“I know,” she said. “Everyone’s afraid, Neil.” Then she whispered, “Would it be so wild to try to do this relationship on realist terms?”
The evening was going dark around us. “Look at them, my grandma and my mom,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at her two progenitors. Her mother was looking decidedly away, while Lakshmi Auntie’s gaze remained on us. “Look how far they’ve had to travel in their lifetimes. We don’t have to do those distances, Neil. We just have to figure out how to be at home right here. That’s so much easier. That’s so lucky.”
There were her lips on my clavicle again, and everything was both the same as always and also entirely, infinitely, promisingly new.
• • •
I waited at the top of the hill with Lakshmi Auntie while Anita and her mother picked down the slope together. Anita with the gold. Her mother, holding her wrist. The two of them faded into each other in a single shared form. I had that sense I’d had about them when I was a teenager—that some part of each one was indistinguishable from the other. I felt awkward and tongue-tied standing next to Anita’s ajji.
“So. You are writer,” she said.
“Oh! No. Just a grad student.” I turned to see that her lined face was impassive.
“Anita says you are writer. You’re writing book.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Only a dissertation no one will ever read.”
She folded her arms. Surveyed the beach. Anita and her mother were now lost to the darkness. “You should write book,” she said. “That is how you make career.” I imagined Lakshmi Joshi looming over Vivek as he turned wraithlike from all the swotting. She was so small, and yet imposing, and had that older-Indian manner about her that refuses excuses.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Write a big book. Adventure story. Mystery story. Sell many copies. I tell Anita these things, too. Your parents did not come so far for you to write nothing-things, for her to plan parties.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Good boy.”
Then the sound I’d been waiting for rose up from the bank—a splash, like a bundle of heavy bricks puncturing the surface of still water. The gold, in the river. And I remembered then, that story Anjali Auntie had told me years earlier, about King Midas. How he shook his fingers into a river to wash away the curse he’d wished upon himself, which he’d first believed to be a blessing. How when the water took the golden touch from him, the earth earned back some of its precious stores. How other people panned for it, amassing little synecdoches of Midas’s fortune for generations. How the burden was lifted and shared, and in that way turned back into a gift.
“Hai Raam,” whispered Lakshmi Joshi, which meant she saw what I saw. “I hoped. Something to happen.” Right at the spot where the two rivers forked into each other, the twin waters shuddered, briefly, like a fault line had been activated. And then came a flash, soundless, and the river turned a pale yellow, the hue of the dregs of lemon juice.
I raced downward. The sky above was still alight. The river, still that lemon shade. I approached the riverbank, where I dipped my fingers into the yellow water. I kicked my shoes off, rolled up my jeans, and stepped in. It was not as cold as it should have been.
I thought I saw, to my left, Anita and her mother standing ankle-deep in the river, but my eyes were not on them. I was looking instead across the water.
Crouched on the far side of the river was a dark man. His hair was rumpled and full of cowlicks. I recognized him. I might have called out, but I did not know his true name. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and his arms were partially submerged in the water, as though he was collecting something.
A trickle of gold—brighter and bolder than the yellow of the rest of the water—was swimming neither downstream nor upstream but from our bank to his. Briefly, I tore my eyes away to see if Anita and her mother were looking, too. They were. I snapped my head back, half-afraid he’d be gone. He wasn’t. He bent over, arms in the water. We all stood there like hunters watching a deer pad through brush. After a minute, or a few, the yellow began to fade, and the stream of gold grew distant until it all seemed to gather on the other side. My Bombayan gold digger was standing and shaking a pan.
And from the pan drifted the misty shape of a man; his white hair caught the moon’s glow. His head was turned in the direction of Anjali Auntie, as though he could not see me at all. And another figure: a young man, early twenties at best, whose impish smile I could see even from here; he, too, looked at Anjali Auntie, his younger sister. And then a third: a girl with frizzy hair and a glower that I couldn’t see from here but that was surely there, wrinkling her face. I waited to make out her expression—if I could just see how she looked upon me from death to life, then maybe I’d know if I had been or would be forgiven, one day. But it was just the shape of her, distinct yet cloudy, so all I knew was that she was regarding me. I didn’t know if I’d ever know how to parse that regard. I took one step toward them on the rocky bank, but their figures seemed to quiver, as though at risk of dissipating if
