“Aiyee,” she ventured. “What is it?”
“This has nothing to do with you,” Lakshmi said. “This is for Vivek.”
With practiced ease, her mother lifted the pot with tongs and held it high above a steel tumbler, like a street tea seller. Liquid ribboned out between the two vessels: a perplexing, deep-yellow flicker. It caught the muted evening sunlight streaming through the flat.
The door opened, and there came the sounds of scuffling in the hallway, Vivek and Parag, briefly unburdened of their studies. Anjali heard them making plans for a round of cricket, then lowering their voices before a burst of conspiratorial laughter. There would be no cricket; she knew Vivek would fall asleep over his coursework before there was time for games.
“Aiyee!” Vivek called, kicking off his street-dirt-streaked chappals. Lakshmi swiveled, hand still inches from the fire, and her flinty gaze fell on Vivek. He straightened, and Anjali swore he shuddered as he saw what swished in the tumbler. He glanced back over his shoulder, as though hoping Parag might call him away. But Parag had gone. The open door swung on its hinges. At the drift of outside air, the gas stove shuddered. Its flame hued the same witchy blue as the Goswami sign. Lakshmi switched it off.
• • •
Many years later, Anjali stood in her own kitchen in Hammond Creek, Georgia. Her daughter slept upstairs. Her husband was miles away. In the suburban somnolence, the only noise was of a long metal spoon clinking against a glass pitcher as she stirred. She brought just the edge of the spoon to her mouth. A small pink tongue darted out to taste the thing that still seemed forbidden. Was it tangier? Too sour? She had tried her mother’s drink only once, briefly, surreptitiously. But she suspected her iteration was not yet right. That seemed to happen in migration. The old recipes were never quite the same on this side of the world.
Part One GOLDEN CHILDREN
May this gold which brings long life and splendor and increase of wealth, and which gets through all adversities, enter upon me for the sake of long life, of splendor, and of victory.
—from the Grihya-Sutra of Hiranyakesin, Vedic text
As in metal, so in the body.
—Rasarnava, Hindu treatise on alchemy
1.
When I was younger, I consisted of little but my parents’ ambitions for who I was to become. But by the end of ninth grade, all I wanted for myself was a date to the Spring Fling dance. A hot one. The dream was granted, by chance. Finding myself unaccompanied in the final days before the event, I begged my neighbor and childhood best friend, Anita Dayal, to take pity on me. Fine; I could be her “escort,” she allowed, putting the word in air quotes as we readied for that rather fateful night.
Before the dance, I was set to meet Anita and our crowd at the mall. We’d take photos outside the TCBY, all trussed up in our Macy’s finery. My mother deposited me on a median in the middle of the parking lot, early, then sped off to my older sister’s picture party. Prachi had been nominated for Spring Fling court and was living a more documentable high school life. Prachi, the Narayan child who managed to be attractive and intelligent and deferential to our cultural traditions to boot, was headed to Duke, we were all sure. Earlier that day, cheeks blooming with pride, my mother had fastened a favorite, slim gold chain of her own, gifted by our ajji, around Prachi’s neck. My sister kissed my mother’s cheek like an old, elegant woman and thanked her, while I waited to be dropped into my own small life, in an ill-fitting suit.
I waited on the median, growing anxious. There was no sign of Anita. I paced and fidgeted, watching the others pin corsages and boutonnieres, and readied myself, after fifteen minutes, then twenty, to give up and trek down one of those horrible sidewalk-less stretches of great Georgia boulevard back home to Hammond Creek. I was already turning away from the fuss, attempting to loosen my father’s congealed-blood-colored tie, when Anita and her mother screeched up in their little brown Toyota. I knocked my knee against the concrete dolphin-adorned fountain and shouted, “Shit!”
A wall of mostly Indian and Asian parents regarded me with a collective glare. Yes, I consisted largely of my parents’ ambitions, but some part of me was also made of the ogling, boggling eyeballs of the rest of our community.
And another part—a significant part—was Anita, who was now stepping out of the double-parked car, smiling blithely. Anita had bright eyes: muddy brown, lively, roving, liable to flick over you quickly, as though there was something else more interesting or urgent in your vicinity. It made you want to stand squarely in her line of vision to ask for her full attention; when you got it, it felt like the warming of the late-morning summer sun.
“Neil, I told her we were late, but stubborn girl wouldn’t listen!” Anita’s mother, Anjali Auntie, said. She was dressed like she planned to attend the dance herself, in a bright green sheath framing her breasts, a dress that reminded me she was unlike other mothers.
“I got invited to Melanie’s picture party first,” Anita said. “I IM’d you!”
A betrayal: cherry-cheeked and universally admired Melanie Cho had laughed off my invitation to the dance weeks before, leaving me itchy with self-loathing. Anita’s grin—the grin of the newly anointed popular—matched the crystal studding along her bright blue bodice.
Anjali Auntie positioned us shoulder-to-shoulder. Anita linked her arm through mine so the insides of our elbows kissed. This was how we’d been posed in Diwali photos as kids, when our families got together and Prachi dressed Anita up as Sita and assembled a paper crown for me, her spouse, Lord Rama. The posture suddenly seemed foreign.
There was no time
