After that, she goes to see Lyall at Berkeley a few times. They aren’t together-together. He needs tending. At this point, it’s a battle for months, maybe a year. “There must be something I can do,” she insists, because this is something she knows how to do—to orient her life around another person’s problems.

He says he has one hope—part of the reason he came to California. He still thinks about the promise the swamis made him. About the placer-lined Saraswati River, containing the holiest gold. Gold untouched by human madness and cravings. Gold that’s pure enough to extend one’s time. He knows there are only meager flecks left in Californian rivers. But he prays these waters can heal him. He and Anjali drive out to the American River, to the Sacramento, to the Trinity, to the Feather, to the Yuba.

She is always at the wheel, while he sits in the passenger’s seat. His forehead bounces against the glass as he dozes. Rainless clouds obscure the Sacramento Valley sun. Cornfields reach for the dry gray sky. Each time they arrive at a riverbank, they remove their shoes and wade into the water, splashing each other, copying gestures described in texts. Once, a historical reenactor in suspenders and Levi’s warns them not to keep their mouths open if they don’t want the worst fucking runs for weeks.

And?

And, nothing. The rivers are just rivers.

There is a moment, though. Once, at the South Yuba River State Park. When they step toward each other in the water. They swivel their heads to the far bank to see a white woman and a brown man. Lyall sobs. Anjali breathes heavily. The woman looks so like Miranda. The man reminds Anjali of Vivek. They paddle across the water.

When they reach the other side, their bare feet slip on the slimy rocks, and the woman is laughing and the man is not Indian but Hispanic. “What are you guys doing in there?” the woman asks. Her accent is all middle America twang. Miranda was English. “You really meet some crazies in California.”

Lyall dies. There wasn’t enough pure gold left in the waters to undo the mercury poisoning. It’s nearly all sapped up, by pans, by Long Toms, by barges, by dredges, by hydraulics, by the interminable yearning we share with so many other players in the long drama of history.

ANJALI AUNTIE LIFTED HER shirtsleeve to her eyes. “I’m sorry you put yourselves at such risk. If I’d known—if my mother had clued me in, or one of you… I would have told you, there’s no point. It’s too late for whatever blessing that wedding gold might’ve given me.”