Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  In return Trisha didn’t mention the fact that Ma had forgotten to update her about rescheduling the tea.

  “Ma-saheb told me that Esha thinks there’s going to be some trouble with you,” Ma said, giving the wheelchair a soulful pat.

  Okay. And trouble with her automatically meant that Yash would be under threat? Really, sometimes her family was so infuriating Trisha wanted to shake them. “Ma, Julia has not contacted me. Think about it, why would she ever contact me? I made it very clear that I wanted to have nothing to do with her. I would never hurt Yash. Why is it so hard for Dad to believe that?”

  “Don’t take your father’s name in anger, beta! He said she’s been seen around the hospital speaking with your patients.”

  “Why does he even know these things?” Trisha said, when she really should not have, because she knew only too well why he had to know.

  Ma glared. “Do you really not see what’s at stake here? You’ve heard Steele’s poking around. You know he has that whole ‘working man’s candidate’ advantage. You know Yash has to overcome the ‘West Coast elite’ thing. You know what the party’s looking for right now.”

  “They’re looking for Yash, if they have any sense.”

  That made Ma smile. And sigh. “Oh, Shasha, haven’t you learned that the world doesn’t see things as simply as your brain does?”

  Trisha almost gasped. Yes, she was aware of how simply, and wrongly, she had seen Julia. She should not have let HRH bully her into coming here. Her mother took her rubber gloves off. Good. Trisha was done with this entire wheelchair-cleaning drama. It was nothing but emotional blackmail. Entirely unnecessary emotional blackmail.

  “I know what she did to him, Ma. I am aware.”

  “It’s not what she did to him that matters. It’s what she can do to him now. If we don’t make sure she doesn’t.”

  Trisha stood. A sick churn in her stomach. “Would I not have come to you if she had contacted me?”

  “Well, one isn’t always sure why you hold your silence when you do.”

  Wow, Ma was not pulling any punches today. Trisha definitely preferred the ostrich theory. But Ma was right. If Trisha had said something, spoken up, Julia wouldn’t have been able to violate Yash the way she had. And there wouldn’t be a video that could destroy everything he had worked for floating around. It wasn’t like Trisha didn’t know this. Didn’t carry it with her constantly. If she let it, the guilt would crush her under its weight, make it impossible to crawl out from under. The way it had for months after it happened. She pressed a fist into her belly. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything. I have to get back to the hospital.”

  Ma stood, too, with one last sad stroke of the chair’s wheel. “You know what Yash has been through to get here. This is Yash we’re talking about, Shasha. Your brother loves no one more than he loves you.”

  Trisha almost snorted at that. This was not true. Or at least it was no longer true. And it shouldn’t matter. They were all grown adults and no one should be measuring who loved whom most.

  “Okay, never mind all that now. At least I got to see you, baby girl,” Ma said much more softly, hooking a finger around a curl that had popped out of Trisha’s ponytail and tucking it back.

  Trisha gave her mother a quick kiss on her cheek and was almost across the attic when Ma stopped her again. “Well, if it isn’t that Wickham girl, then what’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Ma walked up to her and took her hand. “Shasha?”

  “I had to tell a patient that the surgery to save her life is going to make her blind.”

  Her mother waited as though it was the most obvious thing in the world that there was more.

  “She’s an artist. She’s refusing the surgery.”

  The stark sense of failure that jabbed at her was embarrassing. The pain in DJ’s eyes when he’d told her about Emma’s decision that wouldn’t stop flashing in Trisha’s head was downright baffling. She tucked her chin and turned away from her mother.

  Ma pulled the door to Yash’s special storage room shut and punched in a code to lock it and made one of her sounds, sadness combined with disapproval that said, such is life.

  She led Trisha down the corridor to the stairs that led to Aji’s floor. “Will it affect the grant? Was this surgery key to that?”

  Trisha didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at her mother’s pragmatism. “No, Ma, the grant won’t be affected.” Not unless Trisha botched the surgery, and she wouldn’t. “But I can’t just let a patient die when I can save her.” She let her mother’s hand go and made her way down the stairs.

  “Beta,” her mother said following her. “You know the best thing your father ever did?” Trisha rolled her eyes, since Ma couldn’t see. “Somehow, he cultivated this decency, this goodness in all of you.”

  Trisha spun around. “Dad did not do that by himself.”

  Her mother flicked Trisha’s words away. She was but a satellite to the greatness that was Shree Raje. “My job was to instill street smarts in all of you.” She wrapped her arm around Trisha and nudged her down the last few steps. “How to present yourself to the world, how to give the world something they couldn’t get enough of, but to also get what you needed in return. With the rest of them, I managed it. Some would even say I managed too well.” Her smile was self-deprecating, as though raising children who were too successful wasn’t a huge accomplishment. “But you . . .” She shook her head dolefully as though she didn’t know where they had gone wrong with Trisha. “I think you might be the first simpleton in the Raje family.”

  Simpleton? “I just won my hospital a multimillion-dollar grant!” Not one of her siblings had achieved such a thing.

  “True. No one said you aren’t good at what you do. But the smart thing to do would be to focus on the grant and to not get hung up on one case.”

  She wasn’t hung up on the case. This wasn’t about being hung up on a case. “I can save her life, Ma. How can I let her choose not to let me?”

  Her mother threw a meaningful look up the stairs. “You remember Yash in the chair?”

  Well, say by some miracle she had forgotten, wasn’t Ma’s little performance just now aimed at jogging her memory?

  “Yash didn’t get out of it because any of us pushed him. He did that because it was what he wanted. You provide the solutions. In the end, the patient’s decision is not on you.”

  Trisha let out a deep sigh. Her mother was right. She couldn’t force Emma Caine into the OR.

  She followed Ma into the sitting room and found Esha and Aji on the sofa. Esha gave them one of her beatific smiles. Which meant she was having a good day today. Ma stroked Esha’s head. There was a way her mother softened around her nieces. Her love for them seemed not to come with the same taint of expectation. It had driven Trisha crazy when she was younger, but she understood it now. It was quintessential Ma logic, to be just a tiny bit softer on her nieces than on her own children to make sure they knew that they were just as valued.

  Trisha gave her grandmother a tight squeeze from behind and soaked up all the lovely Aji smell from her thick silver hair gathered into a bun.

  “It’s been two days!” her grandmother said in Marathi. She spoke impeccable English, but it had been her rule to always speak to the children in Marathi. This was how she always started all her conversations. Whether it was a day or ten, she always started with how long they’d been apart. To let them know she had been counting.

  Ma sank into the couch next to Aji and a look passed between them. Trisha didn’t bother to pretend she didn’t know what it was. Mission accomplished, it said.

  Esha got up. “You’re a gift to your patients, Shasha. But you’re needed by more than just them,” she said with classic Esha crypticness. Then she gave Trisha one of her rare hugs, her slight frame pressing tightly into Trisha, her head resting under Trisha’s chin. Esha being physical meant she was having an exceptionally good day. This lifted Trisha’s mood. She blew kisses
to everyone, hamming it up, then bowed to her grandma with a salaam in a perfect imitation of the staff in Sripore and backed out of the room, making all three of them laugh.

  When she pulled out of the Anchorage gates, she felt a little bit worse and a little bit better than she had when she got here. Maybe that was the true meaning of going home.

  Chapter Twelve

  In her entire life Trisha had never heard the words I need you from her big sister. Let alone I need you right now, and if you don’t get here this minute I will never speak with you again. Let alone all this left on a voice-mail message while in tears.

  Forgetting her phone in the car had been a really bad idea.

  Nisha sniffling on the phone was not a pretty sound. It was, in fact, such a terrifying sound that Trisha turned the car toward Nisha and Neel’s house in Los Altos Hills while desperately dialing her sister’s number.

  Trust Nisha to have an emergency (she had spelled the word out for Trisha, “E M E R G E N C Y, can you hear me?”) and now when Trisha was calling back, incessantly, Nisha wasn’t answering her phone. Calling Neel was out of the question, because Nisha had used her mad big sister voice to warn Trisha not to call anyone else.

  “This is private. P R I V A T E.”

  Her sister spelling one word was bad enough, but her spelling out multiple words in multiple voice messages—that just made Trisha’s mind ricochet in all sorts of dark directions. She restrained herself, using every focus technique she knew, and concentrated on getting to Neel and Nisha’s house without running red lights.

  Not bothering with the doorbell, she punched in the garage code, entered the house, and kicked off her shoes. There were no signs of anything untoward. Everything was exactly as it always was: picture perfect. Books and artifacts strewn around just so. Signs of Mishka everywhere, sketches on the fridge, walls covered with family pictures. Trisha ran past it all.

  “Nisha? Hello?”

  No answer. She ran into the bedroom and saw her sister on the bed. Curled up in fetal position.

  No.

  “Nisha?” Trisha laid a tentative hand on her sister’s shoulder and heard a soft exhale in response. Relief whooshed out of her. She climbed on the bed and moved the hair off Nisha’s face.

  Nisha opened one wet-lashed, swollen eyelid. “You’re here,” she said and burst into sobs.

  Trisha pulled her close but she’d seen this before. Too many times. Somewhere deep inside her the memory of what this was rose like water filling her lungs. How had Nisha not mentioned that Neel and she were trying to have a baby again?

  “It’s not what you think,” Nisha said between sniffs. “I haven’t . . . I haven’t lost it.”

  Another wave of relief swept over Trisha. “Then why are you crying?”

  “Why do you think?” Nisha reached for the box of tissues lying on its side next to her, pulled out a fistful, and blew into them with none of her usual grace. “I’ve lost six.” Her sob trapped so much pain it didn’t even sound human. “I can’t . . . I can’t lose another one.”

  “You won’t.” That would have been the right thing to say.

  But Trisha had seen her sister break six times and pick herself up. Six times she had watched her pretend that this time, this one time would be the time it worked. She had watched her sister’s marriage—without question the best marriage Trisha had ever witnessed—stretch at its seams as Neel struggled to understand why Nisha needed this so badly, why she would not see reason.

  But Nisha wasn’t someone you argued with once she’d made up her mind. Being a mother was what she loved best and she had wanted another baby.

  “Congratulations.” That would also have been the right thing to say, but they didn’t say that in their family anymore when someone got pregnant. Not until the baby was born.

  “I didn’t know you and Neel were still trying.” That’s what Trisha settled on saying.

  “We weren’t. This one, Trisha . . . this one is like Mishka.” Hope spilled from her eyes, making its way past the tears. “No meds, no treatments. Just us. Just Neel and me.”

  The hope in those words scared Trisha much more than the tears. How could Nisha do this to herself? She lay down next to her sister and curled around her.

  “It has to be a sign, right? Please tell me you believe it’s a sign,” Nisha whispered.

  Trisha gathered her favorite person in the world even closer. “Yes.” God, please let it be a sign.

  They held each other like that for a while, sniffling together. Smiling every time their sniffs matched up. Those stupid smiles made hope bubble inside Trisha too.

  “How did Neel take it?”

  Nisha pulled away, leaving Trisha cold, and afraid. “He doesn’t know,” she said quietly. “No one knows except you. No one can know. Especially not Neel. Not yet.”

  That’s what Trisha had been afraid of.

  All Nisha’s failed pregnancies had terminated within the first trimester. A time when you can do almost nothing medically to save a pregnancy. Three months. Six months. Nine months. That was a long time to sustain hope, and keep a secret.

  How on earth was Nisha going to keep this from the family, from Neel? From Esha!

  One day at a time. It’s what Esha always said when asked how she handled not leaving the house in over thirty years. One moment. Then the next.

  “How are you feeling?” First things first. “How far along are you?”

  “I’ve been queasy as hell every morning for weeks now. And exhausted. But I was so busy with Yash’s dinner that I ignored it. Then this week it totally crashed on me. You know Mishka had the stomach flu last month. I thought I had picked that up. Finally I went to Sarita this morning.” Sarita was their family physician. She was also someone they had grown up with.

  Nisha gave her nose a dab. “I couldn’t remember the last time I had my period. Sarita made me pee in a cup. Before I got home she had left me a message asking me to call her. She wanted me to call you over first. She didn’t want me to be alone when she told me. But I made her.” Nisha’s eyes turned fierce. “I’m twelve and a half weeks.”

  Trisha sat up, her heart racing.

  “I know! I’m almost at the end of the first trimester. One and a half more weeks. Just twelve days and it’s going to be safe.”

  “Nisha . . .”

  “No. I know it. In my heart I know it. If I can carry this baby for twelve more days.” She looked down at her flat belly. Her fingers twitched but Trisha knew she was too afraid to touch it. “I know we’ll have a chance. I’ll tell Neel after that. I’ll tell Ma, Dad, everyone else. But until then you have to help me.”

  “You want me to lie to everyone?” Little lies for Ma were one thing, but this? There was no way.

  “Neel’s leaving for his reunion tomorrow. Then he’s taking Mishka all over England. They’ll be gone for two weeks.”

  “Come on, Nisha, you have to tell him before he goes.”

  “No!” She almost shouted it. “I’m not putting him through this again. I can’t.”

  “Nisha—”

  “No! Do you know why I stopped trying?”

  Trisha opened her mouth, then shut it. She had no idea—she’d never wondered why. What was to wonder? It had been incomprehensible to Trisha why they had gone on trying for as long as they had.

  “Neel said he’d leave me if I tried again. He said he didn’t have the strength to go through it one more time. He was done.”

  “Neel would never leave you. He didn’t mean that.”

  “You’re right,” Nisha said too weakly. “Of course I know he would never do that. That doesn’t mean I get to push him to a point where he breaks.”

  Having known her brother-in-law her entire life, Trisha knew how solid he was. She also knew how serious his relationship with his high school sweetheart, Barbara, had been. They had started dating in their senior year and he had followed her to the University of Michigan, although Harvard and Stanford had both accepted him. His parents h
ad been livid, but “Neel does what Neel does”—as his mother loved to say. He had proposed at the graduation ceremony in Ann Arbor. Then they had headed off to Oxford for grad school and planned to get married after they came back.

  Of course, everyone also knew that Nisha had carried a rather bright torch for Neel since they were children and the two mothers had done everything they could to encourage that match starting young. But once Barbara came along everyone seemed to forget about it. Everyone except Nisha. Because the day they had heard the news about the engagement, the look that had crossed her sister’s face had made Trisha want to hunt Barbara down and kill her. Or at least tell her to get out of the way because she was in the middle of someone else’s love story.

  But the universe had a way of setting things straight. Barbara, who had never left California until she went to Ann Arbor, had fallen in love with England and refused to return home after they graduated. Neel, being Neel, had changed his plans and stayed back even though he had wanted to come home.

  Then something had gone wrong between them. Six months after earning his master’s in international law at Oxford, Neel had returned home without a fiancée and one diamond lighter. “Three carats at that!” his mother loved to point out.

  Who didn’t return rings when they broke off engagements?

  Who let a person like Neel go?

  Not that Trisha wasn’t immensely grateful that it had happened.

  In the end Neel had left the three carats behind in London along with whatever dreams he had taken there. After coming home, he started working for a law firm in San Francisco, attended all the family parties, and hung out with the old gang. Everyone followed his lead and went on like nothing happened. Everyone except Nisha.

  Nisha had refused to meet him. Not in any overt sort of way. But if she knew he was going to be somewhere, she simply didn’t show up. When Ma tried to rekindle her matchmaking, Nisha told her that she would rather kill herself than have anything to do with Neel. When it came down to it, Nisha was definitely the more dramatic of the sisters no matter what anyone said. When Ma didn’t take her seriously, Nisha played her ace—she went on a date with a divorced-with-children colleague who’d been pursuing her and swore that if Ma ever mentioned Neel again, she’d elope with the colleague. Not surprisingly, that second threat had worked where the first one had not.