A beat, two beats of silence, and I swore I saw something swelling in his expression, but then he trained his attention back on the rice. He glanced up a minute later.
“Good evening, young fellow,” he said. “How is your medical school going?”
A pleasant, dreamy expression took his mouth and eyes. Perhaps it was not frightening to find one’s mind unmoored from time and place; perhaps it was freeing to leave yourself behind.
I felt a hand on my neck, scratching affectionately. Anita. “Your mother wants you,” she said, and I went on looking helplessly at Ramesh Uncle. “Actually, she’s quite annoyed you’re sitting all the way over here, and I am, too. . . . Your cousin Deepak is a nightmare; he’s told me three times how much his Tribeca apartment costs.”
And then I was carted away; hands were on me, and someone pinched my cheeks and told me how much I looked just-the-same, only sho-sho-handsome now, what was I doing these days, writing?! Really?! Well, what did I hope to do with that?! （“Write,” I said, to no laughs.） There was saffron pound cake being shoved in my mouth by fingers adorned with gemstones, and photographers wanted the families here, then there, and then here again. There was my brief toast—I was still known, unfairly, as the public speaker of the family; I read a Neruda poem in lieu of offering original thoughts, in part to keep from choking on the something sentimental that was coursing through the air. Soon, Prachi, feeling empowered on wedding champagne, summoned the Narayan nuclear family onto the dance floor and made us sway in a tiny circle with her to some high-pitched Hindi croon.
The next time I looked, after the Narayan family dance and the Kapoor family dance and the Narayan-Kapoor family dances, he was gone.
Anita suffered through several songs, patiently screwing-in-the-lightbulb and patting-the-dog at my mother’s elbow, before tugging me over to the dessert table, where we were hidden from view by the vat of gulab jamuns. Her skin glistened with sweat, nearly as bright as the silver-gray glimmer of her blouse. She mopped her brow with her pale pink dupatta.
She pulled her heels off and rested her wrist on my knee with just enough flounce to indicate tipsiness.
“I’m sorry about the table settings.” I took a breath, preparing to explain all about Ramesh Uncle, and the matter of the Bombayan gold digger, and all that I felt had been lost. The fiction I’d wished was true. But I exhaled, and the words left me along with the breath. “And I’m especially sorry about Deepak.”
“He kept hitting on me.” My face must have puckered. “I told him you and I had been promised to one another years ago and that our families are expecting a suitable shaadi any day now.”
She was rolling her eyes as I stared at her very seriously. “Oh, I was joking,” she said. “Don’t be gooey.”
I brought my face close to hers. Our lives existed in this realer plane now, the one she’d exhorted me to accept. And while sometimes that meant I missed the mysterious patina that had once shrouded her, at other times, times like this, I saw that everything I’d ever wondered about was much closer at hand.
Just then, I looked at her and thought it seemed less that things had been lost than that they were being found, over and over again.
* * *
? ? ?
Before the forty-niners, in California, were the twenty-niners, in Georgia. They stole the land first from the Cherokee Nation, and then they stole and stole the gold until it was nearly all tapped. And then, after the Cherokee had been forced out, after home itself was purloined, many of those twenty-niners caught wind of Sam Brannan’s call and went West. It was that loud: Gold, gold, gold in the American River! It was the same call my parents heard across oceans, over a century later; the same one Prachi followed to her Victorian on Alamo Square; the same one that had made me both at home in this country and responsible for a great evil.
The morning after the wedding, I had a few precious hours, and a small pilgrimage to make. I gunned my mother’s car north toward Lumpkin County, and pulled over at a diner near the Dahlonega public square. I ordered sweet tea and a cinnamon roll, and I took out my notebook. I began writing a letter, the kind Wang had told me about. To: Shruti Patel, 2007. I remembered Ramesh Uncle’s philosophy—eternalism. That the past lies just around every bend in the mountain highway. That you can spy it from the right summits. That if the fog lifts without warning, you might find yourself face-to-face with its most vivid outline in the sudden sunshine. That if you kneel by the right stretch of land under the right constellations, it might even rise from a river and acknowledge you.