He had, he tells her, even trekked with some swamis in search of the mythical gold-laden Saraswati River. The swamis told him that if he brought his wife’s ashes there, the holy water might revive something of what had been lost.
It drove Lyall nearly mad when they couldn’t find the river.
I saw it then: Anjali Dayal and Lyall Pratt leaning into each other beneath the autumn Atlanta sun that year, daring to brush hands as they walk along the old Decatur homes, gold and myth on their tongues, gold and crimson leaves canopying above them.
Lyall helps Anjali confirm Anita’s place at the new school, no gold required. He is from an old Atlanta family; he knows everyone. He makes a call. Anjali listens in as he chats up the admissions committee. She’s in his office, admiring the late-afternoon sunbeams warming the sleek wood of his floors and bookshelves. Dripping from his walls are Indian fabrics, mirrorwork and tinsel, ikat and chungadi prints. India itself is decoration for him. Outside: Atlanta’s Bradford pears are stripped of their foliage. Dead branches rap against windowpanes. Undergraduates scurry to the library. Lyall’s is a security Anjali has never before seen, so free is it of the elbowing and clawing of Hammond Creek. He belongs, effortlessly.
But getting Anita into her new school is not enough. Lyall’s money and power are white. She needs more for her daughter. That spring, the acquisitions begin. Anjali, creeping through suburban homes as onions brown and sabzis simmer in the kitchen. The sizzle and crack of jeera in hot oil as she steals into bedrooms, closets, jewelry cabinets. Choosing the small pieces no one will miss. Reciting to herself: You are the wife of a rich man. You are not the help. If she were caught—and she nearly is, a handful of times—she could talk her way out of it. Snooping, someone would gossip. Who would imagine Pranesh Dayal’s wife to be a cat burglar?
In a chemistry lab at the university, she and Lyall iterate the lemonade formula. At night, she fiddles in her kitchen. At last, she gets it. It doesn’t taste quite the way she remembers her mother’s concoction—she still recalls, vividly, that single stolen sip of Vivek’s brew, decades ago. Lakshmi’s potion was ugly, sour. Anjali has made the lemonade sweet. She’s made it a delight to drink. She’s made it craveable.
At this point in the telling, Anjali Auntie’s eyelids looked heavy, like the weight of the story was exerting excess gravity on her. She turned her face to the window. The drapes were still drawn, but her eyes bore through the curtain, like they were witnessing a private play. Lakshmi Auntie was pacing around the motel room with the energy of a much younger woman.
Anjali has the recipe for Anita’s and my lemonade in hand now. She doesn’t need Lyall anymore, not officially; she could make do alone. But she keeps visiting Decatur. To see him. She stands in Lyall’s backyard in his house off West Ponce de Leon Avenue, clinking white-wine glasses while sitar and tabla music plays. A portrait of Lyall’s late wife, Miranda, eyes them from his bookshelves. They talk about gold, its strange properties, its beguiling histories.
“And I wasn’t only interested in him,” Anjali Auntie said now—and this was the first time she had stated it so boldly. “He and I shared a certain fascination. With alchemy.”
“Alchemy promises more time,” she went on. “See? And he and I both felt we had lost things to time. He had lost years watching his wife die, and grieving her, and all that aged him prematurely.
“Me, I suppose I felt something had been taken from me. I had never been given quite the same chances as my brother, or even Anita. I thought—more time . . . well, it seemed my due.” Her voice turned a little bleating at that last part.
Lakshmi Auntie glanced at the basin. The gold congealed at its edges, a duller shade than I’d seen before. She lifted her sari to her mouth, as though to cover some impolitic expression. She closed her eyes. I was not sure how much she understood of the English, word by word—we were moving quickly. I wondered if Anita’s ajji was attempting to hear as little as possible about the events leading to today, reserving her energy for the aftermath; she was not there to condone or analyze what had occurred, only to try to put it all to rest as best she could.
And so the affair begins, and with it, Anjali and Lyall’s shared project.
Hours bent over old texts, hours of his hands unfurling in her hair, of forgetting responsibility and risk. They discover ancient recipes, and something begins to change. Anjali is lighter, happier. Her smooth, bronze-patina cheek presses against Lyall’s lighter one, mildly shaded by his graying stubble, which browns with the potions. They must indeed be cheating time, because how else could she be here, how else could the two of them possess all this life and heat when she is supposed to be raising a daughter, being a wife? This is all she’s wanted, for years, though she never had the language for it: a space apart from expectation, purloined pockets of time where she is permitted the sprawl of youth.