To Amy Parker, Ariel Katz, Diana Saverin, Patrick Doerkson, Ren Arcamone, Sib Mahapatra, and Ted McCombs, for years of literary friendship. To Ginny Fahs, for unswerving support.

To Varun Nagaraj for furnishing details on 1980s Bombay and IIT. To Shivani Radhakrishnan for shedding light on academic life. To Malathi Nagaraj and Tyler Richard for Sanskrit assistance, Arati Nagaraj for Marathi, and Ishita Chordia for Hinglish. To Rajesh Jegadeesh for lending Neil his old screen name.

To Sam Chang for making the Iowa Writers’ Workshop what it is. To all those who make the Workshop run, and who funded me there and immediately after, including the Maytag Fellowship, James Patterson, and the Michener-Copernicus Foundation. To the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. To Daisy Soros and the PD Soros fellowship team.

To Lasley Gober, who made me at home in American literature. To John Crowley, for reading mountains in 2013 and encouraging me after. To Anne Fadiman and Fred Strebeigh, whose teachings remain the cornerstone of my writing education. To several more teachers: Aaron Ritzenberg, Charlie Finlay, David Drake, David Heidt, Emily Barton, Gavin Drummond, Jenny Achten, Josue Sanchez, Justin Neuman, Rae Carson, Rick Byrd, and Tiffany Boozer.

Finally, to my brilliant agent, Susan Golomb, for her faith, advocacy, and warmth; to Mariah Stovall for the careful reads and for seeing something in the manuscript, and to Writers House Literary Agency. To Ginny Smith Younce, my astute editor and fellow Georgian, whose deep and generous understanding of this book was a boon, and to Caroline Sydney, who read shrewdly and kept everything running smoothly. And to everyone else at Penguin Press: Ann Godoff, Scott Moyers, Aly D’Amato, Matthew Boyd, Shina Patel, Katie Hurley, Kym Surridge, Juli Kiyan, Sarah Huston, and Mollie Reid. There was no better team to give Gold Diggers a home.

A Note on Research

I made use of many books while researching this novel. Epigraphs come from the following sources: The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 30, edited by Max Mueller (1892); The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India by David Gordon White (2012); Manu Smriti via the Sacred Texts archive, and The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands (2002).

The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger is based on “the Hindu,” one of the chapters in a German travelogue by Friedrich Gerstäcker called Scenes of Life in California, which I accessed via the Library of Congress online. The San Francisco Call announced the death of a “Hindostan” in Happy Valley in 1850. I have borrowed some of its language directly here.