by Sonali Dev
A long, deep, incredibly pathetic sigh emanated from her. It was time to take herself home. Thinking about home made her want to weep even more. Had her father really banished her? In so many words this time. Wasn’t banishment outlawed when electricity was invented? She needed to call her mother and beg. No, not beg, but yell at her for never standing up to HRH’s high-handedness. She for one was done with it.
WHEN TRISHA FINALLY left the hospital, she could barely feel her extremities, from exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Fortunately, the drive home was less than one mile.
The longing for her bed, her beautiful bed, was a physical ache. Before she got to her car Aretha belted out of her phone.
Nisha.
Trisha hesitated a moment—she’d be home in a few minutes—but something made her answer.
“I’m at the hospital,” Nisha said, and Trisha started to jog through the parking garage.
“I’m on my way. Are you in Sarita’s office?”
“Yes. But I’m fine. I thought I had contractions. I tried to call you. But you were in surgery. So I called an ambulance.”
Oh God. “I’m so sorr—”
“No! Stop it! Do not say that word. I’m fine. It was just me being paranoid.”
“You were being safe. Safe is good. I’m picking you up.” In another five minutes, she found her sister waiting for her outside her OB’s office.
Trisha was so exhausted she could barely keep her eyes open. So she gladly let Nisha take the wheel.
“Sarita says I need to stop hiding out in your condo and start to move about. She wants me to be brave.” Nisha laughed while saying it but with sleep trying to wrap itself around Trisha as she fought it, the sound felt distorted.
“Are you high?” her sister asked.
“Have barely slept a few hours in the last forty. It feels like an acid trip.”
“When did you do acid?”
“Well, I feel like I’ve done it now.” She was definitely slurring, and her words tasted slurpy. “Neel came to my office. Sarita is right. You should be brave.”
Nisha swerved into a parking spot across the street from Trisha’s condo. Which was not a good place to swerve into given that it was a parking spot. “What the hell do you mean Neel came to your office?”
Trisha scratched her head. “I think I mean he came to see me.”
Her sister was probably giving her the Glare of Elegance. She couldn’t tell because her eyes wouldn’t open. She lifted them with her fingers. “He wanted to know where you were. Can you carry me up to bed?”
“He already knew where I was. Or he knew where I was supposed to be. What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing. He was just concerned. He wanted to make sure you weren’t gone because you were upset.”
Nisha didn’t respond and this was not a conversation Trisha could fall asleep in the middle of, so she sat up and tried to blink her eyes open. Her sister was crying again and trying to pretend like she wasn’t. Trisha wiped her cheek clumsily.
“I spoke with Mishka. She told me that she met, you know—”
“The evil ex-Barbara,” Trisha supplied.
“You knew.”
Trisha was tired enough to deny it. But she couldn’t.
“How could you not tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That my husband went out with his ex.”
Trisha rubbed her eyes. “Are you listening to yourself, Nisha? She’s his ex. E X. It’s Neel. The guy worships the ground you walk on. He paints your toenails! He sits through Ma’s postmortems. He massages Aji’s feet when she’s tired. Takes Mishka on dad evenings. Carries fashion emergency stashes for me because I can’t pick my own clothes out. He hasn’t ever hurt you or anyone in the family by word or action. Ever. Why isn’t that enough? What more do you want him to do? You might have seen him cry over someone ten years ago, but I saw him cry over hurting you today. And if anyone ever felt that way about me, I’d be brave enough to believe it.”
Great, now she’d made her pregnant sister cry even more. She reached out and touched Nisha’s shoulder. “Listen, remember how you told me that sometimes you have to be brave and put yourself out there? You also have to be brave to accept what you have, even if you’re terrified of losing it. Because not everyone gets what they want in the first place.”
Here she was delivering a long speech even though she was tired enough to pass out, and Nisha wasn’t even paying attention. She was staring openmouthed over Trisha’s shoulder. “Is there someone on your balcony?”
Trisha spun around and followed her gaze. Yipes! There really was someone on her balcony. A burst of adrenaline broke through her drowsiness and she jumped out of the car.
Nisha followed her out. “Neel?” Nisha shouted up at him. “What are you doing on Trisha’s balcony? And what’s wrong with your arm?”
He waved with his left hand. His right hand was hugged to his side at an awkward angle. “Can you come up and let me in? I think I’ve dislocated my shoulder. I climbed up the balcony to see you.”
Nisha ran into the building, Trisha close on her heels.
“Slow down, Nisha. The baby.”
“Shhh,” Nisha shushed her and they made their way up in the elevator to the second floor. Trisha thanked the gods for the day she had decided not to wait for the fourth-floor condo to become available.
NO ONE EVER talks about how weird it is to see your siblings making out with someone. Almost as weird as watching your parents do it.
Nisha and Neel wouldn’t stop kissing.
Which had to be hard to do with a dislocated shoulder. Which apparently was easy to do when you tried to climb up to a second-floor balcony when you were pushing forty. Trisha didn’t say that to him, though. Or maybe she did. Also, he’d done it with two dozen roses stuck down the back of his shirt. Those things had thorns!
When Neel tried to prove a point, he really tried to prove a point.
“It’s only you for me,” he said to Nisha. “Please don’t shut me out.”
That made Nisha cry again. Trisha too sniffed into one of the last remaining tissues in her home. Then Nisha told him she was pregnant. Thank God.
“I swear I was not trying,” she said sniffling into his shoulder, the one that wasn’t dislocated. “It just happened.”
Since they were being gross and swapping tongues again, Trisha left them in her room and threw herself onto the futon in her office.
“Nisha, sweetheart. I know. This is . . . it’s great. Why didn’t you just tell me? I would’ve come back,” she heard her favorite brother-in-law in the whole wide world say from the next room.
“I didn’t want you to come back. I didn’t want you to even know for another few days. But it’s . . . it’s almost safe. In two days it will be safe.”
“It’s going to be okay, baby. We have each other. We have Mishka. We have the Farm. It’s going to be okay.”
Then silence, which meant they were tongue swapping again.
“Go get his shoulder looked at,” Trisha shouted. It was the last thing she remembered doing before she fell into a boneless sleep.
Chapter Thirty-One
When Trisha woke up the next morning, Nisha was gone. Which felt strange. Having someone stay with you for two weeks altered your routines. She automatically pulled two cups out of the cabinet before popping her pod in the coffee machine, then put one back. For the first time in her adult life the idea of being alone made her lonely.
Nisha had left a sticky note on the machine saying “Went home with a hot judge. Go back to bed, you need sleep.”
She texted her sister to check if all was well and then opened her fridge and stared at its contents. Would she ever be able to think about food without thinking about DJ? Would she ever be able to do anything without thinking about DJ?
It was her day off, but of course she was going to go in to the hospital. She had to take care of things before she left for Africa—naturally she’d been able to talk En
toff into letting her go—and make sure everything with Emma was in order before she got on that plane. It wasn’t the thought of seeing Emma, however, that was making her heart chirrup like the myna birds in the Sagar Mahal aviary.
Her intercom buzzed and she jumped off her barstool in fright. She wasn’t expecting anyone.
“Will you let your mother in? Or do I have to call ahead like some stranger?”
Trisha’s mouth fell open. What was Ma doing here?
“Depends on what you want, Ma,” she said, but of course she buzzed her in immediately.
Ma walked in imperiously, handed Trisha coffee and chocolate-blueberry muffins, and surveyed the condo while patting her perfectly fitted top tucked into her perfectly fitted white linen pants. “You’ve done a good job with the place.”
“Well, Nisha has.” Nisha had helped Trisha with the furnishing, but Trisha had bought all the art herself. She, in fact, might need to stop buying art soon. Five new Emma Caines had been delivered last week. She was running out of wall space to put things up.
“What is wrong with you, Trisha?” her mother said staring at the massive canvas over the fireplace.
“You don’t like it?” Trisha said dryly, knowing full well that Ma was not talking about the painting.
Ma went on as though Trisha had not spoken. “What do you mean by planning a trip to Malawi when Yash has his fund-raiser?”
So HRH had not told her about the banishment. And Vansh had told Ma about her upcoming trip, because he was the only one Trisha had told. She was going to have to box his snitch ears.
“They needed someone to run workshops on one of our procedures.”
“And you’re the only one who can teach this workshop?”
Actually, she’d had to beg Entoff to let her go instead of him. “Yes.”
Her mother gave her the original version of the Glare of Elegance and took a sip of her coffee.
“Also, I’m not invited to the fund-raiser. His Royal Highness Shree Hari Raje disowned me. I’m not welcome at the Anchorage anymore, which I guess means I’m not welcome at family dos anymore either.” She sat down on a barstool and gave the muffin her mother had put in front of her the stink eye.
Ma’s hand went to her mouth. “What did you do now?”
Was Ma serious? Trisha almost didn’t respond. But she was too tired of holding in things she wanted to say. “Other than treat a patient who needed my care? I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask him? You’ll only ever believe him anyway.”
“What is that supposed to mean? Of course I’ll talk to him.”
“Sure. And that should set everything straight. Because he always listens to you, right?”
Ma looked outraged. As though she couldn’t imagine what Trisha meant.
“Come on, Ma. Why do you have to act like you’re always on the exact same page as him? Would it be so bad to admit that you differ on things? Shouldn’t that be okay in a marriage?”
“Differ? Whatever on?”
“Well, for starters on things like having to raise us as though our Indian heritage was something to hide. Like always following his lead on everything.”
Ma walked to the iPod dock and turned it off. The tranquil rhythms of Zakir Hussain’s tabla stopped, creating a vacuum of silence. She turned around and looked at the painting over the fireplace—a circle of women doing the ghoomar in the sands of Rajasthan. “Need I open the fridge to find the stash of Ashi’s kababs and bhajis?”
Trisha stared at her, feeling like a bit of an idiot.
“You spent every summer while you were growing up in Sripore. You work at Stanford. Your ancestors were maharajas. Your brother is running for governor of California. Which of those two identities is you? Only one of them? We didn’t want our children to pick just one. We wanted you to own both. That’s how we raised you, to honor everything, to choose what felt right for you. To not conform to stereotypes anyone else assigned to you.”
Trisha took a grudging bite of her muffin, unable to respond to that.
How can you act so white?
When DJ had asked her that, she had wondered why being comfortable in your skin was “acting white.” But of course she knew why. Of course she understood the norms of her country, and his, and perceptions and privilege. But Ma was right, Trisha’s comfort in her identity came from the fact that Ma and HRH had consciously owned both their identities and insisted on their children owning theirs.
“Your father is the most fair man in the world.”
Trisha choked on her muffin, which gave her the opportunity to spit the vile thing out into a napkin and throw it in the garbage. Ma might have had a point just now, but this was pushing it.
Her mother was not amused. “You know the stress of this campaign is killing him. Why can’t you be a little more understanding?”
“Understanding? He disowned me, Ma! It’s that easy for him. To throw me out. And, honestly, he threw me out fifteen years ago, when Julia made that video. For fifteen years he’s barely tolerated me. Now finally he gets what he wants.” She took another bite of the muffin because she was determined to make it taste good.
Ma placed the coffee on the breakfast bar and crossed her arms, her raised eyebrows trapping all her substantial disappointment. “This is your father you’re talking about, beta.”
“My father who wants to control everything. Who’s lost his head to this campaign.” Because sure, she’d made a mistake, but she’d been seventeen. Seventeen! “I was a child, Ma. A sociopath took advantage of me. How was I supposed to predict what she did? Why didn’t you see that? Why didn’t you see what Julia did was not on me?” She had so badly needed someone to say that to her. Just once.
This time Ma’s hand went to her mouth. For a moment she looked like she might cry. Trisha didn’t know if it was because she saw how much she’d hurt Trisha or because none of her children ever spoke to her that way.
Trisha wanted to apologize. But she also wanted to scream!
“Was nothing more important to you and Dad than ‘your dream’? Wasn’t I?”
“That’s unfair. You children are more important than everything.”
“If I’m important, then why didn’t you stand up for me? Why don’t you ever stand up to him, Ma?”
“Stand up to him for what? What does he ever do that’s not for the good of us all?”
Trisha gulped down the muffin. It wasn’t easy, because really, swallowing cardboard and crap at the same time made her want to gag.
Ma watched her for a while wordlessly, then she turned and walked to the couch. “Come here. Sit with me.” She sank into the couch and patted it. “I’m going to tell you why. I guess it’s time.”
Something about her tone made Trisha do as she said.
“You know how your dad and I met, right?”
Trisha nodded but she was seriously not in the mood for another rendition of how the perfect prince swept the perfect film star off her feet.
Ma didn’t look like this was going to be a romantic story, though. She shifted in her seat until she was pressed into a corner and stared at her hands. It made her look awfully small and more unsure than Trisha had ever seen her.
Just when the silence had stretched so long that Trisha thought Ma had changed her mind, Ma spoke. “When we first got together, there were only two things people ever asked me. The press, our friends, they were only interested in knowing: one, what it was like to give up stardom, and two, how on earth had I landed a prince?
“I had to make up answers to both those questions because no one wanted the truth. Getting rid of stardom was something I had been trying to figure out how to do for years. Not because I wasn’t ambitious, although I wasn’t, or because I took for granted something everyone else coveted, I didn’t. But because of the price I had to pay for it.”
Trisha sat up. Ma’s face had paled, her usually bright eyes dimmed beyond recognition. The way she was looking at Trisha, as though she were trying to soak up how Trisha was looking a
t her—it was as though what she was about to tell Trisha was going to change how Trisha saw her forever.
It made Trisha want to ask her to stop. But Ma’s jaw was set. “All the things you hear about men in power in the entertainment industry—they were doubly true in my time. But we had none of your hashtags, no movements to give us voice, to help us. Not that all the help in the world could help a child . . . a child of five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . .” Her voice cracked. Fractured innocence from a long time ago glittered in her eyes. Trisha couldn’t move, couldn’t react, all she could do was hold herself motionless.
“A child does not understand power and silence, actions or reasons. She just feels dirty.” Her fingers twitched as though she wanted to rub at her arms, but she held herself still. “Filthy. Grotesque. Ugly. When millions of people sob at her beauty, write poetry about it, paint pictures in bright colors she can’t bear, it makes her want to slash her own face to ribbons. But she’s too scared to do even that. When the person who should protect her is the person she is most terrified of, she dies. She dies. She’s a corpse.”
For a long time, she said no more. The hand in her lap fisted and loosened. Fisted and loosened. As though she were working an invisible stress ball.
Then suddenly her gaze fell on Trisha’s hand pressed into her belly, and she took it and stroked it. A smile softened her face, brought the strength back to it, as though a memory had parted its way past the ugliness of the words she’d just spoken. “The first question your father ever asked me when I . . . when I jumped on him”—her smile turned real, her trance broken—“and landed in his lap, and told him he’d ruined my escape, was: ‘But why? Why are you trying to run away?’
“It was probably my utter dismay at having been caught before I had made it out of the hotel premises, at knowing that my only chance at escape was gone, that I answered him honestly. For the first time in my life I told the truth. That if I didn’t run away I would kill myself.
