Cover

Gold Diggers

'Dizzyingly original, fiercely funny, deeply wise'—Celeste Ng

Sanjena Sathian

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Title Page

Dedication

For Usha, Krish, and Tejas Sathian

PROLOGUE

In the middle of Bombay there was, for many years, a certain squat building that served as a beacon for the city’s ambitious. It was smog-licked and wedged between a halal butcher and a chai shop, with a sign that flickered neon blue: THE GOSWAMI CLASSES. Underneath, in faded lettering streaked with bird droppings: PHYSICS STUDIES CHEMISTRY STUDIES MATHS STUDIES | BEST CHOICE FOR SCHOLARS. A practiced eye could spot the sign from the Dadar flyover, or from the pedestrian bridge above the train station.

One evening in 1984, thirteen-year-old Anjali Joshi pressed her-self against the balcony of her family’s fifth-floor flat and examined the neon from her elevated angle, fiddling with her two long plaits and smoothing her plaid school uniform. Anjali hoped to glimpse her older brother Vivek exiting the school after his extracurricular tuitions, his figure knocking shoulders with the clever neighbor boy, Parag. All the strivers shaded blue.

Vivek had lately stopped paying her much mind, and the world had become suddenly lonely. Once, her brother and his friends in the housing society had played cricket with her behind the building, bowling the ball with noodly and forgiving arms. But now, Vivek’s afternoons were reserved for studying, often with the wolfish, swarthy Parag, who was overgrown for his age, with a habit of grinding his teeth as he did problem sets, as though chomping hungrily on tough meat.

Anjali did not see Vivek, so she returned to her own chemistry papers—ordinary papers, unblessed by the legendary Ratan Goswami, who handpicked his students, anointing those who would matriculate at the Indian Institutes of Technology and later make their way to the highest echelons of the nation’s industry—or to America. Anjali’s parents had not entered her into such a pool. She was a daughter. It had never occurred to the Joshis that Anjali might want for herself what they wanted for Vivek. It had never occurred to Anjali to want very much at all.

On this particular day, she chewed on an eraser, lying on her stomach on the dusty floor and wishing for some relief from the heat. Even the drench of the monsoon would be preferable to the dryness of April in Dadar, where you could forget that Bombay bordered the sea, that a few miles away the air might salt your skin and you might see something like a beyond.