by Sonali Dev
“But I don’t want it all gone. You’ve worked your entire life for—”
“For us.”
She dismissed that with an impatient flick of her head. “You shouldn’t have to start from scratch.”
Truth was he’d never not felt like he was starting from scratch. Maybe it was because of those homeless days, but it didn’t matter how well he did, it had never been enough to feel secure.
“Maybe I’ll start blogging about this. That should take my art sales through the roof. Maybe I’ll become an internet sensation and they’ll make a movie: artist lives out her last days trying to make sense of death through her art. We can call it Going Down in a Blaze of Glory!” She made jazz hands. “Surely everyone will throw money at that!”
He stiffened, but she smiled at him. “Relax, I’m pulling your leg. Maybe.” She leaned back into the headrest.
“We’ll sort it all out. I’ve got a gig catering a fund-raiser for a bloke running for governor. Long as I get that right we’ll be okay. Let’s just go home now.” It was strange to use that word here. He’d long stopped trying to figure out what home even meant. When was the last time he had thought of any place as home? Certainly not England. He had no desire to go back there. Had he ever thought of Paris as home? He’d felt established there if not exactly rooted. Like his feet held up even if the land beneath them wasn’t familiar. Did he even want to feel rooted? Or did being rooted just mean you could be uprooted?
But Emma seemed to have found home here, and that meant this was where he needed to be right now.
“When has Chef Caine ever had trouble getting a dinner right?” she asked, smiling, her eyes closed.
Never. For all the things that were going tits up around them, Yash Raje’s fund-raiser was one thing he would not allow anyone or anything to mess up.
Chapter Eleven
They said shitstorms were like dominoes. Okay, so no one actually said that, but recently Trisha’s personal shitstorms were falling so hard and fast they were knocking each other down.
First, Emma had completely thrown her off by refusing surgery yesterday. Then, Nisha wasn’t answering her texts or calls. Then, Trisha had spent five hours in an emergency surgery operating on Dorna Matunge. And lost her.
She pressed a hand to her chest. She had known Dorna all her life, and she was going to miss her. All that wisdom, all that experience she had shared so generously, gone.
They had known there was no hope going in, her brain stem glioma had progressed. But Dorna had been insistent on the surgery and Trisha had thought there was a chance—albeit a tiny one—to make it work, so she had taken a stand on her behalf. Before going into the OR, Dorna had made Trisha tell her all about the technology. Unfortunately, the technology hadn’t been able to help given how far her cancer had advanced.
Now, just as she was contemplating texting the Animal Farm with the news about Dorna, she had texts from Ma and HRH, both saying the last thing she wanted to deal with right now.
She read HRH’s text first. “She’s been sniffing around your patients.”
Gee, I wonder who he’s talking about!
Then Ma: “Can you swing by the Anchorage today? It’s important.”
Gee, I wonder what she wants to talk about!
Trisha absolutely did not have time for her parents’ Julia paranoia today. Julia hadn’t contacted her. Yash was fine. End of story.
Please please let it be the end of story.
“Is there a particular patient you’re worried about?” she replied to HRH’s text first.
“How is that relevant?” Translation: No particular patient.
“What is it you want me to do exactly?” That’s what she wanted to text. Instead, she went with, “I’ll be careful.”
“Look over your patient list for the past two months and let me know if you have any terminal cases.”
“Overkill, Dad?” Of course that’s not what she sent. “Sure.”
“Go home and check on Esha.” Translation: Your mother needs to play good cop and knock some sense into your head.
Trisha was annoyed enough that she almost didn’t tell him. “Dorna didn’t make it.”
She could practically feel the sadness in the silence that preceded his words. “I know. Sorry.”
Seriously? He’d known she’d lost a patient on the table an hour ago. A patient who was a close family friend. A patient she had hero-worshiped her whole life. And he’d got straight down to his badgering nonetheless?
“You okay?”
She would have been better if he had opened with that. “I’m fine. You?”
“She had a good life. We have to remember that.” She felt the pain in those words. Who would have thought a bunch of electronic characters on a screen could trap as much emotion as the sounds our vocal cords made? Dorna had been one of his closest friends and his tireless partner as they’d worked on advocating for inclusion in their workplace in particular, and their world in general.
“I’ll go see Esha.”
He didn’t respond. Not that she had expected him to.
“Bye! I love you too, Dad! TTYL!!” She tapped out the words, then deleted them with flourish as she grabbed her wallet and left for the Anchorage. She’d just come off a five-hour surgery, but energy was coursing through her. Of course HRH had known her schedule when he’d issued the order.
On her way out she stopped at the nurse’s desk. Anne, the clinic nurse and general admin chieftain, had a lump of surgical steel where others kept their hearts. Her bright smile died the moment she saw Trisha approaching. “I’ll call you back,” she said into the phone, “one of the surgeons needs something.” Yup, she dragged the word surgeon out like a piece of gum stuck stubbornly to her shoe.
Anne and her posse of clinic staff loved to use terms like “arrogant” and “brash” when it came to describing Trisha on those annoying staff surveys the department loved to do every year. Usually, Trisha didn’t disagree with criticisms lobbed at her. She didn’t care. She didn’t have time to babysit incompetence, and the competent staff liked her well enough. They’d even said so on the stupid survey.
“Do we have Emma Caine’s MRI results yet?”
“Hello to you, too, Dr. Raje,” Anne said before punching some keys on her keyboard, which was so curvy and padded that it could qualify as a prosthetic. Anne was wearing her usual carpal tunnel wrist braces that sat perfectly on the padded wrist support of the keyboard. Maybe it was the pain that made her so grouchy all the time. “The MRI’s done but Dr. Patel hasn’t read it yet. We should have them by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Good. Text me as soon as they come in and if the patient or her family calls to ask about them, tell them they’re not in yet. Say it will be a few days.”
“You want me to lie?”
Good God, could one damn person just take her word for something! How much harder did she have to work for people to stop acting like she didn’t know what she was doing?
“No, what I want is for you to help me save a patient’s life. If you don’t want to lie, tell the patient you’ll have to check with her surgeon. But do not tell her that the reports are in. Please.”
Anne’s usually bitter-medicine face turned even more bitter.
“Thank you. And, Anne, raise the seat on your chair; it will take the pressure off the nerves at your wrist.” She had told Anne this a few times before, but she stubbornly refused to listen.
“Thank you, Dr. Raje.” She turned to her spaceship controls and went back to plotting world domination. Her chair stayed as it was.
On her way to the car Trisha tried calling Nisha again. Usually Nisha texted her twenty times a day, but it had been two days since she’d responded to Trisha.
“I’m coming over!” Trisha sent when yet again Nisha didn’t answer her phone.
“DO NOT COME OVER, I’M FINE!”
Was an all-caps response supposed to help her?
A lowercase message followed immediately. “Busy with
Neel and Mishka’s trip. Relax.”
This was getting annoying. Nisha was acting like Mishka was leaving for college. On Mars! Neel and Mishka’s trip to England for Neel’s Oxford reunion had been planned for a year. Her hyperorganized sister had probably had Mishka’s bags packed for a month. And she knew Trisha knew that.
There was only one possibility Trisha could think of that would explain her sister’s bizarre behavior. It was almost too idiotic to contemplate, and yet . . . Nisha couldn’t possibly be freaking out about Neel going back to England because his ex still lived there, could she? Surely her sister knew that was a nonissue.
“K. But you’d better tell me if something’s wrong,” she sent and got a very unconvincing smiley emoji back. She’d have to go over later.
WHEN TRISHA GOT to the Anchorage, she found her mother on the uppermost floor in the storage room, which was basically the attic that covered one-half of the mansion’s footprint. The sloping roof used to have fifteen skylights when the house had first been built but those had been closed up and covered with solar panels that powered the entire estate.
On the inside, the walls of the commodious room were lined with climate-controlled storage cabinets. Their grandmother insisted on not throwing away a single thing she deemed meaningful. Everything, from each one of their first shoes, rattles, chew toys, clothes worn for various ceremonies, report cards, was wrapped in tissue and naphthalene balls and packed in trunks and then stacked in the storage cabinets.
Someday all this would be shipped back to Sripore for record keeping the way it had always been done for all the royal children. However, between HRH and Ma, there wasn’t consensus on when that would be. Trisha suspected that HRH wanted the keepsakes—at least the ones that belonged to Yash—to stay stateside, where he fully expected museums to be interested in them not too far in the future.
Trisha found Ma in the special room where Yash’s things were kept. Ma was wearing a linen summer dress and Trisha thanked her stars that she had changed out of her scrubs and into shorts and a blouse. She always kept a change at the office and in her car because she often came to the Anchorage directly from the hospital.
Percussion beats of Zakir Hussain’s tabla lilted in from the speaker system. Ma was sitting cross-legged on a low, tufted stool cleaning Yash’s wheelchair, her movements keeping time to the four-beat cycles. Her mother never did any cleaning in the house. A cleaning service under J-Auntie’s hawkeyed supervision made sure the Anchorage glistened at all times. But this room, none of the help were allowed to touch.
Trisha’s stomach cramped at the sight of the wheelchair. She hated that thing, had hated seeing her brother in it. The accident had happened when she was ten years old. A drunk driver had hit Yash biking home from volunteering at a pet shelter. At the time, the wheelchair had been the answer to their prayers. When Yash had gone into the OR, they hadn’t known if he would come out alive.
Nisha and Ashna had dragged her into the nondenominational chapel in the hospital. There Trisha had promised whichever nondenominational gods were listening that if they helped Yash that day she would always help anyone who asked her for help. Always. All she wanted in return was for Yash to live. And she’d meant it. That child’s prayer had made her keep Julia’s secret years later and ruined everything.
Being taken in by Julia’s words would never stop haunting her. You have to help me, Trisha, you know how badly I want this! I have no one else!
Ma patted the tufted stool next to her. Crossing her legs, Trisha sank onto the stool and watched her mother spray and wipe.
“Is Nisha okay?” Trisha should have known that would be Ma’s first question. Ma’s radar when it came to her children was a scary thing.
“Busy with sending Mishka off with Neel. I think it’s the fact that it’s Mishka’s first trip without her. She’s taking it hard.” Spinning crap for Ma for the benefit of her siblings came easily. They’d all done it all their lives, covered one another’s asses with Ma—a movie instead of a study date, the rare return home intoxicated. Because to call Ma protective was the wildest of understatements.
Through school they were never allowed sleepovers at friends’ houses. They had only ever hung out with friends who were also Ma and HRH’s friends’ children. It was something no one could budge Ma on. Trisha believed it had something to do with Ma’s own untraditional childhood as a child star. She treated their safety as though it were a fragile bauble in her keeping. Even a hint of a threat to their well-being sent her into a tizzy of trying to manage their lives for them and they were all united in their quest to avoid that at all costs.
Between Ma’s overprotectiveness and how packed she’d kept their schedules, Trisha had never learned to make friends. The only time she had tried her hand at it was in college with Julia and that had ended badly enough that fifteen years later her mother was still pulling her into “meetings” like these. After Julia left, the rest of Trisha’s time at Berkeley had been spent being gun-shy of any attempts at friendship. By the time she got to medical school at Stanford, not having time for friends had become a way of life. Every once in a while she went out for a drink with her colleagues, but otherwise the Rajes were it. And despite the tension with HRH and Yash, they had been all she’d needed.
Ma gave a delicate nod, making the sharp edges of her auburn-highlighted bob swish around her jaw, and gave the wheelchair another wipe with her gloved hands. It was a rare thing for Trisha to have Ma all to herself. As a little girl one of Trisha’s favorite things had been to watch her mother. Just watch her as she talked on the phone, listened to her favorite Indian classical music, or worked on her charities and events from her office. For all her fierce protectiveness, Ma had this dignified acceptance of the world. It was a dichotomy Trisha had never understood nor been capable of emulating.
Ma smiled—it was the smile that had captivated a nation of a billion people since she had been five years old. Mina Raje, or Baby Minu as she’d been called in the child-star years, had been India’s answer to Shirley Temple, jet-black curls framing large twinkling eyes, and a smile bracketed by two dimples that made every woman want to be a mother, and every father want to be a better man.
She had also been one of those rare creatures who had seamlessly made the transition from cherubic child star to beautiful leading lady with a neat leap over any hint of adolescent awkwardness.
But Ma’s story did have an ugly part. Her father had forced her into acting at the age of five, and by the age of twenty she hated everything about being a film star. So, once while shooting in Amsterdam, she had decided to execute a Roman Holiday–style escape. She had jumped over the wall of her hotel and landed right on top of His Royal Highness, Shree Hari Raje, knocking the young prince off his feet literally and figuratively.
Shree, who had been stranded in Amsterdam thanks to a winter storm on his way from Mumbai to San Francisco, never did anything in half measures. He had fallen hard. The drama that ensued had put all of Ma’s rather ridiculously over-the-top films to shame. He’d hidden her from the furious manhunt, missed his flight again, and risked his job to take her on a romp across Western Europe. Because Mina had never traveled without a film crew. Because she had never been on a vacation. Because he hadn’t been able to let her go.
And he hadn’t let her go, not when faced with Mina’s father’s wrath and very Bollywoodsy gangster connections—they’d broken his arm, and he was a surgeon! Not when faced with his own mother’s utter horror at having a Bollywood actress with a history like that defile their royal lineage.
Mina had matched his stubbornness. She, for her part, had ignored gangster threats—that included threats of acid attacks, withstood a virulent smear campaign in the media—that included pregnancy rumors, and faced down her mother-in-law’s disdain. But she had refused to let Shree go, either.
When she married him, Shree had been the very definition of a young blue blood. The world had been his playground, his job his passion. His only ambition had
been to “live life king-size”—the motto behind the motto of all royalty across the world.
Then his brother—the maharaja and the bearer of the family’s politics—had died, and Shree had changed. In taking on the guardianship of his niece and his title, Shree Raje had also taken on all the ambition that had driven his brother. Maheshwar had been a public servant born and bred, obsessed with helping his people and also with the political power it took to make things happen in democracies.
Shree had taken on his belief systems with the zeal of a convert. But by the time the transformation happened Shree had already fallen in love with America.
Mina dealt with her husband’s transformation like she dealt with everything else. She acted as though that’s how things had always been. She stood by this new Shree wholeheartedly, became his perfect partner. In all things except his obsession with assimilation. In that one thing Trisha felt like Ma wished she had pushed harder and been less accommodating.
Neel’s mother, Sunita Auntie, who was Ma’s best friend, had once told Trisha that Mina had ruined the lives of many an Indian man and woman by setting up entirely unrealistic standards by playing the idealized dream of the perfect wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law.
When HRH had dug in his heels about marrying Ma, Aji knew her son too well to push her reservations too hard. But she’d held on to them until that plane had gone down and Aji and Esha had moved to the Anchorage three decades ago. It was Ma’s love for Esha, all the nights she stayed up holding her as she trembled with her visions and seizures, all the adjustments she made to the upper floors so Aji and Esha’s lives would not be disrupted any more than they had already been. And then there was their joint love for Indian classical music. That had sealed the deal and now Ma and Aji were as much a unit as Dad and she were.
“I was so proud of you for coming to the dinner the other night.” Ma didn’t mention her lateness or the fact that she had missed the postmortem tea.