The three of them, Shruti and Lyall and Vivek, and perhaps still others I couldn’t even see at all, bent alongside the gold digger and plunged their hands into the river, collecting whatever we were giving back to them.
Our offering seemed meager, but they shone at the sight of it.
The Bombayan began to recede first, like fog lifting, and then the others followed him. In a moment, there was again a sudden shock of crooked yellow light. It came and was gone so quickly, and the night went dark as all the shapes from our past took rest.
I dipped my hand into the now alarmingly cold river, disturbing its stillness.
I didn’t and don’t have a name for what happened that night. In the months that followed, all I got from Lakshmi Joshi and her non-hermeneutical approach to history was that there are some mysteries a person needs to accept, some logics to which we are all subject, whether or not we believe we opted into them.
“We had to give it back,” she said of the gold. “I was not sure. But thought maybe something would happen. To think about gold like some offering.”
Or, like returning offspring to its ancestor.
Perhaps when Anita and Anjali Auntie delivered gold to the river that had run dry of it for so long, they unskewed some sins. Perhaps that night granted Anita’s mother time. For there was time, time during which three generations of women were together, and closer, and known to one another. Time that, over the next few years, came to seem like incontrovertible magic, as Anjali Auntie had good days, days during which she told stories of Bombay in her living room and passed on recipes (to me, never Anita, who was clumsy in the kitchen). Time that, as Chidi would always say, was all everyone wanted—more time for the big and the small, a chance to undo resentments, a chance to witness your child’s future slowly unfurling, a chance to go on another walk around the sun-warmed cul-de-sac.
Then again, perhaps the earth took the gold for itself, sparing us no boon. Perhaps the only magic that night was that a grandmother and a mother and a daughter saw each other more clearly, and that I glimpsed that truth about history, that it flows toward us as we flow toward it, that we each shine sense on the other.
12.
Prachi Narayan and Avinash Kapoor were married on Memorial Day weekend. I announced the matter of Anita to my parents a few months before the wedding. Relations with the Narayan headquarters back in Hammond Creek were chilly, as I’d consulted no one before taking a leave of absence from Berkeley. I needed a chance to write something grounded in the present for a while. I was using the next year to try my hand in the magazine world. History would wait for me.
“We’ve only been seeing each other for about four months,” I reassured my parents. “It’s new.” We’d chosen to begin our count after the expo, rather than before. But I added that it was serious, and that Prachi had invited Anita, and I hoped they’d be welcoming, and that being welcoming entailed not mentioning the Dayal divorce.
My father attempted heartiness: “The whole gang back together again!”
“I’m only saying what everyone’s saying,” my mother said. “Which is that she took him for all he’s worth, poor fellow. Anyway, it is not her fault, that girl growing up in a tarnished home and all. What is Anita doing with herself now? Gotten a good job, I hope? One of you needs to be making some kind of money, what money is there in writing, at least people understand what a professor is.
“Oh! But, Neeraj, have I told you who’s bought the old Dayal house? Third fresh-off-the-boat family moving into the subdivision in six months. I am starting to wonder where all the Americans have gone. Would you believe it, the other day a white family drove into the neighborhood looking for their friend’s house, and they asked some auntie on her afternoon walk if she knew where the Georgemeisters or the Johnsmiths or whoever lived. And this auntie, you know what she said? She told them, ‘There are no foreigners on this street, you are in the wrong place.’ Pah! These new immigrants, very arrogant, they have much more money than Daddy and I did when we moved here, they waltz-faltz into Hammond Creek, and we had to scrimp and save, no idea how hard it was for us . . .”
On the Saturday of the wedding weekend, my father and I vaguely attempted to help with the setup for the mehendi in our backyard but were rendered useless by our masculinity. We stood on the fringes, eating catered samosas, taking in the pleasant chaos playing out in front of us. Cousins and neighbors and the new generation of Hammond Creek Indians gyrated to songs in languages only a fraction of them spoke. Keya and Hae-mi and Maya were all there, having their henna done. Across the grass, Anita was placing one hand on my mother’s shoulder. My mother gestured inside, and Anita entered our basement—which had been finished during the past year, bearing lovely cream carpeting and an untouched exercise room. She came out wielding a flower arrangement in the shape of a heart that read prachi weeds avi. She caught my eye through the mess and gave a small, sweet shrug.
“She is a good girl,” my father said stiffly. “Attractive, too.” I badly wished he hadn’t added that. “Make sure she does not steamroll you. Other than that, I think she may be a very good match.” He belched, a big rippling sound. “Samosas are very oily today.”
I’d been conscripted into folding name cards according to the seating chart, since Prachi had fired her wedding planner at the last minute in a rare fit of fury. This was how I came across
