by Sonali Dev
Dedication
For Rohit.
Mamma and Papa (and the phul and taare) were
right after all: the only thing we’ll have forever is
each other. Thanks for being such a sister to me, my
darling brother. I would not be me without you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the Author
About the Book
Also by Sonali Dev
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
So much about the world baffled Dr. Trisha Raje, but she was never at a loss for how to do her job. Telling a patient her tumor was not fatal should have been the easiest thing, but Trisha had no idea how she was going to manage it. How on earth did one tell an artist that she was going to go blind?
Trisha stood frozen in Stanford’s neurosurgery ward, staring down the passage that led to her patient’s room. But instead of the clinical gray floors and walls lined with locally sourced artwork, what stared back at her were memories of marble arches inlaid with peacocks of emerald and lapis lazuli. The smell of ancient sandalwood and salty ocean air permeated her lungs, displacing the mild tang of disinfectant.
This wasn’t the time for falling down the memory rabbit hole, but Trisha needed something to ground her and nothing did that quite like her family’s ancestral home thousands of miles away. Wrapping her arms around herself, she tightened her hold on the memories and pulled them closer. The Sagar Mahal, or the Ocean Palace, with its three hundred rooms overlooking the Arabian Sea, was the seat from which Trisha’s ancestors had ruled the kingdom of Sripore in western India for over two hundred years before British colonization.
As warrior kings, the Rajes had held the Mogul invaders at bay on the battlefield, but Trisha was having a hard time channeling their fierceness. Right now, she related more to how the Europeans had felled her ancestors using the more insidious violence of commerce to infiltrate and steal their land. In a befuddling twist of history, the rulers of the many kingdoms that made up modern-day India—the Rajes included—had found themselves stripped of their power and shoved into the role of figureheads, paying taxes to the British Empire.
In return for his indentured allegiance, the eighteenth maharaja, Trisha’s great—add four more greats to that for good measure—grandfather, had been allowed to retain his title and their beloved home and all the royal properties associated with it. So Trisha had him to thank for spending every single summer of her childhood in Sripore.
Trisha’s mother had insisted upon her American children staying connected to their royal Indian heritage. It was her way of holding on to the home she’d given up when she’d married their father and migrated to America. Trisha’s father for his part had gone along with it so long as their heritage didn’t interfere with their assimilation. To His Royal Highness Shree Hari Raje—HRH, as his children liked to call him behind his back—their royal lineage was their past, it was history. Their identity as native-born Californians was their future; it was the history he fully expected them to make.
To Trisha, medicine was where both her identities crossed over inside her, much the same way that the two optic nerves crossed over at the chiasm—the hallowed spot in the brain where her patient’s tumor was tragically located. Which meant that Emma Caine was going to lose sight in both eyes when Trisha performed the surgery that would save her life. In her five years of performing surgery, this was the first time a patient of hers was going to go blind. The irony was cruel.
The year Trisha turned thirteen, her family had been on their annual summer trip to Sripore. As was his routine, HRH spent most mornings visiting the many royal charities. His pet project was the orphanage for blind children that his father had built just before he died.
Trisha was the only one of the children he had asked to accompany him to the orphanage that day—a rare treat she had rubbed in her siblings’ faces. Subtly of course. The Raje children were expected to be dignified in all things, and tormenting one another was not an exception.
At the orphanage Trisha had followed her father up the gray cement stairs where the headmistress greeted them with a welcome party of children lined up along the hallway in their white-and-navy school uniforms. One of the girls, roughly the same age as Trisha, had stepped up to her. She had reached out and touched Trisha’s face, traced her brows over her glasses, her cheeks, her jaw. Her hand had smelled of paint—chemical yet earthy; her touch had been moist and cool.
“You’re pretty,” she had whispered with a smile that wondrously reached her eyes where her pupils were sheathed in cloudy white film. Her shy voice had been at odds with the bold touch of her hand, the unselfconscious whiff of her breath, and when she had stepped away, Trisha had felt punched in the chest by a feeling she couldn’t place. An empty, hungry restlessness that had knocked her completely off-balance.
For the rest of the visit she had felt like a balloon with a leak, pressure siphoning out of her pores and slipping through the silk kurta her mother insisted she wear for public appearances. She had carried the feeling back to the palace with her, like a parasite inside her body she couldn’t expel.
Hours later, her father had found her hiding in the room she shared with her older sister, Nisha, curled up on the four-poster bed the rajkumaris had slept on since the first maharaja built the palace in the 1600s. Often at night, her brothers and sister and cousins gathered on the huge bed and pretended it was a battleship from which they conquered the world. The warmth of the teakwood posts had a way of stealing into Trisha’s bones, and the quilted silk of the coverlets had a way of anchoring her until she felt invincible.
But that day Trisha had felt afloat on it, unanchored. Unable to bring herself back from the gray-washed walls of the orphanage. From the sightless children working in rows at the long workshop tables under ceiling fans that turned the summer air with a ponderous buzz and scattered the smell of ink and shaved wood around the room. They had stamped and glued, the rhythm of their movements keeping time to their chatter as knickknacks and toys gathered into piles in the baskets beside them.
“What about today bothered you?” her father had asked when he found her. Back then he still cared to come looking for her when she was lost.
Try as she might Trisha had not been able to articulate what she was feeling.
HRH had lowered himself into the armchair next to the bed
and waited. The quintessential prince, his spine straight but not stiff, his strength at once shaming her and making her want to be just like him. God, she had wanted so badly to be just like him.
“It’s important to identify what bothers you,” he had said in that beautifully clipped diction that always became more pronounced when they were in Sripore. “If you can’t pinpoint what bothers you, how will you fix it?”
He’d waited, his silence insisting that she move her focus from wallowing in her sadness to defining it, turning it active and curious instead of passive and consuming. Finally, it had come to her. What she was feeling was anger. Rage that only felt like sadness because it made a horrid mix with helplessness.
“They shouldn’t be blind.” She had sat up, blinking away her tears, embarrassed by how they pooled where her glasses dug into her cheeks. “Those children should be able to see. It’s not fair!”
Leaning forward only the slightest bit, he had thrown a pointed glance around the gilded room. “Families like ours don’t get to complain about the unfairness of how fortune is distributed. Guilt is a waste of time. The fact that you have the things you have isn’t wrong. Not understanding what you have is. You do understand what you have, right, beta?” He’d paused until she acknowledged the meaning in his brown gaze. “It’s not just sight or comfort. What you have is that brain, and access to resources. But even more important than that is the thing you felt today. That compass inside that told you something wasn’t right. That is your greatest gift. So what are you going to do about what you felt today?”
She’d drawn her knees into her chest. “I’m not God, Dad. What can I possibly do to make someone who’s blind see?”
He’d smiled then, one side of his mouth lifting. “Well, say you did have that power. What would you need to know to help a blind person see?” He’d held out his monogrammed handkerchief. He only used those in India, where the servants laundered and ironed them and arranged them on the clothes butler with the rest of his dress for the day.
Trisha hopped off the bed, her heart racing as though she’d run up the cliff all the way from the beach to the palace. She took the proffered piece of cloth. It smelled like the palace, like sandalwood and history, and yet somehow it also smelled like her father, all-American like the Californian summer, gravelly earth and fresh-cut grass.
“I’d find out the cause of their blindness.” She lifted her glasses and dashed away the wetness.
“Bingo!” This time his smile lifted both sides of his mouth and lit up his eyes. His proud smile, the one Trisha lived for. He cupped her cheeks and dropped the fiercest kiss on her forehead, making joy burst inside her. “That’s my girl. Go find the cause. Then find out if their blindness can be fixed. Then do something with what you find.”
She had. She’d gone back to the orphanage. It had taken that entire summer, but she’d met with the doctors, procured the reports, and pored over them with HRH while her siblings and cousins lay on beach blankets by the crashing ocean and played rummy and Monopoly with the staff. She learned that a lot of those children had early-cataract-induced blindness. Some had retinal dislocation. Issues that had surgical fixes that the orphanage could not afford.
When they came home to California, Trisha had organized a mission of ophthalmic surgeons across the Bay Area to work with the doctors affiliated with the orphanage. Then she had convinced her mother to put together one of her fund-raisers and they had raised enough money for fifteen surgeries. By the end of that year, six boys and nine girls had regained their eyesight. There had been another four children who hadn’t been blind from birth. Their blindness had been related to the brain and none of the surgeons had been able to come up with solutions for it.
The project had gone on to become a global charity that performed eye surgeries. Her aunt who ran it had named it “Trisha for Sight.” Trisha was the Sanskrit word for “thirst.”
Trisha had gone on to choose skull-based neurosurgery as a specialization. She had never even considered anything else. Now here she was, the youngest member of Stanford’s neurosurgery team, and all she could think about was the blind girl’s hands on her face and how, try as she might, she couldn’t remember her name. And the fact that she had no idea how she was going to tell her patient that she was going to go blind.
Standing outside Emma Caine’s hospital room, she took a deep breath, and reminded herself that Emma had received a terminal diagnosis before she came to Trisha. Every surgeon Emma had gone to before had deemed her tumor inoperable. When Trisha had figured out a way to operate on the tumor, no one on her team had been surprised. The word genius might have been tossed about amid cheers. And not for the first time either.
It wasn’t like Trisha minded the label. She did love her work with the combined intensity of every single star in the sky, as her grandmother loved to say. Problem was, the word genius suggested ease. There had been nothing easy about developing the technology that was going to save Emma’s life. Trisha had spent every waking moment for the past five years thinking about how to operate on tumors growing on brain tissue without damaging the brain tissue. Actually, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t just her waking moments; she spent most nights dreaming about her work too.
Trisha pushed into Emma’s room and was greeted with a far-too-hopeful smile, and a very British “Hullo there, Dr. Raje!”
Emma had always said Trisha’s last name perfectly, without Trisha ever having to help with her usual “it’s Ra-jay just like the bird blue jay.”
Despite the electrodes stuck to Emma’s chest that fed her vitals to machines, despite the fact that she’d been in and out of hospitals for months, energy exploded out of Emma like the profusion of curls spilling from her high ponytail.
From the moment Emma had first walked into Trisha’s office and declared that she wasn’t ready to die, her case had consumed Trisha. Her almost fearlessly detached determination to beat her illness made her unlike any other patient Trisha had ever treated.
For the hundredth time that day Trisha reminded herself that she was going to save Emma’s life.
“I have something for you, Dr. Raje.” Emma’s heterochromatic eyes—one brown and one nearly black—shone with excitement as she pointed to a gift-wrapped package propped against the wall next to the bed.
Someone must have brought the package in, Trisha realized with relief. That meant Emma wasn’t alone today.
“Is your brother here?” Trisha asked, looking around the room in one of those ridiculous reflexes that followed a question like that, even though the room was obviously empty.
Emma had come to Trisha because Emma’s brother was an old friend of Trisha’s cousin Ashna. This happened a lot. Sometimes Trisha thought of her family’s network as an actual fishnet that stretched all the way around the globe. She was constantly seeing patients referred to her by someone who knew someone who knew her family. When Ashna had heard about Emma’s diagnosis from her brother, she had insisted Emma come to see Trisha, believing—correctly so, thank God—that Trisha would be able to help her.
Ashna and Trisha were the only two people in the family who had skipped inheriting the Raje social-charisma gene, so Trisha couldn’t help but be curious about this mythical old friend of Ashna’s. But she had yet to meet Emma’s mysterious brother.
“He had to go to work, but he was here earlier.” Emma always got the fiercest look in her eyes when she talked about her brother.
According to Ashna, when the man had found out about Emma’s tumor, he had actually quit some sort of fancy job in Paris, packed up his life, and moved here. Granted, Emma had been given six months to live by the doctors she had seen before Trisha. But still, there was something insanely noble about making that kind of sacrifice, something crazy large-hearted about setting aside the life you’d built when your family needed you.
There had been a time when Trisha’s own brother Yash would have dropped everything to help her, too. But that was before Yash’s dreams had become the only
thing that mattered.
“I can come back when your brother is here.” Trisha picked up the package Emma was pointing at. “And you didn’t have to get me a present!”
“Open it,” Emma said, veritable sparks of excitement shining in her eyes.
Trisha stroked the thick handmade wrapping paper before peeling off the tape with care. Tucked inside was a canvas. Trisha reminded herself that an artist’s sight was no more precious than anyone else’s as she stared at the thickly broad-brushed oil painting and blinked as the vivid strokes swirled and danced forming what looked like . . . oh! Was that a fleshy orchid?
Nope. No. It was something a little more human than that.
Definitely a . . . umm . . . vagina? It was angled to look like lips, but there was no mistaking it, especially not if you’d studied anatomy. And they were . . . well, they were popping the cap off a bottle of Sam Adams.
For a full minute, all Trisha could do was blink at the painting like some sort of buffoon. Her face warmed and her lady parts, well, they did more than just warm—they clenched in the most mortifying way.
Emma grinned. “I call it Vagina Before Head.”
Something like a cough choked out of Trisha. “It’s . . . It’s . . . ”—vivid?—“wonderful . . .”
“It’s inspired by you,” Emma added, humor quirking her lips.
This time the laugh Trisha was trying to swallow burst out. If only Emma knew the truth. Given how much use Trisha got out of those particular muscles, popping anything with them was delusional at best. If not for the few and far between under-the-sheets sessions of surgeon-on-surgeon with Harry, things might have even started to atrophy.
“Thank you?” she said on a gulp, making Emma laugh until she teared up.
And it sobered Trisha. Her fingers stroked the painting, tracing the strength that Emma had harnessed with her brushstrokes. Once you got over the initial shock, it was an incredible piece. Not only had Emma understood and captured the force and mechanics of the action, but she’d topped it off with an almost operatic humor.
Maybe it was time for some Kegels?