I still want, sometimes, to stand in front of time, to dam it up, halt or reroute its current. But as I pressed myself to that earth, I thought about Anjali Joshi shrinking under the weight of time and Anita beginning to grow larger in it and me, about to take some important strides toward a tomorrow that had long seemed elusive, and I thought that perhaps all this was good, or at least natural. Because I suspect that if I were to change the past, I would have to trace its river back to its primordial estuaries, to some place where all desire began, to the universe before neutron stars rained gold onto Earth. I don’t think I would find, even in those elemental waters, the pure beginning of history, but instead the future already rising up, silt and gold and sweat, slicking across the surface of the water like oil and then drifting on.
Acknowledgments
I owe many thanks. Here are some. To Gita Krishnankutty, for the literary genes.
To Andrew Ridker, who believed in Gold Diggers first and fervently. Without his wisdom and friendship, it would not exist. To Ayana Mathis, for lending her considerable intelligence to an early draft. To Gold Diggers’ other pivotal readers: Lee Cole, Pooja Bhatia, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Wes Williams. To Janelle Effiwatt, who lived with and tended to this book, too. To Charlie D’Ambrosio, for pointing to where the story lay.
To Amy Parker, Ariel Katz, Diana Saverin, Patrick Doerkson, Ren Arcamone, Sib Mahapatra, and Ted McCombs, for years of literary friendship. To Ginny Fahs, for unswerving support.
To Varun Nagaraj for furnishing details on 1980s Bombay and IIT. To Shivani Radhakrishnan for shedding light on academic life. To Malathi Nagaraj and Tyler Richard for Sanskrit assistance, Arati Nagaraj for Marathi, and Ishita Chordia for Hinglish. To Rajesh Jegadeesh for lending Neil his old screen name.
To Sam Chang for making the Iowa Writers’ Workshop what it is. To all those who make the Workshop run, and who funded me there and immediately after, including the Maytag Fellowship, James Patterson, and the Michener-Copernicus Foundation. To the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. To Daisy Soros and the PD Soros fellowship team.
To Lasley Gober, who made me at home in American literature. To John Crowley, for reading mountains in 2013 and encouraging me after. To Anne Fadiman and Fred Strebeigh, whose teachings remain the cornerstone of my writing education. To several more teachers: Aaron Ritzenberg, Charlie Finlay, David Drake, David Heidt, Emily Barton, Gavin Drummond, Jenny Achten, Josue Sanchez, Justin Neuman, Rae Carson, Rick Byrd, and Tiffany Boozer.
Finally, to my brilliant agent, Susan Golomb, for her faith, advocacy, and warmth; to Mariah Stovall for the careful reads and for seeing something in the manuscript, and to Writers House Literary Agency. To Ginny Smith Younce, my astute editor and fellow Georgian, whose deep and generous understanding of this book was a boon, and to Caroline Sydney, who read shrewdly and kept everything running smoothly. And to everyone else at Penguin Press: Ann Godoff, Scott Moyers, Aly D’Amato, Matthew Boyd, Shina Patel, Katie Hurley, Kym Surridge, Juli Kiyan, Sarah Huston, and Mollie Reid. There was no better team to give Gold Diggers a home.
A Note on Research
I made use of many books while researching this novel. Epigraphs come from the following sources: The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 30, edited by Max Mueller (1892); The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India by David Gordon White (2012); Manu Smriti via the Sacred Texts archive, and The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands (2002).
The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger is based on “the Hindu,” one of the chapters in a German travelogue by Friedrich Gerstäcker called Scenes of Life in California, which I accessed via the Library of Congress online. The San Francisco Call announced the death of a “Hindostan” in Happy Valley in 1850. I have borrowed some of its language directly here.
I further relied on the following texts about the gold rush and its ensuing eras in California, in addition to Gerstäcker and Brands: Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush by Susan Lee Johnson (2000); Foreigners in the California Gold Rush by Seville A. Sylva (1932); Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration edited by Michael Kowalewski (1997); Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Law Men, and Vigilantes by John Boessenecker (1999); The Rush: America’s Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848–1853 by Edward Dolnick (2014); California as I Saw It by William McCollum (1960); Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World edited by Kenneth N. Owens (2002); Returning Thanks: Chinese Rites in an American Community by Paul Anderson Chace (1992 via ProQuest dissertations), and the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.
On alchemy, in addition to White, I referred to The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton edited by Stanton J. Linden (2003); Indian Alchemy: Soma in the Veda by S. Kalyanaraman (2004); “Alchemy: Indian Alchemy” by David Gordon White in Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Lindsay Jones (2005); and Chinese Alchemy: the Taoist Quest for Immortality by J. C. Cooper (1899).
I also read and learned from The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein (2000) and The Early History of Gold in India by Rajni Nanda (1992).
The history Ramesh Uncle refers to comes from many sources, but I want to thank Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee for running the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Anirvan surfaced the San Francisco Call article. Thank you as well as to Samip Mallick and the South Asian American Digital Archive.
About the Author
A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has worked as a
