Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  Trisha walked up behind the cop. “Officer, you are making a mistake. We were just trying to get into the car because I left the keys inside. It was my fault.”

  The cop reached for his gun again. “You need to step back, miss.”

  “She’s unarmed. I’m unarmed. It’s cool, Officer. We’re cool.” There was a thread of something in his voice, something he refused to name, something that was a thousand times worse because she was here.

  “It’s not cool,” she snapped, her voice raised and entirely fearless. “Are you actually going to draw a gun on me before you find out what is going on? His hands are on his head, for shit’s sake. And mine are up in the air too; look.”

  “Dr. Raje, please,” DJ said. “Let the officer do his job.” He tried to meet the cop’s eyes—just his eyes, because he wasn’t about to make any sudden movements.

  “Is this your car, sir?”

  “No, it’s a friend’s car.”

  The cop stiffened, took his gun out of his holster, and called for backup. “I need to see your license and registration, please.”

  “Sure.” DJ forced himself to relax. Breathe. “My license is in my wallet in my back pocket. The registration is in the car.”

  “Turn around, please, and keep your hands up where I can see them.”

  He turned around and the cop patted his bottom and pulled his wallet out of his pocket.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” Trisha said behind him.

  “Miss, what are you doing?”

  “I’m recording this.”

  DJ couldn’t see her but he imagined her pointing her camera at the cop and his temper rose so hard and fast he could barely breathe.

  “Ma’am, please put your phone away. I’m just doing my job,” the cop said, a trace of panic entering his voice.

  “Dr. Raje, stop it,” DJ said, every instance of phone cameras making cops panic flashing in his head along with Emma lying alone in a hospital bed.

  “Your job is to draw a gun at a man trying to retrieve his keys from his car?” Trisha said, her voice dead calm yet laced with rage.

  “He was trying to break into a Porsche that does not belong to him. If you don’t stop, ma’am, I’m going to have to take you both in.”

  “Take us in for what? I suggest you put away your gun and let this gentleman show you his license and registration like the upstanding citizen he is, and I will think about not sending this video to every news outlet in the country. Or getting my brother Yash—that’s Yash Raje, who you should know is the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California—on the phone right now.”

  There was a long silence. “You can turn around, sir,” the cop said finally, his voice distinctly a few notches less assertive. He lowered his gun but didn’t put it back in his holster. “License and registration, please.” He handed DJ his wallet, then turned to Trisha. “I apologize, ma’am, but surely you understand that I was only doing my job.”

  His tone was entirely different now. He was young, just a kid, really. He looked scared.

  Finally he tucked his gun back in its holster, and DJ moved enough to open his wallet. He still couldn’t feel his heartbeat, and he could barely feel his fingers enough to move them.

  The officer—Officer Dunn—ran the information through his system. Fortunately, Green Acres was able to verify that Betsy had willingly let him borrow her car and they were free to go.

  For the entire hour all that took, DJ had focused on trying to bring the feeling back into his limbs. Dunn had tried his best to strike up a conversation with Trisha, with absolutely no luck. Every attempt at apology from the officer had been met with a monosyllable or a grunt. She’d been in full-fledged tyrant mode, seething.

  But she had nothing on the rage gathered to bursting inside him.

  They wouldn’t be in this situation if she weren’t so stubbornly ignorant in the first place. The last thing DJ needed was to get involved in something like this. Even a whiff of negative publicity could destroy his business before it took off. If anyone dug up his record, everything would be over. There was a word for brown kids arrested for arson. Terrorist.

  Emma’s face flashed before him just the way it had when he’d stood there with his hands over his head and the cop had reached for his gun. One wrong move and Emma would have been entirely alone. He would never forgive Trisha Raje for putting him in that situation. Never.

  Through the entire thing, he’d had a hard time looking at her. Now he threw her a glance as she sat in silence in the passenger seat as he maneuvered the car through rush hour traffic. Her usually luminous skin was ashen, her lashes lowered in shame. She looked like the world had shifted beneath her feet and it made a sick mix of sadness and vindication burn inside him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  You’re not asleep, are you?” Nisha said, twirling a lock of Trisha’s hair around her finger.

  “Well, not anymore.” Trisha smiled and opened her eyes, not that she’d been able to fall asleep. “You okay?”

  Nisha smiled, but looked concerned. “I’m fine. You don’t seem fine though. You haven’t been sleeping lately.”

  Except in a car. Where she had fallen asleep and drooled in front of the one man she didn’t want to be drooling around.

  “It’s natural to be upset about what happened with DJ. I know it was awful. But you have to let it go.”

  Trisha couldn’t respond. After coming home last night with anger roaring inside her, she’d told Nisha what had happened. It hadn’t helped.

  DJ’s expression as he’d stood with his hands over his head wouldn’t stop playing in her mind. A horrible pang spasmed in her chest. A crater had opened up inside her at the blankness in his eyes, at everything he had banked away behind it, the anger, the shame, the pride. How had she never noticed what that combination of vulnerability and strength did to his face? To have seen it tainted like that, it made her want to hunt down the cop. To send that video out across the internet for the world to see.

  Nisha had shut the idea down the moment it left her lips. “Are you crazy? The last thing we need right now is that kind of media attention. It could destroy everything. Yash has worked hard to win the support of law enforcement and you know how strongly he supports the Black Lives Matter movement. Providing a bridge across that divide is one of his biggest platforms. He won’t get past the primary if he loses either one of those votes. It’s out of the question.” Nisha had become so fired up that for the first time since she’d found out about the baby she had seemed like herself. Trisha had immediately backed off.

  Their visit to the doctor had been a relief. Everything was progressing normally, which in this case meant miraculously. The timing wasn’t great for giving Nisha something to lose her shit over again. But that wasn’t why Trisha would never take this public.

  She had given DJ her word.

  Trisha squeezed her eyes shut again, but there was no banishing the icy waves of anger that had radiated from his body as he had stared at the road, the unspent rage in his eyes completely at odds with how utterly calm he had seemed in his interactions with the cop. No, calm was the wrong word. He’d been completely devoid of emotion, entirely empty.

  In all her interactions with him she had felt a blaze of assertiveness under his very polished veneer. An almost immovable self-possession. His ability to never back down from butting heads with her—it had made something come alive inside her for the first time in her life.

  When the cop had touched his gun, all that confidence had fizzled like a candle doused with a flood. It had been snuffed out without so much as a hiss of smoke. And she had been the one to put him through that. Because she had been blind, even when he’d tried to get her to see.

  She hadn’t told Nisha about their conversation in the car coming back.

  “Are you . . . are you okay?” she had asked, feeling incredibly stupid. Of course he wasn’t, but she had needed to reach him.

  “Peachy,” he’d said. “You needed
a demonstration of what happens when a black man tries to break into his own car and you got it. I hope that was entertaining.”

  He thought she was entertained? “You blame me for what happened back there.”

  He hadn’t even taken a breath. “No, it was my fault. All the way mine. I should have walked away the moment you started that madness.”

  His anger returning had been a relief.

  “I’m sorry.” She’d say those words a million times if it would ease him. “But how could you have been so calm when that cop was treating you that way?” She hadn’t been able to keep the question inside.

  He had laughed then, as though she’d made the most tasteless of jokes. A sound so harsh it had gouged out everything she had been up until that moment. “Maybe because I don’t have a ‘U.S. Attorney brother’ card to pull.”

  She’d deserved that. “So you just let them do what they want?”

  “Yes! I’m not keen on the idea of a bullet in my head, or finding my arse dumped in jail. I have a sister who needs medical care and has absolutely no one to take care of her if I disappear. So, yes, they can do whatever the bloody hell they want.”

  After that she’d stayed quiet.

  When he pulled up next to her Tesla, she hadn’t wanted to leave him. She’d wanted to apologize again, to do something to erase her unforgivable stupidity, erase the hurt she had caused. “Tell me what I can do.”

  All his simmering rage had darkened his eyes, tightened his muscles under the fine, laundered cotton of his shirt. But in the end all he did was let out that ugly laugh again.

  “Are you laughing because you think you taught me some sort of lesson?” Because he had, he had pulled the world from beneath her feet.

  “You give me too much credit, Dr. Raje. It’s not my place to teach you anything.” She hated when he did that, withdrew behind those clipped words. But his eyes continued to blaze, and that she couldn’t hate.

  “We can do something about this. I have it on video. We can file a complaint against Officer Dunn.” The need to do something screamed inside her.

  He had drawn up at that, fear dampening his gaze. “Absolutely not. Listen to me, I do not want to go down that path. I do not want this to go any further. My focus has to be Emma right now. If you feel the need to mete out justice, find a way to get my sister into the OR. Save her life.” Then with every iota of his anger gone, with everything gone, he met her eyes again. No armor, nothing but the truth of who he was naked in front of her. For the first time since she’d met him, she felt like she was seeing him, all his strength, all his fear. “I mean it. Please. Let me have my privacy and let what happened today go.”

  Every single time Trisha came in contact with the man, she had come away feeling childish and petty. Today she had felt insubstantial, as though she were a feather held up against the wind in unsteady fingers, seconds from being blown into an endless sky.

  She sat up in bed. “Go back to sleep,” she said to Nisha, tucking the sheets around her. “I have some work to do. I’ll be in my office if you need anything. And don’t worry, I’m never going to let anyone see that video.” Not when she had promised DJ.

  “A person is only as good as his word.” Nisha mumbled the line with a sad smile and fell back to sleep, satisfied.

  Trisha poured herself a glass of milk and opened up her laptop. It was barely two A.M. and there was an email from HRH in her in-box. The email she’d sent him yesterday had completely slipped her mind. She had finally gathered the courage to let him know that she had run into Julia at Green Acres. She opened his response. It was, as usual, serialized into a neat clinical list.

  Dear Trisha,

  I have information that she has been working on interviews with terminally ill patients. (attached: PI report of cases against her for stealing funds from families of patients after claiming to help them raise funds)

  This is the second reminder to review your terminal cases.

  Do not take this lightly. Covering up for your errors in judgment will not be possible this time around. Think about your family when you make decisions, please.

  Inform me of ANY and EVERY detail of your interactions with her.

  Sincerely,

  Dad

  There are no interactions, Dad! she wanted to scream.

  This explained what Julia was doing at Green Acres. It wasn’t a hospice, but patients sometimes went there prior to entering hospice care.

  Trisha had said nothing about DJ knowing Julia to HRH—or to anyone in the family—because even the hint of a connection would mean that DJ would not be catering Yash’s dinner. Restlessness swelled inside her at the thought.

  She responded to the email with “Dear Dad: Check, check, check, and check. Sincerely, Trisha.”

  All her conditioning to never be rude to her parents made her almost delete those words and type a more appropriate response. But something made her hit send.

  Her snarkiness gave her no peace. A pathetic part of her wished she could pick up the phone and tell HRH what had happened with DJ and the cop. What if he had a different theory about reporting the incident? The cop had insisted that he’d just been doing his job, but would he have done his job differently had DJ looked different? Dad would know what to do. He never faltered when it came to knowing right from wrong.

  But she knew she was kidding herself. Even if she hadn’t promised DJ she would stay silent, she knew that the time when she could have a conversation with her father about something that was bothering her was long gone. She was also fully aware of the fact that Nisha was right. This could destroy Yash’s campaign. If Yash found out, he would want to do something about it. He would not be able to let it go. Yash’s political charm might piss the hell out of her sometimes, but that didn’t change the fact that his integrity was untouchable.

  Their dad had drilled that mantra into them with a sledgehammer: Do something about things that bother you.

  And he’d lived by that mantra. Even though somewhere along the way his focus had shifted to making sure that a political win came before everything else because you needed power to truly bring about change.

  If she was being honest, she was the one to blame for that. Had she not exposed Yash to Julia, HRH might not have become so aware of—and paranoid about—how fragile their dream to see Yash take office was. If not for her, her father would not have had to spend the past fifteen years obsessed with making sure nothing destroyed that dream before it had a chance.

  That day at the orphanage for the blind, his words had changed her life forever. And even after losing him, she had always followed his words. That compass inside that told you something wasn’t right. That is your greatest gift. Do something with it.

  Until today she had never realized how easy it had been for her to follow that edict.

  DJ had stood there helpless as a cop reached for his gun for no reason other than fear based in prejudice. DJ’s defense had been to withdraw into himself and to let the reality unfolding around him wash over him like a wave, his eyes closed, his breath held to minimize damage.

  Trisha didn’t want him to be standing there in that inequitable ocean, unable to do anything about it. She wanted to live in a world where the waves hit everyone the same way, where everyone could choose how they surfed them. Where the only thing that mattered was ability.

  And she had allowed herself to become oblivious to the fact that they did not live in that world.

  Ma’s pet peeve was how the Western world misunderstood the theory of karma. “I mean it’s the Bhagavad Gita they’re bastardizing. What is all this ‘karma’s a bitch’ nonsense!” Ma loved to say.

  The entire “what goes around comes around” thing was a backward view of karma. Karma was simply Sanskrit for action, and the theory was that your actions are the only thing under your control, as opposed to the fruits of your actions, which are not. And since actions always bear fruit, you were better off focusing your energy on your own actions, rather than worrying about
the results you wanted them to produce.

  Until now it had seemed simple enough.

  Now her naiveté at thinking it simple felt irresponsible, harmful.

  While it was true that you only had control over your actions, your power to choose those actions didn’t exist in a vacuum. DJ was right; she had been ignorant to push him into breaking into the car, to negate his experience when he warned her. And later, she had been able to stand up to the cop because she’d had the power of Yash’s name and she’d pulled it out without a second thought. Was it a metaphor for everything she had achieved in her life?

  Of course she’d worked hard, but growing up in the Bay Area in a family like hers, she had never borne the weight of being seen as different. She had never had the odds stacked against her.

  She stared at her computer for a while. Emma’s latest test results were in. It had been eight days since she’d discharged Emma. Nothing had changed. Trisha started flipping through her images, back and forth, zooming in from the lateral view to the anterior. The tumor was wrapped snugly around the nerves, like a fist squeezing two ropes together. She clicked the crosses on the screen, mindlessly taking measurements, poking at the mass of tissue that would kill Emma if she didn’t wake up soon. The clicks of her mouse punctuated the silence.

  Click. If you feel the need to mete out justice, find a way to get my sister into the OR.

  Click. She’s all I’ve got.

  Click. Click. My sister is not live tissue . . . Click . . . she’s an artist who lives for her art . . .

  Click . . . this will change her life forever.

  Click. Click. Click. The blind girl’s hands on her face. Click. You’re pretty.

  Click. Click.

  What if they could find a way to not take Emma’s art away?

  She thought about the basket of knickknacks at the orphanage. Colorful pieces of felt and leather, stamped and glued and perfectly beautiful.

  She typed “Artists and Blindness” into Google. And an entire world opened up in front of her.