Watch: Sanjena Sathian reads from her debut novel Gold Diggers, about Indian-Americans' ambitions, struggles

Editor’s Note: A floundering teenager growing up in Atlanta’s suburbs, Neil Narayan doesn’t have the same drive as everyone around him. His immigrant parents’ expectations for him are high, and he tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbour Anita Dayal. But Anita has a secret: she and her mother, Anjali, have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that transfers the ambition of the jewellery’s original owner to the drinker. Anita needs just a little boost to get into Harvard, but when Neil – who needs a whole lot more – joins in the plot, events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Spanning two continents, two coasts, and four epochs, Gold Diggers balances social satire and magical realism, asking what a community must do to achieve the American dream. The following is an excerpt read by Sathian (along with a text version of the same) from his book, Gold Diggers that has been reproduced here with due permission from the publishers HarperCollins India.

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Before she was Anjali Dayal, my neighbour, she was Anjali Joshi, just a middle-class Bombay girl. Bombay, a city where Gujaratis and Maharashtrians and Tamilians and Parsis become Bombaykars, allegiances shifted to contemporary urban existence rather than to the regions that created them. The Joshis considered themselves modern, but in one respect they rang a bit of the bygone days: the parents — an excise tax officer and a housewife — privileged their sons’ education over their daughter’s. Anjali grew up flitting about with friends in the housing society, playing with her two older brothers when they were free, reading English novels. She did fine in school, though not spectacularly, and no one told her to put in more work. There was an understanding: her brothers were to one day become somebodies; she was to one day become married. When Anjali was in the fifth standard, she watched her eldest brother, Dhruv, sweating through entrance exams, mortgaging his adolescence for a chance to study at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. He made it to IIT’s Delhi campus, setting the bar high for the younger brother, Vivek, who did not display the same innate brilliance or work ethic as Dhruv. As Anjali crested into her teenage years, in the mid- 980s, Dhruv was accepted to graduate school in a place called North Carolina. Vivek came under even more pressure to follow in his brother’s footsteps. The parents enrolled Vivek in the renowned Goswami Classes, the cram school meant to prepare him for the IIT exams. Dhruv had done without these courses, but Vivek needed help. Anjali Joshi perceived something mysterious about the Goswami Classes, because they pulled Vivek toward some inexplicable newness. She used to spend hours eyeing the blue neon sign advertising the courses, waiting for Vivek to get home, hoping he might spare a few minutes to flick around the striker on a carrom board. In the height of monsoon in 1984, Dhruv came home from America for a visit, wielding gifts like arms, breaking through the barricades of the closed Indian economy. For his father, Dhruv brought a ceramic mug reading NC STATE DAD. For Vivek, a Butterfly aluminium-frame tennis racket and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape. For his mother, melamine plates and Tupperware; she systematically emptied their steel vessels in favour of the foreign imports. For Anjali: Jolen hair-lightening cream. “For your face,” Dhruv explained, pressing a pinky to his upper lip. The women in the housing society came to ogle Dhruv. Though ungainly, he was not bad-looking, and they wanted to hear how his accent had evolved. (“You sound just like the people on the TV,” said Parag.) They were ravenous for America. America: metonymy for more. A vast place full of all the things Dadar lacked. Nonstick cookware, Chevrolet Corvettes, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, small leather purses, Mary Kay cosmetics, Kraft cheese. And something all those trinkets added up to— another way of being in the world. “A lucky girl, whoever marries him,” the neighbour aunties said. But Dhruv was in no hurry to be married. He left still a bachelor. One afternoon, before Vivek arrived home, Anjali saw her mother return from Parag’s house, where the society mothers had been gathering, and set to work in the kitchen. What she saw baffled her. Had her mother melted gold? Boiled it? Anjali would learn the proper names for the processes later, in adulthood, reinventing some of them herself. But at the time, she gathered this much: her mother had somehow liquidated Parag’s gold coin and served it to her brother. When Lakshmi lay down for her afternoon nap, young Anjali crept into Vivek’s bedroom and found him there, sipping this strange drink. Vivek, hunched over graphing paper, drawing numbers in pencil so small that he had to squint to make out his own markings. His skin blooming with dark shadows of sleeplessness. A devil’s bargain, this route to America. “Can’t you tell me what it is?” she whispered, pointing at the tumbler. Vivek folded his arms, glanced at the clock on the wall, and sighed. “I have to get back to this in three minutes,” he said, his voice full of the new lonesomeness that had frosted it in recent months. But he told his sister what their mother had told him the first time she gave him a glass of brewed gold to drink, some weeks earlier. “Gold,” he said, “is a wise metal. It contains people’s dreams and plans.” “How, bhau?” He sighed. “Think, Anju. Think what all reasons people buy gold.” She thought. At the birth of a new baby—gifts of gold. As a backup in case the cash economy failed. It appeared in poojas, at weddings. “Everybody puts many hopes and plans on gold, see?” “Why go drinking it?” “If it’s brewed properly, it seems to give us . . . some sort of power.” “To do what?” “To, na, achieve those plans.” “You’re . . . stealing somebody’s . . .” Anjali fumbled for the word. “Ambition?” “Don’t be dramatic. Skimming off the top, really.” Anjali stood to examine the tumbler, but she saw only the dregs of whatever her mother had been brewing earlier. She tilted it back into her mouth. It was bitter, and it stung. “I don’t like it,” she said. “Well, you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to go to IIT,” her brother replied. “What if I wanted to do something else?” Vivek rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock meaningfully. “Like what?” Anjali squatted on the ground and fiddled with her plaits. She felt very small down there, curled in that semi-fetal position. She did not know what else there was to do, or to want.

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Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers is published by HarperCollins India | May 2021 | Paperback | 336 Pages | Rs 599