Anjali Auntie seemed to need a wall or a chair to hold her up. Once or twice Anita’s ajji looked at her and paused her recitation so the daughter could repeat after the mother in a faint voice. Various liquids were squeezed out, and Lakshmi began to massage the gold. It didn’t liquefy as I remembered. It took on a batter-like quality, thick and jiggly on the surface.
“Light,” Lakshmi Joshi said, breaking her rhythm. Anita extracted a butane canister. I took so many steps backward, I nearly buckled onto the bed.
Anita flicked on the blue flame, which angled steeply over the basin. Then she withdrew the butane. The flame shuddered.
I stepped close enough to feel that halo of heat that still ringed the basin and saw the lavalike bubbling of our now-molten gold. There was so little. But at least the stolen goods were one step more alien, one step removed from the crime.
“Where are the lemons?” I asked, pawing through the bags.
“Mama, we forgot them.” Anita’s voice caught.
Lakshmi Auntie’s hand appeared on mine. She steered Anita and me away from the supplies. Her grip was gentler than I’d expected.
“What’s wrong, Auntie?” I said.
“You listen Anita’s mother, now,” the old woman said.
“We won’t need those lemons and all this time,” Anjali Auntie said.
“You’re not going to drink it?” Anita said.
“Come.” Anjali Dayal ran a hand through her strange hair, that weird striping of black and gray. The already stuffy room was suffused with the dizzying smell of the molten metal.
“Sit,” she said. “Let me tell you some things first.”
* * *
? ? ?
Anjali Dayal treasured the Hammond Creek years when her life was solely hers. Well—hers and her daughter’s. She wanted those precious years to go on forever. She believed they could.
Pranesh, on the West Coast, is at first content to split the family across the coasts. He builds his company in California, while Anjali manages hers （he never thinks of her work as a company, but she does） in Georgia. But after a few years, Pranesh grows tired of living alone, in a rented townhouse, like a bachelor, subsisting on Maggi noodles. His wife and daughter need to follow him west—it’s past time. They rehearse this fight many times.
One night, during the fall of our freshman year of high school, the Dayals snipe at each other over the move for the hundredth time. Pranesh does not want to go on paying a mortgage and rent. Rent, at their age. He is trying to do what he came to America to do, to build something—can’t Anjali see that? And Anjali: Can’t Pranesh see that the thing you come to America to build isn’t software, but a home for a new generation? She invokes Anita. Anita cannot move. Anita’s just started high school. Anjali isn’t sure where her needs end and her daughter’s begin.
They strike a bargain on this fall evening: Anjali tells Pranesh that Anita will have a better shot at Harvard from a private school in Atlanta. “These public schools in the Bay Area, they’re full of too many too-too brilliant Asian kids,” she pitches. Pranesh, who never debates the importance of education, assents. If Anita can get into a private school with a track record of strong Ivy League admissions—a better track record than a South Bay public school—he’ll pay for it, and the women can stay put a few more years.
So, Anjali needs a guarantee. For herself, and for Anita. She knows what a guarantee looks like. She’s seen it bubbling on a stove. She’s even tasted it, once.
Anjali and Lakshmi are not speaking regularly at this point in time. Anjali still nurses the snub of her childhood. That she was never given a dose of the gold her brother drank. That she had to take ambition on Pranesh’s lips, secondhand. She has no desire to humble herself; doing so would mean returning to silenced parts of the past—to Vivek. The Joshis do not talk about Vivek.
But Anjali needs the gold.
So instead she hunts around online. Stumbles upon a few academic publications by a white man, a professor at Emory University, inside the perimeter. His name is Lyall Pratt. He’s written on alchemical and Tantric texts. She decides to seek him out; perhaps whatever her mother did all those years ago belongs to some branch of philosophy or ritual practice that this South Asianist has studied.
In his office, she works up to it, asks him questions about gold, plays a curious, bored housewife. She’s taken with him. He’s a widower, twelve years older than she. Tall, salt-and-pepper-haired, with a background in philology and anthropology and a lithe, yogic body. His eyes are a surprisingly dark brown. By the end of that first meeting, she risks it. Tells him everything she saw her mother do years ago. He is suddenly animated. Keeps saying he heard of these kinds of things when living in the Indian hinterlands. Stories of kings drinking the plunder of their conquered subjects.