I nodded. Perhaps it was the wine or perhaps it was honest new wisdom, but I could see everything he did only as a kind of inept performance by a B-grade actor.
“Do you like looking like this? You look like a big mess. You do not look like my son.”
“Yeah. I like it.” I loved it, actually, when he put it like that.
A button of moonlight shone between the clouds. Through the staircase window, I could see the still-bright lights of the Dayals’。 I had the mad thought that if I got up to my room, alone, before the buzz wore off, I might find Shruti waiting, prepared to talk with me.
“I wanna go to bed,” I said.
“Have you been doing this regularly, Neeraj?”
My father’s eyebrows, already only barely separated from each other, looked to be one long fat caterpillar.
The garage door creaked.
“Raghu!” My mother pushed the side door open. “Raghu, those Dayal guests have parked everywhere all up and down the cul-de-sac. Didn’t think to invite us, did they?”
“Daddy,” Prachi said. She was undoing her sandals in the doorway. “Daddy, please tell Amma I can’t go to the temple every time we buy something off the college checklist, okay? Just for shower curtains, I mean—”
“Your shower will keep you clean and healthy, Prachi,” my mother said. “It can stand to be blessed.”
The Narayan women were padding into the kitchen, were within feet of me, would see me like this, however I appeared—sweaty, blaze-eyed, looking not like my father’s son.
“Go up,” my father whispered. “I will not tell Amma. You drink water, and you sleep.”
“What’s that, Raghu?” my mother called. She and Prachi were pawing through the Target bags and wondering if they’d bought too many hangers.
“Neeraj is going to bed,” my father said firmly.
“Tell her,” I said, and then I said it again, louder.
Prachi was hoisting the bags onto her shoulders. Her forehead was smeared with the warm sunset hues of haldi kumkum. She looked ruddy in the cheeks, terribly hale.
“Neil, what the shit is wrong with you?” Prachi said.
“Prachi!” my parents both said.
“Why talk like that?” my father said.
“Tell what?” my mother said.
The three other Narayans, the three functional Narayans, stared at me, still as wax museum figurines. They appeared much better, more sensible, the three of them, without me. Upstairs, Shruti was waiting, pacing by my bed, ready to chide me: A two on the chemistry exam, really, Neeraj? I would accept all her reproofs, and then when she was preparing to depart, to slip once more into the underworld, perhaps I would ask her to take me with her. I would tell her that, as usual, she’d gotten it right, found the best answer to the complex problem we were all locked inside.
“Tell what?” my mother said again.
Across the way, the Dayal house had gone mostly dark but for two squares of dim light on the top floor, like the drowsy eyes of a beast preparing for sleep. And all around, that early-June Georgia night, the sultry swell of change in the air. I had been waiting to arrive somewhere for so long, and now that I was here, I wanted only to roll backward in time, to swim upstream until I sat at the font of something, to avoid ending up as this unbearable me.
“I’m fucking drunk,” I said.
There were no secrets worth keeping anymore.
Part Two
PANNING
He who steals the gold （of a Brahmana） has diseased nails.
—Manu-smriti, Hindu legal text
Had the immigrants known what a task the gold-hunting would be, their spirits might have failed.
—H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
6.
Something strange was happening to my family. Of late, the Narayan definition of success had morphed. This was not to say my parents supported my professional choices—in the summer of 2016, I was piddling around as a student of history, suffering their disdain. No, rather, they had accrued additional expectations, ones I did not discover until Prachi fulfilled them.
“Shaadi-shaadi-shaadi!” my mother kept squealing—the Hindi word for marriage. She declaimed the triplicate in times of both exuberance and distress, in much the way my ajji used to utter the name of the Lord—narayana narayana narayana—in prayer.
“So long we have waited for this shaadi-shaadi-shaadi!” （when Prachi first waggled her conflict-free diamond）。 “This is a shaadi-shaadi-shaadi, not some country club Buckhead Betty nonsense!” （denouncing my sister’s plan to wear a white lehenga rather than the traditional red-and-gold）。