gold diggers

I finished reading Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian today. I really enjoyed it. The prose was effortlessly beautiful. More than that I felt connected -- in some small way, since I didn't exactly grow up here -- to the "Indian American" culture it described. It was all very relatable. The quest to find out what it means to be an Indian American. All my life I've cleaved rather obstinately to the latter half of that identity, while trying to stamp out any evidence of the former. There are things I regret about that, things that it's probably not too late to change but I'm content to write them off as being too late to change so that I don't have to put myself through the awkwardness of confronting them. Things like the fact I don't speak a word of Bengali, even though I can. It was in one of Gore Vidal's Chronicles of America novels that an older John Hay (secretary to Lincoln) observed of Henry Cabot Lodge that the Americans who were the most Transatlantic in their speech and habits were also the most severely anglophobic; John Hay, who was a more son-of-the-soil type, was rather fond of the British. Incidentally I would put Gore Vidal closer to Henry Cabot Lodge than to John Hay, and that's one of the things I love so much about him. Perhaps my own Henry Cabot Lodge-esque aversion to all things Indian stems ultimately from the inescapable knowledge that I'm more Indian and less American than the Indian Americans who spent their whole lives away from the motherland, went to high school here and all that stuff. Who knows? I learnt something very interesting in the Gold Diggers (spoiler alert) about the presence of Indians in America: Apparently there was a lone Hindu prospector among the 49-ers who migrated to California in search of gold. That made me feel, as it did the protagonist of the novel, that our Indian American roots are probably deeper and more legitimate than motherland-minded relatives like to remind us.

 

As a post-script, I fucking finally tested negative for COVID today. Day 19. Fuck. If I rebound a second time, I am going to scream.