Anita cut in. “And point is, who else is really, truly ambitious? This is immigrant shit.”
I nodded, slowly, absorbing. “You get it when you go on catering jobs?”
Anjali Auntie nodded. “Mostly.”
“Prachi,” I said. “This is how you beat her?”
Anita’s chin lifted defiantly. “It was only an assist—”
Anjali Auntie interrupted. “What Anita’s saying is that all of us replenish ourselves. We borrow, but someone healthy and motivated keeps regenerating. Prachi, I think, was not recharging. She may have stopped wanting to win. So, Anita acquired some of her desire. But if Prachi’s ambition had gone deep enough, she’d have stood a chance. See?”
I wasn’t sure I did. But I went on: “And Shruti? What do you want to beat her at?”
Anita gave one of her jerky headshakes, the sort that made her resemble a malfunctioning android. “She’s smart, super driven. It’s not all about winning a specific competition or test. There’s this larger race we’re all running, you know?”
I did. “Why not hit jewelry stores?”
“That might work,” Anita’s mother went on, raising her voice to talk over something snarky Anita seemed on the verge of articulating. “But I’m not cut out for such a big, er, criminal operation. My job has made it possible for me to do these small . . . acquisitions.
“And secondly, we want something specific, yes? We don’t just want generally auspicious or lucky gold, which we’d surely get from a store. We want something someone has invested with very specific ambitions. For the future. For their high-achieving children. We want something someone has owned already. You see?”
I felt the excess of that energy prickling along my skin again. I was trembling as I spoke. “I need something,” I said. I looked at Anita. If I told her about the summer—flunking Kumon, flailing through debate research, flitting around with historical tales—she’d chastise me. “I’m afraid I’m not going to make it,” I went on. “Through high school. Without some help. If you let me in, I promise, I won’t waste it.” My voice cracked.
“I’ve only been getting—making—enough for one,” Anjali Auntie said, speaking low.
Anita’s huge, pooling dark eyes met mine, and for a precious beat, her entire attention and understanding enveloped me.
She tore her eyes away from me. She would not look at me that way again for a very long time.
“I’ll share,” Anita said to her mother. “It’s Neil.”
She spoke so quickly I almost missed it. It took me years to understand why she said that, that night. The best explanation I’ve come into is that she did not want to live in this mustard yellow house with just the lemonade and her mother any longer. That she had grown lonely with the secret. That maybe she needed me next to her during the strange year that followed.
Anjali Auntie’s brow furrowed. She pressed her index finger to the space where she might have placed a bindi and smoothed her skin. It was a self-soothing gesture, recalling the way my mother massaged Prachi’s head with oil when my sister complained of headaches from sleeplessness. Anjali Auntie closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they looked like tree bark struck by shafts of afternoon sunlight. I realized they were shining from latent wetness.
“You remind me of him,” Anjali Auntie said, looking back at the photograph that had caught her attention a few times that night—the chubby girl and the cheery boy. “My brother. I always thought so. He had those girlish, long eyelashes, just like you.”
All of me clenched, as if to grasp at some invisible atmospheric manliness.
“He passed away,” she added. “Very young.”
Death was terribly distant to me at that point. I never imagined how, during the Lemonade Period, Vivek seemed always nearby for Anjali Auntie, sometimes laughing in the driveway so convincingly that she’d open the door to find, instead, the Waltham boys howling as they attempted wheelies on their bikes. Sometimes she saw him in the sons of the people whose houses she crept through, and sometimes she saw him peering out of my eyes. I didn’t know that during this period she also often thought of Parag, the neighbor boy whose gold fueled her brother to IIT, and who grew into a middling existence as a competent but unbrilliant engineer. How the life the Joshis and Parag’s family had craved for their sons never transpired, and never happened to her, either; how all those unattained lives mushroomed over the Dayals’ den that night, and we were breathing them, feeding on all that had not come to pass, as we began everything all over again.