Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(2)

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.