I took a seventy-dollar motel room outside Marysville. I’d zoomed there on instinct, as if toward some holy ground. I could not go home, where I might be found so easily. The motel seemed the thing to do. The owners, I was disappointed to discover, were Gujaratis, and gave me that knowing one-two sweep of brown on brown.
In my room, I stalked the grainy local news channels and found nothing about shots fired at a desi bridal expo. No talk of a mass shooting, certainly. But I refused myself optimism. The events at a parochial convention in Santa Clara might simply have been forgotten. Especially amid the nonstop election coverage: leaked emails, leaked tapes. I turned off the TV, took a walk to a corner store a half mile away, bought Jim Beam and a phone charger, began drinking from the bottle.
Somewhere nearby was a river that I’d once imagined saving my gold digger, turning him from an outlaw to a man at home in America. Somewhere nearby, a story of this country I’d wanted to believe in. But the magic I’d dreamt up had been carried downstream with the arrival of that news clipping in my wire mailbox.
I didn’t plug in my phone. I sat on the floor of the motel room and ran my hands along the rough carpeting—ridiculously, I thought, Good, my prints are being callused away. I listened to the raspy air-conditioning unit and the pipes full of other people’s fluids swishing through the thin walls. I stared at the drawn drapes, expecting them to become suddenly illumined with kaleidoscopically spinning red and blue lights as sirens sounded and law enforcement screeched in. In the back of their vehicle I would watch the red and blue fall in long columns along the rippled cornfields and the apricot orchards.
But no lights came, no yowl of sirens.
I drank, drank more.
Night fell and, in the darkness, I finally dared bring the Manish Motilal lehenga up from the trunk of the car—I’d moved it there at a piss stop on the way north, the same place I did the last of the coke and tossed the baggie. I’d been afraid to carry the dress to my room in the daylight; I didn’t know what I might look like to the thin-lipped girl staffing the front desk. A runaway groom, having murdered his bride, on the lam, prepared to engage in some kind of necrophiliac ritual with her couture? I laid out the lehenga atop the faded floral duvet and observed it like it was in fact a body. What was my body count now? Just Shruti? Linda the liaison? One of the aunties cowering behind her car in the expo parking lot? Would they keep amassing over the years? I wondered not for the first time if one day Jay Bhatt or one of our other Hammond Creek victims would turn up dead and someone would mutter, in hushed gossip at the funeral, “It all started when he stopped excelling at math—what happened?” Or Prachi—if one day Prachi would suddenly weaken, and as she declined, confess that in the summer of 2006, she had been sapped of something unnamable yet essential, and had never quite recovered.
There was nothing to do but throw the skirts up and begin gnawing on the tight strings with my teeth. I loosened each secret pocket like this. The sexual tantrum of it all was not lost on me. Next door: an unarousing moan. Downstairs: one of the owners’ voices calling, Shubhaaaa!
I lined up the pieces on the peeling wooden desk and switched on the lamp. One mangalsutra. Three rings. Five bangles. A single jhumka earring. A tiny flower-shaped stud—for a nose? A rhomboid tikka. A few thousand dollars—grand theft—and yet only six or so months of lemonade. About the quantity I’d hoped to nab for myself, leaving the rest to Anjali Auntie.
I drank. The liquor stung. The warmth encircled my core.
The room, suddenly stifling. I jimmied the window, opened the drapes. That unpolluted night—not a lick of moon, no clouds within the gloaming, just an unmoving tarmac sky.
Everyone wants something from someone else. I paced and eyed the gold pieces and swigged again, stomach sloshing acidly. Did I owe Anjali Dayal anything? She, like her daughter, had left me alone with grief and guilt for ten years. I grunted massively and threw myself on the bed next to the rumpled Manish Motilal.
I remembered how to do it, didn’t I? Fire. Flux. Lemons and sugar. I recalled with clarity the singsong of those foreign words; the incantation had meandered in and out of my dreams for years. But there were other substances that went into the vessels whose names I’d never learned. When I’d asked, Anjali Auntie had brushed me off—It’s untranslatable, she’d say.
The truth: I didn’t know how to make the damned thing on my own. I was useless without the Dayals. They had made me. I couldn’t remake myself. I was going to be sick. I slept.
The pounding on the door—it could only be the cops. I smelled something on the floral duvet, dribbles of my own vomit. I rubbed the duvet into itself to spread the vomit, as though that would limit the stench. My eyes filled. I tasted sweat and metal as tears and snot slicked down my cheeks. I wiped and wiped on my T-shirt, staining it like a little boy. I had only wanted to see that it everyone kept talking about. That thing they all knew. That conviction about love, about the absolution love brings. I saw myself in the mirror, the T-shirt discolored with bodily gunk, cheeks beginning to darken with stubble. Redness veined my eyes.
When the cops cuffed me, what motives could I offer? That I’d only wanted to give the girl I loved a bit of jewelry? I pictured it like that—me, declaring I loved her, articulating the thing I’d not spoken aloud, saying it for the first time in salacious newsprint.
The pounding again. “Sir, sir, sir.” I wondered if an officer of the law would be so respectful. “Housekeeping, sir.”
I gagged and this time made it to the bathroom.
“Not right now!” I shouted after I’d rinsed my mouth.
I plugged my phone in to tap around on the Wi-Fi. What would I search: sanskrit gold smelting rituals? Shooting santa clara bridal expo? As soon as the white light flickered back on, glowing lustrous, the thing freaked, buzzing and buzzing, text after text, voice mail after voice mail, from my parents and Prachi. My eyes stabilized on the last message shuddering on the screen as the phone finally lay limp on the nightstand.
From Anita: Neil. I know you’re okay. I *know* you’re not doing something stupid. We just need to hear from you. I trust you. I love you.
“Marysville?” she said when I called. “Where the fuck is that?”
“I just got on the highway and started heading toward Berkeley and then realized I couldn’t stop there if anyone was, I don’t know, after me? So I kept driving and when I saw Marysville, I thought, oh, yeah—”
“Your mind is a messy place, isn’t it?”
I was crying again, hadn’t in ages and now couldn’t stop, tears of shock or relief or just the slackening of a body tightened by years of time and fear.
“You can’t drive, can you?” She sounded soggy, too.
I sniffed. “I’m crashing. I was kind of high. And then drunk. I think I’m still drunk.”
I could hear her head shake through the speaker. “Marysville?” I began to explain where it was, but someone said something I couldn’t hear on the other side. “Huh,” she said. “Apparently my mom knows where it is. We’re coming to you. Stay put.”
“Ani,” I squeezed out pleadingly. “What happened? Back there?”
“Which part?”
Minkus Jhaveri was taken into custody on the count of unlawful possession of a concealed firearm. But first, he went to the hospital for the bullet wound he had inflicted on his own left calf. The utter shock of seeing his new rival, Linda, heroically reaching for what he perceived to be a pistol but was, in fact, a mace gun bearing the empowering label see something spray something caused him to lower his hand a few inches in surprise. He jumped at the sound of Linda’s mace popping, then pulled the trigger, visiting said injury upon himself.
That no one had died did not alleviate my dread or guilt. Regarding the first, there was still the matter of Minkus’s opportunity to out me to the police. And indeed, in the weeks following the expo, a pair of portly disgruntled cops would arrive at my Ashby Avenue apartment to follow up on Mr. Moo-koond Juvvery’s complaints about my odd behavior, his insistent claim that I was a bad guy. But by then, the evidence of our crime had long since been smelted away, and little came of the inquiry; perhaps the cops in the end found the whole thing to be a weird cultural entanglement beneath the dignity of the state.
“What he was doing was illegal either way,” Anita said over the phone, as the three generations of women sped northeast from Sunnyvale. “The guy didn’t have the right permits. He must have just skirted the metal detectors. But, Neil. Call your sister. Tell her you and I had a fight earlier, and that’s why you were weird, and then when Minkus came at you, you just freaked, you’re a panicky guy so you panicked, et cetera. Then we’ll get there and do the thing. It’ll all be over soon.”
I left the television on mute while I called my parents, then Prachi. A crime procedural played. Two detectives surveyed the bloody floor of a New York apartment, traded morbid puns. I was telling my family, then Chidi, that I was okay, that the dude had seemed to have it out for me since I fell down on his cart, that some primal instinct had sent me fleeing.
My mother was weepy, which was infectious, and before I could stop myself, I was crying again. “It’s okay, rajah,” she said. “It’s okay now.” (For a long while after, she talked often, and scathingly, of Minkus, as though critiquing him could undo the horror he had nearly inflicted on her baby boy; she told people this was what happened when you let your brown children go off copying the ways of white people—hunting-schmunting, shooting-wooting.)
I apologized to Prachi—I didn’t have the lehenga, I said. I wasn’t sure where it was.
“Honestly,” she said, after assuring me that what mattered most was my safety. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to wear white, and Amma can suck it up.”
Chidi just whistled. “Fucking A,” he said. “How are we supposed to live forever if you plonk yourself in the middle of shit like this, huh?”
When I was done reassuring everyone, I shoved all the gold under the mattress, left the lehenga on the duvet, and half jogged back to the corner store to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. From the Goodwill next door I grabbed a cheap Hanes T-shirt. Arriving back at the motel, clutching my loot, I found three willowy Indian women, all with the same thick hair, the same sudden widening of the hips, the same swanlike neck, standing outside room 214. One of them was pounding, deliberate and furious.
“Ani,” I said. Three faces turned toward me. Each one a startling inheritor of another. Lakshmi Joshi’s face was lined, but she was curiously youthful in the eyes, which were lighter—wet sand, rather than muddy brown—and more judgmental than Anita’s or Anjali Auntie’s as they assessed me. Anjali Auntie looked the oldest—older even than her mother. Her hair was white and gray in the front, though black around the top and back—it had only been streaked with silver when I saw her in June. It was as though age were imperfectly, somehow unscientifically encroaching.
Each woman had a large bag slung over her shoulder—supplies, I thought, relieved. We could, in moments, eliminate all evidence of the crime.
For a wild moment I had the urge to touch Anjali Auntie’s feet the way my mother once forced me to touch my ajji’s.
“Hi,” I said, and let us all into the room.
Anjali Auntie smiled irresolutely. The frailness of her hand was matched in her face, too.
“This is my grandmother.” Anita lifted her elbow unnecessarily in her ajji’s direction.
Lakshmi Joshi sniffed pointedly.
“Yeah, um. I should shower.” I lifted the mattress up, handed the gold to Anita. In the bathroom, I left the water scalding. Burn me away, I wished it. I emerged, smelling better, to find Anita and her mother watching as Lakshmi swirled some clear liquid in a dish soap bottle.
We gathered into an assembly line, intuitively. I stood at the far edge, pulling tools from bags. Me and the witches three.
The procedure this time was different—a distinct recipe. I laid out on the table several round steel boxes, three long spoons, two more of those dish soap bottles. Lakshmi muttered rapidly, monotonously, trailing through a longer invocation I didn’t recognize. The old woman was efficient, hiking her lavender pallu up her shoulder a few times as it slipped, barely stopping to breathe as she placed each piece of gold in a stone basin. I handed Anita the bottles; she passed them to her ajji. The few times our eyes met I saw that she was as disoriented by the changed procedure as I was. Were we brewing another potion entirely?
Anjali Auntie seemed to need a wall or a chair to hold her up. Once or twice Anita’s ajji looked at her and paused her recitation so the daughter could repeat after the mother in a faint voice. Various liquids were squeezed out, and Lakshmi began to massage the gold. It didn’t liquefy as I remembered. It took on a batter-like quality, thick and jiggly on the surface.
“Light,” Lakshmi Joshi said, breaking her rhythm. Anita extracted a butane canister. I took so many steps backward, I nearly buckled onto the bed.
Anita flicked on the blue flame, which angled steeply over the basin. Then she withdrew the butane. The flame shuddered.
I stepped close enough to feel that halo of heat that still ringed the basin and saw the lavalike bubbling of our now-molten gold. There was so little. But at least the stolen goods were one step more alien, one step removed from the crime.
“Where are the lemons?” I asked, pawing through the bags.
“Mama, we forgot them.” Anita’s voice caught.
Lakshmi Auntie’s hand appeared on mine. She steered Anita and me away from the supplies. Her grip was gentler than I’d expected.
“What’s wrong, Auntie?” I said.
“You listen Anita’s mother, now,” the old woman said.
“We won’t need those lemons and all this time,” Anjali Auntie said.
“You’re not going to drink it?” Anita said.
“Come.” Anjali Dayal ran a hand through her strange hair, that weird striping of black and gray. The already stuffy room was suffused with the dizzying smell of the molten metal.
“Sit,” she said. “Let me tell you some things first.”
Anjali Dayal treasured the Hammond Creek years when her life was solely hers. Well—hers and her daughter’s. She wanted those precious years to go on forever. She believed they could.
Pranesh, on the West Coast, is at first content to split the family across the coasts. He builds his company in California, while Anjali manages hers (he never thinks of her work as a company, but she does) in Georgia. But after a few years, Pranesh grows tired of living alone, in a rented townhouse, like a bachelor, subsisting on Maggi noodles. His wife and daughter need to follow him west—it’s past time. They rehearse this fight many times.
One night, during the fall of our freshman year of high school, the Dayals snipe at each other over the move for the hundredth time. Pranesh does not want to go on paying a mortgage and rent. Rent, at their age. He is trying to do what he came to America to do, to build something—can’t Anjali see that? And Anjali: Can’t Pranesh see that the thing you come to America to build isn’t software, but a home for a new generation? She invokes Anita. Anita cannot move. Anita’s just started high school. Anjali isn’t sure where her needs end and her daughter’s begin.
They strike a bargain on this fall evening: Anjali tells Pranesh that Anita will have a better shot at Harvard from a private school in Atlanta. “These public schools in the Bay Area, they’re full of too many too-too brilliant Asian kids,” she pitches. Pranesh, who never debates the importance of education, assents. If Anita can get into a private school with a track record of strong Ivy League admissions—a better track record than a South Bay public school—he’ll pay for it, and the women can stay put a few more years.
So, Anjali needs a guarantee. For herself, and for Anita. She knows what a guarantee looks like. She’s seen it bubbling on a stove. She’s even tasted it, once.
Anjali and Lakshmi are not speaking regularly at this point in time. Anjali still nurses the snub of her childhood. That she was never given a dose of the gold her brother drank. That she had to take ambition on Pranesh’s lips, secondhand. She has no desire to humble herself; doing so would mean returning to silenced parts of the past—to Vivek. The Joshis do not talk about Vivek.
But Anjali needs the gold.
So instead she hunts around online. Stumbles upon a few academic publications by a white man, a professor at Emory University, inside the perimeter. His name is Lyall Pratt. He’s written on alchemical and Tantric texts. She decides to seek him out; perhaps whatever her mother did all those years ago belongs to some branch of philosophy or ritual practice that this South Asianist has studied.
In his office, she works up to it, asks him questions about gold, plays a curious, bored housewife. She’s taken with him. He’s a widower, twelve years older than she. Tall, salt-and-pepper-haired, with a background in philology and anthropology and a lithe, yogic body. His eyes are a surprisingly dark brown. By the end of that first meeting, she risks it. Tells him everything she saw her mother do years ago. He is suddenly animated. Keeps saying he heard of these kinds of things when living in the Indian hinterlands. Stories of kings drinking the plunder of their conquered subjects.
He had, he tells her, even trekked with some swamis in search of the mythical gold-laden Saraswati River. The swamis told him that if he brought his wife’s ashes there, the holy water might revive something of what had been lost.
It drove Lyall nearly mad when they couldn’t find the river.
I saw it then: Anjali Dayal and Lyall Pratt leaning into each other beneath the autumn Atlanta sun that year, daring to brush hands as they walk along the old Decatur homes, gold and myth on their tongues, gold and crimson leaves canopying above them.
Lyall helps Anjali confirm Anita’s place at the new school, no gold required. He is from an old Atlanta family; he knows everyone. He makes a call. Anjali listens in as he chats up the admissions committee. She’s in his office, admiring the late-afternoon sunbeams warming the sleek wood of his floors and bookshelves. Dripping from his walls are Indian fabrics, mirrorwork and tinsel, ikat and chungadi prints. India itself is decoration for him. Outside: Atlanta’s Bradford pears are stripped of their foliage. Dead branches rap against windowpanes. Undergraduates scurry to the library. Lyall’s is a security Anjali has never before seen, so free is it of the elbowing and clawing of Hammond Creek. He belongs, effortlessly.
But getting Anita into her new school is not enough. Lyall’s money and power are white. She needs more for her daughter. That spring, the acquisitions begin. Anjali, creeping through suburban homes as onions brown and sabzis simmer in the kitchen. The sizzle and crack of jeera in hot oil as she steals into bedrooms, closets, jewelry cabinets. Choosing the small pieces no one will miss. Reciting to herself: You are the wife of a rich man. You are not the help. If she were caught—and she nearly is, a handful of times—she could talk her way out of it. Snooping, someone would gossip. Who would imagine Pranesh Dayal’s wife to be a cat burglar?
In a chemistry lab at the university, she and Lyall iterate the lemonade formula. At night, she fiddles in her kitchen. At last, she gets it. It doesn’t taste quite the way she remembers her mother’s concoction—she still recalls, vividly, that single stolen sip of Vivek’s brew, decades ago. Lakshmi’s potion was ugly, sour. Anjali has made the lemonade sweet. She’s made it a delight to drink. She’s made it craveable.
At this point in the telling, Anjali Auntie’s eyelids looked heavy, like the weight of the story was exerting excess gravity on her. She turned her face to the window. The drapes were still drawn, but her eyes bore through the curtain, like they were witnessing a private play. Lakshmi Auntie was pacing around the motel room with the energy of a much younger woman.
Anjali has the recipe for Anita’s and my lemonade in hand now. She doesn’t need Lyall anymore, not officially; she could make do alone. But she keeps visiting Decatur. To see him. She stands in Lyall’s backyard in his house off West Ponce de Leon Avenue, clinking white-wine glasses while sitar and tabla music plays. A portrait of Lyall’s late wife, Miranda, eyes them from his bookshelves. They talk about gold, its strange properties, its beguiling histories.
“And I wasn’t only interested in him,” Anjali Auntie said now—and this was the first time she had stated it so boldly. “He and I shared a certain fascination. With alchemy.”
“Alchemy promises more time,” she went on. “See? And he and I both felt we had lost things to time. He had lost years watching his wife die, and grieving her, and all that aged him prematurely.
“Me, I suppose I felt something had been taken from me. I had never been given quite the same chances as my brother, or even Anita. I thought—more time . . . well, it seemed my due.” Her voice turned a little bleating at that last part.
Lakshmi Auntie glanced at the basin. The gold congealed at its edges, a duller shade than I’d seen before. She lifted her sari to her mouth, as though to cover some impolitic expression. She closed her eyes. I was not sure how much she understood of the English, word by word—we were moving quickly. I wondered if Anita’s ajji was attempting to hear as little as possible about the events leading to today, reserving her energy for the aftermath; she was not there to condone or analyze what had occurred, only to try to put it all to rest as best she could.
And so the affair begins, and with it, Anjali and Lyall’s shared project.
Hours bent over old texts, hours of his hands unfurling in her hair, of forgetting responsibility and risk. They discover ancient recipes, and something begins to change. Anjali is lighter, happier. Her smooth, bronze-patina cheek presses against Lyall’s lighter one, mildly shaded by his graying stubble, which browns with the potions. They must indeed be cheating time, because how else could she be here, how else could the two of them possess all this life and heat when she is supposed to be raising a daughter, being a wife? This is all she’s wanted, for years, though she never had the language for it: a space apart from expectation, purloined pockets of time where she is permitted the sprawl of youth.
Lyall’s emptied garage in the Ponce de Leon Avenue home: bodies knock into beakers. Strange smells, some pungent as fresh ginger, others hot like chili powder. Eerie columns of smoke rise from the vessels. Blue and orange flames irradiate the windowless bunker. Nothing here is as pretty as her lemonade. Often, it’s gloopy, cinnabar red. Another, like souring milk—it comes up from her mouth in foamy vomit; she is rabid. He won’t let her stop. He pushes the vial to her lips, holds her head back, tips it down her throat. “You have to, darling,” he whispers. “You have to.” For the first time, she wonders, as she swallows her bile, if they’ve gone a little mad.
But she’s come to crave these drinks, just as we crave the lemonade. It’s an addiction—to the brews, and to him. She aches for both equally. Once or twice, he wonders aloud if they should slow up. She never allows it.
Lyall and Anjali have had a year together.
But then Pranesh restarts the old fight. Anjali and Anita must move. To California. He plans to put the Hammond Creek house on the market. He needs liquidity for the company, and claims Anita stands a chance at Harvard from the South Bay public schools. He says it wouldn’t matter, anyway, if she got into Harvard and he couldn’t pay. Anjali fights back. Which causes Pranesh to suspect something. He threatens to cut her off. “I have been patient,” he warns her. “Indulgent.”
And then, Shruti.
When I tell Anjali the news, she thinks bitterly: Perhaps this is why we age, placing a hand on my neck. So that someone makes the right decisions. The world seems to be telling her that leaving Hammond Creek, and Lyall, is the adult thing to do. He tries to reason with her, even arrives at the mustard yellow house on the night the Dayals are hosting a party, the very last night I see Anjali Dayal for a decade. I catch a glimpse of him, pulling up by the Walthams’ house. I walk home while they argue in plain sight. He begs her to consider being with him, not to be so trapped in her own culture. She dares him: Would he pay for Harvard? Parent Anita? His silence is all the answer she needs; her daughter is just a story to him.
Next to me, Anita sniffed. She had been as stony as a practiced meditator as we listened to her mother; her ajji, across the room, was similarly unmoving. I was afraid to look at Anita, for she had never liked anyone witnessing her vulnerability. I reached to hold her small hand in my larger one, gripped it so my muscles clenched and my ears popped.
Anjali Auntie, drawing me out of myself, just as she used to in the Hammond Creek basement: “Do you know why so many alchemists died, Neil?”
I shook my head—I didn’t seem to know anything at all, in that moment—but then a phrase returned to me, from a college history-of-science class. Mad as a hatter.
“Mercury poisoning is often incurable and often deadly,” she said in a terrible monotone. “And it’s a key ingredient in most alchemical rituals. You end up ingesting fumes. We drank it, too. A lot of it. I thought I’d found some methods the rasasiddhis—the Hindu alchemists—never knew in order to make it safe.” She scoffed. “Lyall believed me. That, or he was too hooked to object. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell when mercury starts affecting you. The symptoms can seem like something else. Depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s.” Her hand—her shaky hand—clutched her kneecap. “Your kidneys fail. A lot fails after that.”
“Why couldn’t you have drunk all the gold we were taking?” I burst.
“So much,” Anita whispered. “There was so much, Mama.”
Anjali Auntie shook her head, a professorial reprimand. We knew better. “Alchemy is bigger than that. We didn’t want to steal someone else’s ambitions. That’s petty, small-time. We were trying to steal from the universe, you could say. Steal time itself.”
Lakshmi Joshi stood, tracing the basin with her finger. Her eyes bore into that lumpy smelted metal. More than ever now, she seemed deaf to what we had just listened to; she was pacing some other plane, a plane where it was not too late.
“I didn’t see symptoms for a while,” Anjali Auntie said.
In Sunnyvale, she is miserable. She cannot find work. Her daughter hardly speaks to her, blaming her for Shruti’s death. Pranesh says he’s heard things. Says he knows what she is. He has learned the phrase gold digger—it’s on every radio station, on all the airwaves that year; even Pranesh cannot avoid it. He pushes, he pounds things, he shouts.
Slowly, Anjali starts to notice she is growing older. Lines and spots and a need for reading glasses and a back that twinges, sometimes spasms. She thinks at first that it is just the natural process. But then it seems to speed up. Isn’t she too young to have these tremors? To be forgetting things with enough frequency that she loses multiple jobs? She develops abstract suspicions: that time, in a way, is having its revenge on her. And then finally she admits it to herself. The mercury—and a few of the other untranslatable substances—are extracting their particular biochemical price. She researches chelation therapy, but what would she tell the internist when the lab work comes back?
She does not know how much damage she did to herself. Is she dying, too? Well, we’re all dying; is she dying faster, sooner, now? Is it the quality of time she’s ruined? Is it why she has a prescription for sleeping pills, why she sometimes shakes them out on her bathroom counter to imagine all of them clunking against one another in her stomach?
Anita inched away from me and placed her head in her mother’s lap. Anjali Auntie ran one hand through her daughter’s hair, her gaze fixed on the wall opposite, as though she was reading what came next on the sickly yellow motel wallpaper.
“Lyall got back in touch two years ago. He showed up at the house.”
Pranesh: answering the door, belly protruding, eyebrows grown into one long caterpillar, facing this man in horn-rimmed glasses with now fully white hair. Lyall was always slender but is now emaciated. A neighbor in a sun hat fiddles in his garden, pausing his spade at the surface of the soil, craning his neck to gauge what juicy scene is playing out at the Dayals’ front door.
Lyall tells Anjali he’s at Berkeley now. He, too, is sick. He blacks out, hallucinates. He is aging unnaturally. Anjali speaks with him in the backyard, beneath the citrus trees. She stays feet away from him, her back against the sliding glass door, while Pranesh harrumphs in the kitchen, eyes on them both. Anjali suspects Lyall has gone on drinking the brews from the Hammond Creek days, that he never detoxed as she did. Which explains why he looks so much worse, as though he’s survived a war.
After that, she goes to see Lyall at Berkeley a few times. They aren’t together-together. He needs tending. At this point, it’s a battle for months, maybe a year. “There must be something I can do,” she insists, because this is something she knows how to do—to orient her life around another person’s problems.
He says he has one hope—part of the reason he came to California. He still thinks about the promise the swamis made him. About the placer-lined Saraswati River, containing the holiest gold. Gold untouched by human madness and cravings. Gold that’s pure enough to extend one’s time. He knows there are only meager flecks left in Californian rivers. But he prays these waters can heal him. He and Anjali drive out to the American River, to the Sacramento, to the Trinity, to the Feather, to the Yuba.
She is always at the wheel, while he sits in the passenger’s seat. His forehead bounces against the glass as he dozes. Rainless clouds obscure the Sacramento Valley sun. Cornfields reach for the dry gray sky. Each time they arrive at a riverbank, they remove their shoes and wade into the water, splashing each other, copying gestures described in texts. Once, a historical reenactor in suspenders and Levi’s warns them not to keep their mouths open if they don’t want the worst fucking runs for weeks.
And?
And, nothing. The rivers are just rivers.
There is a moment, though. Once, at the South Yuba River State Park. When they step toward each other in the water. They swivel their heads to the far bank to see a white woman and a brown man. Lyall sobs. Anjali breathes heavily. The woman looks so like Miranda. The man reminds Anjali of Vivek. They paddle across the water.
When they reach the other side, their bare feet slip on the slimy rocks, and the woman is laughing and the man is not Indian but Hispanic. “What are you guys doing in there?” the woman asks. Her accent is all middle America twang. Miranda was English. “You really meet some crazies in California.”
Lyall dies. There wasn’t enough pure gold left in the waters to undo the mercury poisoning. It’s nearly all sapped up, by pans, by Long Toms, by barges, by dredges, by hydraulics, by the interminable yearning we share with so many other players in the long drama of history.
Anjali Auntie lifted her shirtsleeve to her eyes. “I’m sorry you put yourselves at such risk. If I’d known—if my mother had clued me in, or one of you . . . I would have told you, there’s no point. It’s too late for whatever blessing that wedding gold might’ve given me.”
Anita began to dig in the bags. “Mama,” she said metallically, “you need ibuprofen. A hot water bottle? Or, no. Is there an ice machine?” Her hair fell over her face, obscuring her features. Here she was, taking refuge in the hard edges of efficiency. Never one to dwell in grief or fear, or love. Then she looked at the basin next to her, at the gold that had settled into something pudding-like. “What do we do with this?” she muttered.
Which was when Lakshmi Joshi rose from her position perched on the desk chair. Her light eyes flicked themselves alive. Had we reached her plane now? A plane where something could be done?
Lakshmi Auntie said, matter-of-factly, her English clear but tentative, “We put it in river.”
Like dumping a body.
“That’s it?” I said.
Anita’s grandmother rapped the vessel. “You take. Neeraj, you take.”
“You didn’t know about any of it?” I asked her, hoisting the basin to my hips obediently. “The alchemy, the—the affair?”
“Absolutely I did not know. If I knew, I would not have said go chase bridal gold. I would have done some other thinking.” She took my elbow, unconcerned about overburdening me, and shuffled beside me. “So last night after Anita’s mother tells me all this, I sit and think for a long time. New rite I am trying. Let us see.”
“Where did you learn all this, Auntie?”
She pursed her lips and smacked them a few times. “You pick up things from mother, mother’s mother, mother’s sister. Like recipes. Cannot remember who starts it all.”
Behind me, Anita carried out the Manish Motilal lehenga. We descended the stairs to the parking lot. I placed the basin in my passenger’s seat, covered it with my dirty T-shirt.
Anita was in an authoritative mood now. “Drive. We’ll follow you, Neil.”
We squeezed through the narrow streets in that neatly gridded downtown and arrived at Sally’s Saloon, with its swinging doors. We parked and passed the red Taoist Bok-Kai temple. I was holding the basin against my belly like a large pumpkin. Anjali Auntie stopped for a moment in front of the temple’s high red gate. Anita was helping her grandmother up the steps that preceded the slippery gravel slope down to the riverbank.
Anjali Auntie turned from the red pillars of the temple.
“Do you know . . . ?” I began, and then stopped myself.
“How long I have?” Those white-gray streaks framing her face were handsome.
“Yeah.”
“No.” Her voice didn’t break. “It’s been bad since moving here. But the last few months, since Lyall died, have been even worse.” Above us were the two dark shapes of Anita and her ajji, blending into each other. Anjali Auntie’s eyes flitted a few centimeters to the right, locking on the taller, slimmer figure. “Ani must be furious at how little I told her.” Her bark-colored eyes locked on mine. “But I haven’t seen much of her in the last two months. She has secrets, too.”
I looked away, flushing.
So up the steps we went, Anita’s mother’s elbow crooked through mine, until the four of us stood looking down at the sand-and-pebble bank. We were alone, us and the slow, gurgling rapids.
“Ajji won’t be able to make it down,” Anita said. Lakshmi Auntie spoke quickly in Marathi, gestured, and then tapped the basin.
Anita blinked very fast a few times as though to beat back emotion. I had almost forgotten my own heightened pulse from earlier in the day when I’d seen three words beaming up from my phone: I love you. It seemed wrong that the declaration had not been followed by a sudden stabilizing of the world.
“Anita,” I said, still gripping the basin. The gold clotted at its edges like dairy left in the heat. It seemed eons away from what I’d been stuffing into my pockets and bag at the expo. “Can I have a word with you?”
She glanced over the water, at the lowering sun, and said, “Yes, but quickly, Neil.” And I was consumed with a version of the feeling I’d had all the time as a child, that sense that privacy draped her, that she could not or would not lift it long enough to look directly at me. Except this time she turned, followed me a few paces away from her mother and grandmother, and let her lips briefly brush my clavicle. I felt the hot poignancy of her breath on my T-shirt, on my chest hairs. Her hands gripped the basin; her touch was so light that it was at first just there for balance, but then, before I knew it, she had taken the full weight of it out of my hands and into hers. The air felt icy on my palms.
“I just wanted some help,” I said. “From this gold. I know it’s too late now, I know it’s probably not potable, or whatever.” She was shaking her head rapidly. “I’m not asking for it. I’m not. But I want you to understand why I let it make me crazy. I just wanted something to make everything less scary. Sometimes I can’t imagine ever feeling at home anywhere in the world, or with anyone at all.”
“I know,” she said. “Everyone’s afraid, Neil.” Then she whispered, “Would it be so wild to try to do this relationship on realist terms?”
The evening was going dark around us. “Look at them, my grandma and my mom,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at her two progenitors. Her mother was looking decidedly away, while Lakshmi Auntie’s gaze remained on us. “Look how far they’ve had to travel in their lifetimes. We don’t have to do those distances, Neil. We just have to figure out how to be at home right here. That’s so much easier. That’s so lucky.”
There were her lips on my clavicle again, and everything was both the same as always and also entirely, infinitely, promisingly new.
I waited at the top of the hill with Lakshmi Auntie while Anita and her mother picked down the slope together. Anita with the gold. Her mother, holding her wrist. The two of them faded into each other in a single shared form. I had that sense I’d had about them when I was a teenager—that some part of each one was indistinguishable from the other. I felt awkward and tongue-tied standing next to Anita’s ajji.
“So. You are writer,” she said.
“Oh! No. Just a grad student.” I turned to see that her lined face was impassive.
“Anita says you are writer. You’re writing book.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Only a dissertation no one will ever read.”
She folded her arms. Surveyed the beach. Anita and her mother were now lost to the darkness. “You should write book,” she said. “That is how you make career.” I imagined Lakshmi Joshi looming over Vivek as he turned wraithlike from all the swotting. She was so small, and yet imposing, and had that older-Indian manner about her that refuses excuses.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Write a big book. Adventure story. Mystery story. Sell many copies. I tell Anita these things, too. Your parents did not come so far for you to write nothing-things, for her to plan parties.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Good boy.”
Then the sound I’d been waiting for rose up from the bank—a splash, like a bundle of heavy bricks puncturing the surface of still water. The gold, in the river. And I remembered then, that story Anjali Auntie had told me years earlier, about King Midas. How he shook his fingers into a river to wash away the curse he’d wished upon himself, which he’d first believed to be a blessing. How when the water took the golden touch from him, the earth earned back some of its precious stores. How other people panned for it, amassing little synecdoches of Midas’s fortune for generations. How the burden was lifted and shared, and in that way turned back into a gift.
“Hai Raam,” whispered Lakshmi Joshi, which meant she saw what I saw. “I hoped. Something to happen.” Right at the spot where the two rivers forked into each other, the twin waters shuddered, briefly, like a fault line had been activated. And then came a flash, soundless, and the river turned a pale yellow, the hue of the dregs of lemon juice.
I raced downward. The sky above was still alight. The river, still that lemon shade. I approached the riverbank, where I dipped my fingers into the yellow water. I kicked my shoes off, rolled up my jeans, and stepped in. It was not as cold as it should have been.
I thought I saw, to my left, Anita and her mother standing ankle-deep in the river, but my eyes were not on them. I was looking instead across the water.
Crouched on the far side of the river was a dark man. His hair was rumpled and full of cowlicks. I recognized him. I might have called out, but I did not know his true name. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and his arms were partially submerged in the water, as though he was collecting something.
A trickle of gold—brighter and bolder than the yellow of the rest of the water—was swimming neither downstream nor upstream but from our bank to his. Briefly, I tore my eyes away to see if Anita and her mother were looking, too. They were. I snapped my head back, half-afraid he’d be gone. He wasn’t. He bent over, arms in the water. We all stood there like hunters watching a deer pad through brush. After a minute, or a few, the yellow began to fade, and the stream of gold grew distant until it all seemed to gather on the other side. My Bombayan gold digger was standing and shaking a pan.
And from the pan drifted the misty shape of a man; his white hair caught the moon’s glow. His head was turned in the direction of Anjali Auntie, as though he could not see me at all. And another figure: a young man, early twenties at best, whose impish smile I could see even from here; he, too, looked at Anjali Auntie, his younger sister. And then a third: a girl with frizzy hair and a glower that I couldn’t see from here but that was surely there, wrinkling her face. I waited to make out her expression—if I could just see how she looked upon me from death to life, then maybe I’d know if I had been or would be forgiven, one day. But it was just the shape of her, distinct yet cloudy, so all I knew was that she was regarding me. I didn’t know if I’d ever know how to parse that regard. I took one step toward them on the rocky bank, but their figures seemed to quiver, as though at risk of dissipating if I got too close, so I stayed where I was.
The three of them, Shruti and Lyall and Vivek, and perhaps still others I couldn’t even see at all, bent alongside the gold digger and plunged their hands into the river, collecting whatever we were giving back to them.
Our offering seemed meager, but they shone at the sight of it.
The Bombayan began to recede first, like fog lifting, and then the others followed him. In a moment, there was again a sudden shock of crooked yellow light. It came and was gone so quickly, and the night went dark as all the shapes from our past took rest.
I dipped my hand into the now alarmingly cold river, disturbing its stillness.
I didn’t and don’t have a name for what happened that night. In the months that followed, all I got from Lakshmi Joshi and her non-hermeneutical approach to history was that there are some mysteries a person needs to accept, some logics to which we are all subject, whether or not we believe we opted into them.
“We had to give it back,” she said of the gold. “I was not sure. But thought maybe something would happen. To think about gold like some offering.”
Or, like returning offspring to its ancestor.
Perhaps when Anita and Anjali Auntie delivered gold to the river that had run dry of it for so long, they unskewed some sins. Perhaps that night granted Anita’s mother time. For there was time, time during which three generations of women were together, and closer, and known to one another. Time that, over the next few years, came to seem like incontrovertible magic, as Anjali Auntie had good days, days during which she told stories of Bombay in her living room and passed on recipes (to me, never Anita, who was clumsy in the kitchen). Time that, as Chidi would always say, was all everyone wanted—more time for the big and the small, a chance to undo resentments, a chance to witness your child’s future slowly unfurling, a chance to go on another walk around the sun-warmed cul-de-sac.
Then again, perhaps the earth took the gold for itself, sparing us no boon. Perhaps the only magic that night was that a grandmother and a mother and a daughter saw each other more clearly, and that I glimpsed that truth about history, that it flows toward us as we flow toward it, that we each shine sense on the other.