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).

My mother broadcast her daughter’s impending nuptials to her clients—when I was in college, she had begun a second, fated career as a Realtor. The wedding talk helped close a deal, in much the way the scent of freshly baked cookies in an on-the-market house does—the general whiff of familial completion is infectious, makes everyone hot for suburban settling.

Preparations for Prachi’s shaadi-shaadi-shaadi were even impinging on my life on the West Coast. Our parents remained in Georgia, but my sister and I had each made our way to California by way of the tech bubble and academia, respectively. She lived on the third floor of a converted Victorian in San Francisco and I in a cannabis-infused walk-up in Berkeley. And on a particular foggy day in June, my roommate, Chidi, and I were running late to a party at said Victorian.

We stood by Alamo Square Park, taking in the vast bay windows of Prachi’s nearly three-grand-a-month apartment, while I sucked on my vape. I discerned the shadows of her friends moving about on the other side of those cakelike window trimmings, and something about their shapes startled me. I’d told Prachi, in trying and failing to beg off that night, that I was spending my summer ensconced in my dissertation and couldn’t be disturbed. In truth, I had no coherent justification for the social skittishness that had become my norm. Yes, there was the mounting pressure of graduate school, but there was also some other general allergy that erupted most acutely when I was surrounded by the hyperopic residents of my sister’s version of San Francisco.