He begins to run for his life. This sprint the whites take as proof of guilt—“He was trying to trick us! It is he who’s stolen gold.”
They catch him. A trial follows, and people arrive to testify against the Hindu. He’d been seen drinking brandy, growing rowdy, in someone’s tent the other day; count him a black rogue, to be sure. In the end, the judge decides to spare the man his life but to have him whipped and banished. “How’s a person supposed to get back to Bombay from here?” the whites wonder. But that isn’t their concern. They beat him efficiently and search him for gold. As he is hunched over on the earth, his face and gestures obscured from view by splatters of blood and kicked-up dust, he begins to wail something in a horrid foreign tongue. Having found no metal on him, they decide they will let him loose and warn him with a few shots in the direction of his uncomprehending rump.
They untie him from the pole where he has been kept for the duration of the trial. He flees into the wilderness, and they shoot after him, one, two, three. He disappears into the woods. He should get himself home as soon as possible, the whites agree to one another. Otherwise, he’ll earn himself a bullet or a noose, soon enough.
• • •
“Found that one in a German travelogue . . . but I can’t for the life of me remember which . . . it was green, I think,” Ramesh Uncle said, scratching his head, watching the mess of books with bemusement. “But. It sticks with you. I had thought the first Indians showed up much later—but think: the gold rush! Such an American phenomenon and one of our own kind running about in the middle of it. Makes you a bit proud, doesn’t it?”
I saw him, the Bombayan, a small-built man, sinewy from years of labor, snapping his suspenders against his billowy once-white shirt, pushing open two big clanging saloon doors. Something primal that I never knew was in me suddenly came alive. Recognition, is that what it was? Kinship? I had never much cared about ancestry the way my parents spoke of it when we went back to India. There, ancestry meant unpronounceable names and impenetrable orthodoxies. But this gold digger felt viscerally like my forebear. What if this was my land, after all?
“I wonder if he survived.”
Ramesh Uncle shrugged. “I shall to try to find out. Sometimes it takes luck and magic to track down someone history has ignored or gotten wrong. This German fellow didn’t know a lick about the poor man. We would never call him a Bombayan, for instance. To us, he’d be a Bombaykar.” Ramesh Uncle tapped one knobby forefinger on his right eyebrow. Then he turned to the window. “Do you know? There was a gold rush here in Georgia before California.”
I remembered a class field trip to the Dahlonega gold mines in middle school. It was one of those strange Southern vacation towns that insisted on peacocking its heritage at you. Kitsch and crowds and turkey legs and gold (chocolate) bars, the past shrugged on as costume—not what Ramesh Uncle meant when he said eternalism, not the real resurrection of history, but the echo of it. I recalled getting in trouble for pocketing a glittery fool’s gold rock that the tour guide passed around; the memory of my childhood gullibility and greed still stung.
“They ran out, out here,” he continued. “Then they heard about more in the West, and off they went. Kicked out all the Indians—the other type—along the way. Same old arrogance, no matter where you look in history.” I had the distinct impression that he was, in fact, looking in, or at, history, as he peered out into the pines and the sunny ravine. Like the past was within sight for him.
By the Fourth of July, Wendi separated us. She said, “Sir, I need Neil here to do his work, and you’re distracting him,” and set me up on my own. Ramesh Uncle winked on his way to and from the bathroom, but Wendi stood and coughed if he lingered too long.
Then, in mid-July, he vanished. I did wonder where he had gone. The truth is, though, that I was young, and preoccupied with myself. I began to google pictures of Jessica Biel and Lucy Liu in the study carrels, both of whom served as a fine replacement for history at the time.
• • •
At night, I continued to keep an eye on the Dayal house. Anita and Anjali Auntie frequently got home late, often clutching things as they debarked, perhaps leftovers from catering events. I kept watching, unsure of what I might see, but hoping for an explanation to account for Anita’s metamorphosis.
Anita’s world had changed before. Pranesh Uncle had started “traveling for work” to California when we were in fifth or sixth grade. A few years after that, he founded a company out there, and was gone more often. Anita and Anjali Auntie spent most of the summer before ninth grade in the Bay Area. When Anita got home, we met up at the pool. Everything about her was different. She kept her arms folded awkwardly around her stomach, like she was trying to hold her intestines in. The gesture emphasized her new breasts. I would have gladly observed them all afternoon if Anita hadn’t also been teary-eyed and tenuous the whole day, finally admitting as we lay on our towels during an adult swim that she might have to move. “I don’t like him,” she’d said fiercely.
“Your dad?” I was bewildered. “Can you say that?” It was the wrong response. But how could I have known that Anita had never seen, up close, two adults making a happy life? That her ignorance of the domestic stability I took for granted in my own home was a blank spot in her otherwise assured worldview?
Anyway, that was all I grasped about change: that it
