Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  Are you making use of all you took?

  Of course not.

  I shook my head and Shruti slunk back into death.

  The party had migrated to the kitchen. Prachi tittering with Hae-mi. Keya reaching for more Sonoma cabernet, despite swaying on her feet. Chidi all marble smile and head bobs, yammering at Maya about longevity. (“Really,” he said, “people have been trying to live longer for centuries, just look at the alchemists, only they didn’t have the rigorous experimental methods we do. . . .”) Manu trailing everyone, attempting to bid Prachi good-bye, evidently leaving without the key Rodham contact.

  “Whoops,” Keya said, sloshing wine down her pale green blouse. “Shit.”

  “Keya came wedding shopping with me today,” Prachi said too heartily, as the girlfriends swarmed with club soda. “I’d need a drink, too! I’m sure I wasn’t easy to handle.”

  Keya did not correct my sister, only grinned amiably as Maya mopped her. Manu attempted to wave good-bye through the crooners, but Prachi seized his palm and squeezed several times as though his hand were a stress ball, keeping him from leaving.

  “Did you pick something?” Hae-mi cooed.

  Prachi reached for her iPhone with her free hand and began swiping to show off options, before suddenly looking up. “Neil! Oh my god. I totally forgot. Guess who we saw at that bridal shop.”

  “Who?” I said through another mouthful of cheese.

  “I’m heading out,” Manu called to Prachi, who still held his hand. “I’ll email you about Christine?”

  “No, wait, Manu, you won’t believe this either—”

  Prachi had inherited our mother’s love of gossip as we grew up. For us it was safe territory, untarnished by my views on her work in Big Tech (which I found repugnant, reminiscent of the inequality I studied) or hers on mine in academia (which she saw as a kind of performative hunger strike). Each time we saw each other, we ran through roll calls of acquaintances. So-and-so had become an angel investor, so-and-so a gastroenterologist, so-and-so a federal judiciary clerk. Many were engaged; some were spawning biracial, caramel children. This was what we had in common now, the general web that had formed us.

  “Anita!” Prachi was shouting. “Total throwback, right?”

  I swallowed my cheese too fast, began to cough, downed half a sparkling water, burped. Avi wandered into the kitchen, having finished his phone call.

  “Anita-Anita?” I said.

  “Anita Dayal?” Manu said.

  “That name rings a bell,” Maya said.

  “This is our old neighbor,” Prachi said, updating Avi. “Pranesh Dayal’s kid, actually.”

  “Pranesh Dayal?” Chidi looked up suddenly. “That guy who sold the smart devices company last year for a fuckload?”

  Avi and Chidi struck up a side conversation about Pranesh Uncle, which Keya joined. I heard her say, “Wait, do you think he’s investing now?”

  “Neer, you in touch with Anita at all?” Manu asked.

  I shook my head. San Francisco is a small town, as is upper-middle-class Asian America. I’d been reencountering Hammond Creek transplanted into the Bay Area for years. There was Manu, and old Ravi Reddy, once expelled to Hyderabad, who’d resurfaced as a back-end engineer and was vocal about his “ethically nonmonogamous lifestyle” whenever I bumped into him. Wendi Zhao—whom I’d dated intermittently in college—headed west after graduating Harvard Law, logging time as a patent troll. I’d even swiped right on Melanie Cho on a dating app once, to no avail. Though we’d grown up in a no-place, the privilege and ambition incubated in that no-place had driven many of us to the place where so many with privilege and ambition flocked. But Anita, who I knew had attended Stanford and stuck around out here since, had remained steadfastly hidden, as though she did not wish to be found.

  At least, not by me.

  “I’ve seen her a few times,” Manu said. “She was working at Galadriel Ventures for a couple of years, doing PR or marketing or events. I ran into her at a demo day she was organizing. She seemed, I don’t know, different.”

  “Different how?” I asked.

  “Calmer, maybe?”

  Manu’s mouth was still open, considering, when Hae-mi snapped her fingers and pointed at Maya. “She was a few years below us at Stanford, dated Jimmy Bansal! Ooh, I bet he helped her get that Galadriel job—”

  “Didn’t they break up?” Maya said doubtfully.

  “Mm, yes, they totally did, at least once, but weren’t they on and off?” Hae-mi said. “I remember one of the breakups because it was our commencement and she just kept calling Jimmy over and over, freaking. I think she dropped out after that, actually.”

  “Anita dropped out of college?” I inhaled sharply, now turning from Manu, who still hadn’t answered my first question. “Like, the way start-up people drop out?”

  Hae-mi looked at me pityingly. “No, not like the way start-up people drop out. I put her down as a case of classic duck syndrome.”

  “Duck what?” Prachi said.

  “Duck syndrome,” Maya said. “You know, someone who looks all calm and crushing it above water, but really they’re paddling like crazy underneath to stay afloat?”

  Prachi shrugged, as though the concept were foreign; school had come easily to her, and professional life welcomed her gracefully. If she’d suffered trauma (I still remembered the sporadic bulimia on which I’d eavesdropped through high school) she generally refused to reflect on it. I’d always thought time eventually forced even the most practical people to introspect. But my sister had cheerfully attenuated her inner life with each year.

  Everyone else hmmed in recognition, though.

  “You didn’t talk to her at all?” I asked Prachi.

  “Took me a second to place her. And I was covered in all these fabrics. Anyway, if she’s wedding shopping now, she must be doing okay,” she said. Which was, of course, so like my sister’s particular understanding of happiness. “Don’t give me that look, Neil, I just mean, that’s an expensive store, so she must be doing well for herself.”

  “Or Jimmy’s paying,” Hae-mi said, taking her phone out. “But I definitely would have seen something on social media if Jimmy got engaged.”

  “Or her dad’s paying,” Prachi doubled back.

  “Ugh,” Hae-mi reported. “Jimmy’s on zero apps. I can’t tell.”

  “Meanwhile”—Maya leaned her elbows on the counter, clearly ready to be done with the talk about Jimmy Bansal’s cracked-up ex—“my parents announced the other day that they’ve spent half of what I thought was my wedding fund on my sister’s post-bacc. If she’d just been premed from the start—”

  “I can’t believe you guys are that out of touch,” Manu said, edging nearer so he was only addressing me. In his gentle regard I felt recognized as the teenage boy I still was, or contained. “You two were always a unit. To me, anyway.”

  “She ran hot and cold on me,” I said. “Did you talk? When you ran into her?”

  “A little. She was pretty thoughtful, in a way people in tech aren’t always. Honestly, I never found her very thoughtful, when we were younger. She was so into winning stuff that I couldn’t have told you what she loved.”

  “What did you love then?” I asked, probably too sharply.

  Manu blanched. “I loved math, Neer,” he said. “I wanted to go to grad school for it. I just wasn’t smart enough. I’m a very good engineer, but I’m not cut out for pure math.”

  “I don’t think I ever knew that,” I said.

  “I don’t think it ever came up,” he said, not unkindly. “I can’t remember talking about anything very real at OHS.”

  “But you and Anita—you talked about something real?”

  “Not quite. She seemed kind of dissatisfied. Maybe I’m projecting. Galadriel’s super prestigious, but they run people to the ground, and their portfolio com
panies start at suspect and go all the way to evil. Data theft and worse. She said she was going to quit soon, she wanted to do something good, only she didn’t know what.” He nodded somberly, sympathetically, for surely it was this shared sentiment that had him considering enduring Grindr in Iowa.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s a start.”

  Lost on earnest Manu was my dryness.

  “I’ve gotta bounce, Neer,” he said, hugging me. “It’s always great to see you. Just makes me reflect on how far we’ve all come, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I spent that summer flailing through my research, in advance of the proposal defense that impended that fall—I needed an outline for the whole dissertation, plus two sample chapters, or I risked losing my funding. I’d already missed several deadlines in spring, and my exigent adviser, Irwin Wang, had let me know that I was on probation.

  Each day, I grew headachy from staring at my laptop until my vision fuzzed. I was exhausted from sleeping and eating too little, subsisting on Adderall or coke, the latter of which was slowly becoming more than a party habit. My hair and limbs hung off me like peeling bark and Spanish moss. I was a ghost to myself, one of those Japanese mythic creatures—the unsatisfied self peels away from the body to haunt it.

  I drove, often. My love of the road may be the most American thing about me. When I felt a crash coming on, or when I could no longer bear to be in my own brain, I’d get in my Honda, roll down the windows, and push onto the 880, winding past Oakland’s warehouse edge, taking the 92 to Half Moon Bay. I’d follow the trampled grass on the bluffs above the state beach, all dotted with weathered, blister-blue clapboard houses. Untamed purple salvia sprouting up everywhere, the spring’s yellow wildflowers drying out. If ever I had an open house craving to match my mother’s, it was for these homes of windbeaten wood and high windows, places that seemed the right sort to hide away a writing man, shelves stocked with Great Americans, Styron and Stegner and Steinbeck. In gray-glum corners of California like this, I imagined myself not so much living—for that seemed to require a burdensome act of imagination, living—but persisting through the years.

  Other times, I’d cross the Bay Bridge, wheezing my car up a vertiginous San Francisco hill. The sight: California splayed out around me. I’d cross the Golden Gate to the Marin Headlands, passing through the veil of fog to breathe the green-and-gold horizon line. Pockets of the Pacific bloomed out around Sausalito. The careens and curves jostled something loose in me. Every thirty minutes on one of those roads, the light and heat or chill of the air rearrange.

  That June forced my head back toward the past. Perhaps the haunting began with the mention of Anita. It was aggravated by Arabella, with whom I suffered a nauseating afternoon on mushrooms one Saturday, during which a Shruti-like creature rose up from the red Mount Diablo dirt. She was inchoate yet clear, forming and re-forming into curly locks and small knowing eyes, even as I blew into the air to disperse her. I spent the trip quaking and retching and mapping my drug-induced pain onto first Shruti and then the world. (Dear Shruti, We’re all sick, riddled with holes, and you saw it first. . . . I set down in my Moleskine, before the queasiness made writing impossible.)

  Later, sober, having driven me home in brutal silence, Arabella had asked me to please, please let her in on whatever demons had manifested during the trip. I refused.

  “I’m done trying to teach men to feel things,” she huffed, her eyes trained on an addict addressing the sky by the Ashby Avenue BART station. “Just done.”

  “I feel things,” I muttered. “More than you know.”

  “Well, you should probably find out how to talk about them, or no one will ever be able to stand being around you—you’re roaming around your own head all the time, Neil, and maybe, just maybe what’s going on in there isn’t the most interesting thing on the planet.” Then, accessing some reserve of cruelty I’d never before encountered in her, she added, fumbling with the key in the ignition: “I saw what’s on your phone. Dil Day? That Indian marriage app? You don’t take me seriously. You’re waiting around for your perfect brown girl.”

  I’d downloaded Keya’s app out of curiosity—about it, and about Keya, who’d struck me as off-kilter in a charming way. But I didn’t explain.

  “Yeah, well.” I got out of Arabella’s car and nearly plowed into the addict, who was calling passersby on Ashby to attention: Remember! he yelled. If you don’t, He will, if you don’t, He will! “To you, I’m just hyphenated, right?”

  I was spending my summer attempting to explain why and how one era leads to the next, why a distant shout of gold in California draws migrants across the brutal Sierra Nevada; how gold-lust formed railroads and poisoned rivers; how the forty-niners’ ache to stake their claim on the earth, to make a home in America, coalesced to change the course of the West, and the world.

  My work as a student of history was the moral opposite of my work as a debater. As a debater, I’d lived in the present and made arguments about possible futures, claiming wantonly that someone’s well-intentioned proposition would collapse the economy or cause nuclear war. The fact that the truth of the future never came to bear on a given round—that we were not accountable for being wrong, for defending a protracted occupation of Afghanistan, or for arguing, as I did most of sophomore year, that investing in clean coal was preferable to initiating a renewable portfolio standard—meant we were relieved of the responsibility of truth-telling at all. But when you study the past, you know how things turn out. The weight of the present demands something of you.

  I was supposed to be constructing an argument about all that followed the California gold rush. But even after many hours of picking dully through papers on the abstract forces of money and power in the late nineteenth century, I found myself without interesting characters to follow through the era. And while I understood the tropes and pitfalls of narrative history, I wanted to meet someone in my research whom I could live with, whose voice I could hear, or perhaps had heard once before.

  I had sought Ramesh Uncle’s Bombayan gold digger as an undergraduate in Athens and during my first year at Berkeley. He was an obsession that seized me for a period of time, until the trail ran out and I had to give up. I’d researched foreigners in the gold rush many times, locating Australians and Chinese and Chileans, but never an Indian or a Hindu.

  Finding that the genealogy of American belonging continued to exclude me, I’d taken Irwin Wang’s advice to pursue economic history, a subfield in which job opportunities came slightly more easily. Now, though, with Wang accompanying his wife on her Indonesian fieldwork all summer, I found myself looking for the Bombayan once more. The hunt for him sustained me through those strange, blurred months; it tugged me back in time, or resurrected revenants, or both. For it turned out that Ramesh Uncle was right. We live alongside the past. It’s our neighbor. We bump into it in the checkout line, at the Laundromat, on the street.

  * * *

  • • •

  One late June afternoon, I’d returned from one of my drives and was headed to the library to investigate a file a librarian had called over from a museum in Marysville. The town, established in 1851 and a couple of hours northeast of Berkeley in Yuba County, was known as the Gateway to the Goldfields. I’d found a news clipping deep in the archives about a “Hindoo” put on “citizens’ trial” for theft in a Central Valley mining camp. I wondered if he might be my Bombayan.

  I wasn’t paying much mind to the redwood-shaded trails north of campus as I ambled along. In fact, I almost missed her. But she collided with me, shoulder-on-shoulder. I did not at first recognize her. She now wore red cat-eye glasses, and they fell from her face. I picked them up, and choked to find myself looking at her, after so long. She was visibly older—her skin looked almost smudged, as though with inky thumbprints. Her figure was less obviously shapely beneath the loose linen flapping around her tor
so. Her hair grayed around the temples and in a few streaks along her forehead. She was still very striking.

  “Anjali Auntie?”

  We stood in the shade of those majestic redwoods, so I thought it was possible I’d gotten it wrong. A passing resemblance, another ghost; perhaps I had only drawn her up from the well of memory. But the woman blinked as she took the glasses from me, and the voice that emerged was familiar yet deeper, newly gravelly, like she was getting over a bout of bronchitis.

  “My god, Neil!”

  “What—ah—what are you doing here?” I asked. “Are you still in Sunnyvale?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Mostly. Yes. I’m down there. But I had an event to go to. Here.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes and I realized the slight growl in her voice was not sickness but recent tears. “A memorial, actually,” she said. “I apologize, I’m a little—”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, unintentionally speaking over her.

  We both stood there, arms hanging like tree limbs half-severed from trunks in a storm.

  “Was it—who was it?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

  Anjali Auntie seemed to consider before replying. “A friend, from Atlanta, actually.”

  “Who lives here now? Ah—lived here?”

  “Well. He once taught at Emory, and then he shifted over to Cal. In the South Asian Studies department. Time, well.” She sniffed. “So it goes.”

  “How’s, um”—I scuffed the walk with my sneaker—“Pranesh Uncle? And, ah, Anita?”

  “Oh.” Anjali Auntie sighed. “I suppose it hasn’t reached your mother yet? Pranesh and I are divorcing. And Anita is, well, mostly herself.”