narayana—in prayer.
“So long we have waited for this shaadi-shaadi-shaadi!” (when Prachi first waggled her conflict-free diamond). “This is a shaadi-shaadi-shaadi, not some country club Buckhead Betty nonsense!” (denouncing my sister’s plan to wear a white lehenga rather than the traditional red-and-gold).
My mother broadcast her daughter’s impending nuptials to her clients—when I was in college, she had begun a second, fated career as a Realtor. The wedding talk helped close a deal, in much the way the scent of freshly baked cookies in an on-the-market house does—the general whiff of familial completion is infectious, makes everyone hot for suburban settling.
Preparations for Prachi’s shaadi-shaadi-shaadi were even impinging on my life on the West Coast. Our parents remained in Georgia, but my sister and I had each made our way to California by way of the tech bubble and academia, respectively. She lived on the third floor of a converted Victorian in San Francisco and I in a cannabis-infused walk-up in Berkeley. And on a particular foggy day in June, my roommate, Chidi, and I were running late to a party at said Victorian.
We stood by Alamo Square Park, taking in the vast bay windows of Prachi’s nearly three-grand-a-month apartment, while I sucked on my vape. I discerned the shadows of her friends moving about on the other side of those cakelike window trimmings, and something about their shapes startled me. I’d told Prachi, in trying and failing to beg off that night, that I was spending my summer ensconced in my dissertation and couldn’t be disturbed. In truth, I had no coherent justification for the social skittishness that had become my norm. Yes, there was the mounting pressure of graduate school, but there was also some other general allergy that erupted most acutely when I was surrounded by the hyperopic residents of my sister’s version of San Francisco.
“None for me, I’d like to be on tonight,” Chidi said, virtuously refusing a hit of my sativa-indica blend, which made me anxious that I’d already begun. “It’s a useful skill to be able to walk into any room and get along with people, Neil. Especially a room with a collective net worth of”—he frowned, doing mental math—“call it tens of millions?” He rubbed his hands together gleefully, prepared, as always, to charm, persuade, finagle, and fundraise. “If you thought more creatively, you could get one of these people to endow you a chair one day, or rethink the whole concept of a university, really bring it into the twenty-first century. . . .”
I was already walking away.
Upstairs, inside, we found the room arranged by twos. It reminded me of the opening of those Madeline books Prachi read growing up: twelve little couples in two straight lines; in two straight lines, they talked tech shop, they ate their Brie, they swirled their wine. The betrothed, Avi Kapoor, tapped on his phone, while Prachi, next to him, picked at red grapes and chatted with one
of her Duke sorority sisters. Chidi shook hands with Avi, whom he knew from incestuous, elite tech circles. I spied, with great relief, Manu Padmanaban, gripping a Blue Moon and being talked at by Prachi’s friend Hae-mi. Manu had grown into himself after coming out in college. He’d briefly been Prachi’s colleague at a midsize start-up, and sometimes wrangled an invite to her affairs, where he was my life jacket. He didn’t see me.
“I own our tardiness,” Chidi lied to the happy couple on my behalf. (I’d dozed through the afternoon following a late night out with the girl I’d been sleeping with. I remembered little of the prior evening’s party, save the gas station whiff of coke and a dreadlocked white guy wearing a vial of ketamine around his neck, plucking solemnly at a sitar.) “My call with Fabian Fischer ran long,” Chidi went on. “He sends his best, Avi.”
Chidi had dropped out of Caltech when a billionaire awarded him a hundred thousand dollars to pursue a 3D printing venture. He’d since launched a wetware product dealing with longevity; that is, attempting to prolong the human life span to Old Testament proportions. He lived off a uniquely Californian income in the interim—exit money from the first company’s sale, supplemented with Bitcoin investments. He was half-Nigerian, the product of an Oakland Hills secular Jewish mother and a transplanted Lagos doctor, and I attributed all differences between us—his proclivity for risk, his openness with his parents—to the nonimmigrant side.
Avi appeared duly impressed. “Are you guys raising? I’m surprised you’re out.” Then, to me: “Book going okay, Neil?”
“Dissertation. A book implies someone’s going to read it. It’s coming.”
At that time, I was going to be an Americanist—a professional interpreter of this land and its layers. My specialty was to be late-1800s California, with a focus on the rise of immigration, the ballooning of enterprise, and the economic stratifications that buoyed the nation into the twentieth century. In other words, the aftermath of the gold rush. But these days, staring at the papers piling up on my desk, I couldn’t imagine spending decades burrowing into this corner of the past. It didn’t help that I stood out in this land of utopian technofuturists, committed as I was to the secular preservationist priesthood that is the history academy.
“You know,” Prachi said. “We just hired an ex-academic from Berkeley for my team.” She fumbled for her name, then remembered.
I knew the woman. “Oh. She’s an ABD—all but dissertation,” I clarified at Prachi’s quizzical expression. The ABD wasn’t the first to flee the academy for Big Tech’s six figures and office nap pods and wouldn’t be the last. The specter of dropping out—burning out—loomed over my life and the lives of many in my cohort. Few of us would land where she had. Without Berkeley, I was a Southern state school grad with two years of debate coaching on my résumé.
Prachi: “Ha! That sounds like ABCD!”
No one had applied that acronym—American-born confused desi—to me in quite some time. We’d grown out of it as we grew up; our generation had perhaps not resolved, but had at least begun to get over that Miss Teen India riddle: What does it mean to be both Indian and American?
Avi chortled. “Drop the C, and you’re an ABD! You could follow her to the big bucks.”
“I think I’ll remain confused, for now.”
But Avi was ignoring me to answer his phone. He worked for a Sherman Act–violating behemoth and was always nursing side start-ups, fielding endless calls. Chidi made for the couples playing Cards Against Humanity at the Crate and Barrel dining table, and I slipped off to greet Manu. He was a rarity in San Francisco, in that he had read a book not ghostwritten on behalf of an investor or a CEO in the past year. He quizzed me on my research and asked about my opinions on the election.
“Don’t bring this up in front of Prachi,” I muttered, having confessed where I’d stood in the primary. “She just calls me a sexist and a socialist.”
Manu grinned. “Sorry, buddy, but I was too much of a political pragmatist to support your man. Actually”—he checked his watch—“I showed because your sister promised to introduce me to this bigwig on the Rodham campaign—her words, not mine—who she swore would be here. I’m trying to escape, I’d like to do something meaningful, but at the same time, I don’t want to be an unpaid intern in, like, Iowa.” He shuddered. “Imagine Grindr in Iowa.”
Which was when Prachi arrived, arm in arm with one of the only unattached women in the room, who, it dawned on me then, was the reason my sister had so insisted on my attendance.
Prachi oozed hostess charm. “My brother’s going to be a professor, as I’ve told you, Keya. Neil, you’ve heard me talk about Keya. Her new company, Dil Day, is doing super well.”
“Dildo?” I coughed on my beer.
“Neil!” Prachi squealed.
Manu chuckled.
Keya, to her credit, seemed only entertained. “Dil Day,” Keya said, giggling. “Dil, Hindi for heart?”
“I told you, Neil, it’s the dating app Hasan and Farha met on!” Prachi cried.
“Shit,” I said. “Sorry. It’s for brown people?”
“It’s for future-oriented South Asian professionals.” Keya lowered her voice. “Believe it or not, they’re—we’re—willing to pay more in the marriage space than any other group.”
“Eat the rich, right, Neil?” Manu said.
“Let’s leave you two.” Prachi steered him away. “Christine is coming, Manu, she is . . .”
I wistfully fingered my vape in my pocket. It could put me to sleep. It could eradicate me. These days I sought out things to remove me from what felt like an increasingly constricted world. There had been a few years, in college, when I’d believed in life’s ever-unfolding variety. But now, as my compatriots entered the promotion and canine-adoption and splitting-the-rent and wedding seasons of their lives, reality had narrowed again, with little warning.
“I consider myself generally oriented toward the past,” I said to Keya.
Keya edged to the counter to pour wine, then filled a paper plate high with cheese. “I was supposed to meet you earlier, but when you didn’t show, I got drunk. Now I’m starving.”
“I should say,” I said, popping some cheddar in my mouth. “I’m seeing someone. Prachi didn’t know.”
I’d been sleeping with one Arabella Wyeth-Goldstein, of the ketamine and sitar party. I had once been her history TA. She now wrote for a leftist East Bay community paper. We’d spent three months mostly smoking weed and fucking, and we’d just reached that sharing-of-trauma phase that marks a crucial milestone in my generation’s patterns of courtship. Arabella’s confessions were terribly normal—concerns about the shape of her breasts, were they too eggplanty, etc. When it came my turn, I spoke of academic and familial pressures and Asian emasculation. She’d nodded as I wrapped up the perfunctory revelations and told me that she “lived entirely with people who identified as hyphenated in college” and therefore “got it.”
Keya’s shoulders slumped genuinely, but then she shrugged. “Same old. Don’t tell your sister, but I’m on a mission. I’ve only slept with white men. Isn’t that fucked?”
“So, I would’ve been an experiment.”
Keya looked unabashed, which in turn made me feel unoffended. “Yeah, exactly.”
“Shouldn’t your app help with that?”
“Oh, I couldn’t swipe on my own thing. And I can’t be seen using someone else’s. I am”—she sighed theatrically—“an analog spinster in the era of digital soul mates.” She lifted an elbow in the direction of one smooth-skinned couple. “I’ve been to three bachelorettes in four months. Maya, with the huge rock? Hers was five days in Belize. I’m broke.”
Before I could open my mouth to offer Keya a better definition of the word broke, Maya caught my eye. She was lovely, with a lithe neck and short black bob. But it wasn’t her face or figure that I was looking at. It was her dangly gold earrings,
which swayed like the pipes of a wind chime. I could not help it: I performed the assessment instinctively, with the intuition of an addict, though it had been nearly ten years since I’d tasted gold. But I wondered, as ever: What would those earrings yield? A tumbler of lemonade bearing . . . what? The power to found the perfect company? To pin down the perfect mate? No, remember, the lemonade delivered not just a boost for a single task, but an energy, a way of being that guided you toward your deserved future. The gestalt of Maya’s golden earrings, of my sister’s white-gold engagement ring, of the party itself: shaadi-shaadi-shaadi. Settlement. Well-adjustment.
(My father’s old aphorism: We are all still ad-justing to this place. It had turned out to be true, clinically speaking. I’d seen a therapist just after graduating UGA, certain I suffered some cocktail of anxiety, major depression, and ADHD. I’d left with no pills, just a cruelly ironic diagnosis of something called adjustment disorder.)
At that instant, someone next to Maya turned. Her hair was still frizzy but had softened into gentler waves. Her skin was still acne scarred. She had smeared makeup over the crevices that used to cut so deep, darkening her. This was the clearest I’d seen Shruti Patel in some time. She was an occasional specter in my life, with a habit of appearing just when the material world felt most entrapping. She’d manifest at the periphery of my vision when I was drunk or high, or overlay herself on some brown girl. The memory of my own monstrosity? A reminder of the general futility of the games that comprised my life? Was she beckoning me to join her, wherever she had gone, looking at me through those marble eyes with that overfamiliarity I had always begrudged her, thinking, I know you, and you belong with me? Depending on the moment, I let her stand for all of those things, for her suicide—suicide itself—was the whirlpool swirling in my vicinity at all times, sucking into its gravity both every meaning I could toss its way and no meaning at all.
Gold Diggers Page 14
