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
