I’d never had an urge to muse on my roots in the way Prachi and the girls in the Miss Teen India pageant liked to obsess over their heritage, like, What does it mean to be both Indian and American? That kind of thing seemed simpering, and I suppose if I were to ruminate honestly on it years later, such questions only magnified certain inconvenient truths: that despite our bubble of brownness in Hammond Creek, we were, in fact, the minority. That the white kids were still, on average, considered more attractive, more popular. More essentially at home in themselves. That sometimes America baffled us teenagers as much as it did our parents. That every emphasis on achieving a certain future came from the anxiety of simply not knowing, none of us knowing, what life here could be. There was no room to imagine multiple sorts of futures. We’d put all our brainpower toward conjuring up a single one: Harvard.
But. If I had roots in American soil, if we had not all so recently crossed oceans, if our collective past was more textured than I’d been led to believe, then, well, maybe there were other ways of being brown on offer.
Of all these historical yarns, I most remember the one about the Bombayan gold digger.
It was the middle of the afternoon in late June, and I was growing drowsy. A Jenga tower of books was piled on the old man’s table that day, and he rapped the top of it as though to announce something. The tower collapsed, sending books skittering.
“Neil,” he whispered, unfazed by the thudding of books landing on his table. I yanked my headphones out. “I have found something incredible. Would you like to hear it?”
I said I very much wanted to hear. He shuffled through the fallen books to find the original, but then swatted the air, giving up. He leaned back in his wooden chair, stretching his legs in front of him. Through the window, the bloom of brown and green, hickory and pines, darkened. A midday Georgia storm began. As Ramesh Uncle talked, the thunder rolled on.
The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger
The man in question goes unnamed, known only as the Bombayan or, otherwise, the Hindu. The Bombayan has been in California for some-odd amount of time in the summer of 1850 and has picked his way to the goldfields, where he, along with Americans, Australians, Chileans, and Chinese, has been trying his hand at panning. This Hindu may be one of the only—if not the only—men of his race in the region. Solo, he must survive by wits and ambition.
Having had some luck in the goldfields, the Bombayan has on his person about nineteen hundred dollars’ worth of gold in the form of dust and nuggets. One night, he makes camp beneath an oak tree in the valley of Douglas Flat, a region where more fantastic tales of riches mount every day, where ravenous men come seeking that sight—the yellow-gold flash in the shallow pan as the silt falls away. Come one early, blue-black morning, he awakens in his canvas tent after a night of raucousness to find that his gold has gone missing. Frantic, he uses his limited English to flag down a passing caravan of whites, some of whom claim connection to local government, though “government” of any kind in 1850s California is scarce. It’s an unformed place, Calaveras County, full of unformed men.
“I have lost everything! Everything!” he weeps to the whites, who at first wonder at his origins—his skin is nearly as dark as the Natives’, but his dress is thoroughly European. Establishing that he hails from the port city of Bombay, that jewel of the British Empire, they at first pity him—“So far from home . . .”
But then discussion commences. The whites form a briefly united nationhood: Germans, French, Scottish, Irish. Between them they purport to comprehend the colonized world. On horseback, gazing down at this peculiar Hindu, they review what they know—the Indians burn their widows over there, don’t they? And is there not some decree prohibiting Asiatics from touching gold at all? Was there not a scuffle in the Deer Creek mines of late, against those impudent Chinese? They must not be fleeced by such a wretch, who himself may have gotten this gold by unsavory means. They decide to distrust the foreigner. But they do not tell the Bombayan this. They invite him to come along while they attempt to find the thief who stole his gold. They will collect the goods themselves and deliver the Hindu to justice for violating this ban: no brown or yellow fingers to touch sunny gold.
He traipses alongside the party as they ride, but then, suddenly, something gives him a fright. Perhaps he looks at them and suddenly, blisteringly, grasps their suspicion and disdain. Perhaps he possesses some last stores of gold on his person and fears these strangers might take it from him. Perhaps he is just made existentially aware of his aloneness in this land—a Hindu: not a white, not a Negro, not of the Natives or of China, but a man out of place and out of time. A man who becomes incomprehensible to
