The seedy underbelly of the model minority

It is no secret that the Indian-American middle class community is ambitious and competitive. Immigrants with professional backgrounds and advanced degrees who arrive in a new country typically push their children to even higher achievements. Many novels have described the Indian-American parental expectation that the next generation get into Ivy League colleges and become doctors or engineers (or more recently, tech barons). Meanwhile, their children suffer from parental pressure as well as their own social insecurities. How Indian or American should they be, and how can they be both?

Sanjena Sathian has a mostly fresh take on this community cauldron in Gold Diggers. The novel opens in suburban Atlanta, where Neil Narayan lives in a cul-de-sac opposite his high-school classmate Anita Dayal. Neil is simultaneously envious and resentful of his older sister Prachi:

the Narayan child who managed to be attractive and intelligent and deferential to our cultural traditions to boot. […] while I waited to be dropped into my own small life, in an ill-fitting suit.

The first half of the book seems like a young adult novel: high school dances, unrequited crushes, the Asian kids in robotics and debate, the cool kids drinking in secret, casual insults, mean girls and boys, all wrapped in the inevitable identity crisis.

Basements were the safest places to survive an Indian party in the suburbs. In a basement, the itchy [Indian] clothes could be loosened, the girls’ dupattas dropped on the floor and trampled, the guys’ kurtas removed to reveal that all along someone had been smart enough to wear a Tshirt beneath.[..] In basements, a semblance of our due — American teenagedom.

We had since distanced ourselves from [the uncool Shruti]. BUt you could never properly avoid, shun, renounce, extract or untangle yourself from any other desi in Hammond Creek. […] Some days you trampled on one another. Other days you hid in the same basement, seeking shelter from the same parental storms.

Neil’s parents are fairly stereotypical:

My mother would ask [Prachi] to recite the fates of those who ‘fooled around’ — which might in her view, include anything from neglecting to take AP Biology to shooting up hard drugs.

It’s funny enough and has the ring of authenticity, as if it comes from the author’s own experience.

The anthropological habits of the Indian community include a well-known love for gold. Gold as investment, gold jewellery as a mark of wealth, gold as dowry, heirlooms and status symbol. Gold, in this novel, has yet another (invented) significance. 24-karat gold, when stolen from the talented or ambitious, melted down with ancient Sanskritic chants and made into lemonade (!!), steals a little of that talent and ambition and transfers it to the imbiber.

Magical realism in a young-adult novel doesn’t seem too bad: it is a time of hopes and dreams and all that, and what’s a little more imaginary stuff? (Even so, I found myself stolidly suspecting that a blob of molten gold in a jug of lemonade would produce a blob of solid gold at the bottom, rather than the sweet glowing yellow liquid of the novel). Anita’s mother Anjali has been stealing gold jewellery during her catering jobs at Indian homes, smelting it into this magic liquid, and giving regular doses to Anita and later Neil. Until one girl, who Neil kissed as a means to stealing her gold necklace and then cruelly ghosted, committed suicide. Along with the relentless discussion of grades, internships and college applications in this novel, it’s a strong commentary about mental health in pressure-cooker competitive communities.

Part 2 of the novel takes place years later, and there is less to like. Neil is in grad school at Berkeley, flailing hopelessly through a history PhD. Anita has left a successful tech job and is now a ‘party planner’. They are both still trying to find themselves and cast off the past, and Neil is endlessly, endlessly introspective.

I grew headachy from staring at my laptop until my vision fuzzed. I was exhausted from sleeping and eating too little, subsisting on Adderall or coke. […] I drove, often.

The plot meanders through Neil’s obsession with the history of an Indian man involved in the California gold rush of the 1850s, his sister Prachi’s upcoming wedding, his obsession with Anita’s body, Anjali’s brother Vivek’s life at IIT Bombay, and on. Social commentary suddenly takes second place to a planned gold heist at a desi ‘bridal expo’: a one-stop-shopping event where brides and their families can hire Indian caterers or mehndi artists or musicians, buy outfits and gold jewellery. This is a 90-degree turn that takes the novel downhill to its end.

And perhaps as a counterpoint to the heist, there are literary digressions that attempt to take the novel into more ‘serious’ territory.

Perhaps the earth took the gold for itself, sparing us no boon. Perhaps the only magic that night was that a grandmother and a mother and a daughter saw each other more clearly, and that I glimpsed that truth about history, that it flows towards us as we flow towards it, that we each shine sense on the other.

Huh. Ok.

Of the characters, Neil is the anti-hero, and Anita’s allure is never as evident to the reader as to Neil. But one character stands out: Anjali Dayal is, implicitly, the cool Indian parent.

She was unlike other mothers.

Of all the parents in the book, she would likely be the one to stand against the community pressures. And yet, her independent, capable, original daughter Anita appear to have all the same angst as the other Indian-American kids, and Anjali is quite ready to hurt other children to enable her daughter’s success. She was the most complex character, and I would have liked to know more about her motivation and self-rationalization, as opposed to seeing her largely through Neil’s eyes. Did she ever have any ethical quandaries?

Sathian’s social commentary is clever and well done, but this could have been two separate novels: Part 1 as is, and a second novel in the Bay Area with a different plot and more interesting set of characters. The dialogue is funny and familiar, even if all the older Indians speak in very desi English (‘chicken-shicken, ‘smarty-smart’ etc). The real flaw of this novel is that it did not end at Part 1.