Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian (10 ebook reader txt) 📗

drank one of her gold earrings. Nothing, she suspected. Her wants were too nebulous.

“I used to use those as swords, when I was small,” Pranesh said, pointing at the pod. He took it and stabbed the air. He was so like a child. All that studying could not grow you up.

Slowly, they became friendly. Anjali shared a milky-sweet chai with him a few times. He reminded her of a teenage Dhruv, who had also been plump and bookish, to the extent that he barely existed outside his turning pages, his pencils on graphing paper. She felt for Pranesh when she learned he had been orphaned at fourteen; it explained—did it?—his coldness. Was there romance? There was a thrill in discovering that men harbored secrets, and that this thing called love might consist in part of teasing such privacies out, learning to hold them yourself. The fact that he told her so little gave her labor to perform, made her feel useful.

Vivek and his mates found the friendship odd. Particularly perturbed by Anjali’s affection for dumpy Pranesh was Rakesh Malhotra, a good-looking Punjabi with a reputation for being the hostel’s worst ragger. He dragged first-years from bed and made them march naked, gripping each other’s penises. When Anjali failed to notice Rakesh, he began to talk about her as a calculating manipulator of male attention—a portrayal that would make its way to my mother’s ears through his family, the Bhatts of Hammond Creek. Gold digger.

But things rolled on with Pranesh. When they strolled around the lake, she grilled him on his plans. He was going to get a PhD, in America.

“It’s cutthroat,” he told her expertly. “They do not let just anybody in.”

She began to tell him about Dhruv in North Carolina, the Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes, the Jolen hair cream. Pranesh asked where Dhruv had been in school.

He shook his head. “I will go somewhere better. Do not worry. I’ll do much more than all those people.”

She felt, for the first time, included in the fringes of someone else’s future.

•   •   •

In the spring of his final year, Vivek went on holiday. He was riding with friends on the roof of a train from Bombay to Kanyakumari. They had their guitars up there, and they were strumming Dire Straits the whole way south. There was a disconnect between landscape and soundscape—their twangs did not match the dry fields laden with yellow-green brush, baking beneath the cloudless sky. They felt thick with the possibility of what awaited them over the next several years, as some of them prepared to cross oceans, to make lives of their own.

The car passed under a low electrical wire. All ducked but Vivek. Beneath the relentless Andhra Pradesh sun, having brushed twenty-five thousand volts, he sustained third-degree burns. He died atop the train, miles from his parents, from his sister, from the elder brother who had set such a standard for him.

“My dad used to call Uncle Vivek’s death very Indian,” Anita said. “A third world way to go, that’s what he’d say. He had a lot of anger against India for things like that. His parents died in a terrible bus crash in Himachal Pradesh.” She shivered and continued.

The following months were brutal at the Joshis’. Dhruv did not come home. He was waiting for his American residency to go through and claimed leaving the United States would boot him to the back of the queue. Lakshmi Joshi never forgave her firstborn. She was territorial about her grief, snapping at anyone who tried to join her weeping. “My child, my child,” she wailed. Anjali could not help thinking that her mother’s overwhelming woe was another sign that she, the daughter, was inadequate.

As the year went on, Anjali completed her exams, earning poor marks. All auspicious events, engagements included, were postponed in the wake of death, so she had some time. But soon, she would be noticed for what she was—a daughter who needed to be married off. And who could say to what type of man? It seemed a horrible fate to have to live your life with someone whose mind was smaller than your own. She wanted someone who was more than she was.

So, she had an idea. To take what she needed. A few weeks after her exams, she rode the bus to Powai with some of her classmates to attend Mood Indigo, the big music festival hosted each year by IIT Bombay. Vivek had played with his band on those stages. It was stomach-clenching to be back in his territory, but she’d arrived on a mission. She skirted the edge of the party, passing greasy-haired communists. One of them handed her a bright flyer reading ban rock show: american imperialist tradition before sighing, shoving the rest of his papers into a cloth messenger bag, and moseying back to his hostel, defeated that night by cultural globalization. A doomed student band from St. Xavier’s began to play George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” and as the frank roar of boos followed, Anjali knew it was only a matter of time before someone began throwing rotten bananas and tomatoes onto the stage.

Then, at the fateful swell of a Police song, she found herself blinking at Pranesh Dayal. They had not seen each other since Vivek’s death. “I’m sorry,” he shouted through the noise.

Their recommenced walks along the lakeside in Powai were longer now. Lakshmi believed her daughter to be studying in town with her posh friends. Pranesh told her stiffly, as though he’d copped the line from a film, that she was the very picture of beauty. For his part, he had begun jogging and doing push-ups; he was, briefly, almost handsome.

When he graduated and told her he was moving to a place called Atlanta, where he had been accepted into Georgia Tech (he’d wanted Stanford), she told him to write. His letters rolled in. There are no good rotis to be found. I hope you are learning your mother’s/chachi’s recipes etc because all of us students are