Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(21)
As she made her way through the house she considered calling her sister again and screaming. Mostly because she had the urge to scream, but also because she wanted to make sure that an alien hadn’t abducted Nisha and left behind a cyborg in her place. A cyborg who didn’t know just how important Animal Farm debriefings were to Nisha.
The Animal Farm was the family’s nickname for itself. It had all started with this picture book called The Animal Farm that some auntie visiting from India had brought the Raje children. HRH, a fan of the novel by George Orwell, had been horrified when he saw the book and ordered Yash to throw it away. But Yash, like any older sibling, had delegated the task to Trisha, and she had been so intrigued by the brightly colored, haphazardly printed book that she had read it. And laughed so hard that the rest of them had taken it from her and also read it.
It was the story of wild and domestic animals living together in harmony in a hamletlike forest. The animals walked on two legs, lived in houses that ranged from hutments to palaces, and wore puffy bow ties if they were male and frilly aprons if they were female. But the thing that had made the Raje children guffaw until they had tears in their eyes was the very random morals each story ended with. These animal-humans who got into all sorts of messes always made everything better with a group hug and with throwing out lines like “One step at a time. That’s how you change the world!” or “A person is only as good as his word!” or “United we stand, divided we fall!”
The Raje cousins had all grown up in the same house. Trisha and her three siblings; Yash the scion of the dynasty, Nisha the perfect big sister, and Vansh the free-spirited brat who did as he pleased. He was currently in Uganda trying to dig wells and set up filtration systems, working toward his plan to save the world one clean water drop at a time. And their two cousins: Esha, HRH’s older brother’s daughter and the oldest of the cousins, whom Trisha’s parents had raised since her parents had died in the air crash she had miraculously survived. And Ashna, HRH’s younger brother’s daughter, who technically hadn’t lived with them, but who for all practical purposes had while her father battled alcoholism and her mother took long breaks from him and ran off to India every chance she got.
Growing up with her cousins and siblings had been fun, but also something of a whirlwind. Ma had made sure they were all too busy upholding the Raje academic and extracurricular standards to have any free time at all. But it was a whirlwind you never had to navigate by yourself. Loneliness was a feeling Trisha hadn’t experienced until she left for college.
While at home, every night before bed they had all gathered in their grandmother’s room to wish her good night and tell her about their day. Trisha had loved that hour they got to be together and to be kids. Raje kids, but kids nonetheless. At these nightly gatherings, they had loved reading The Animal Farm aloud and hamming up those moralistic concluding lines from the stories, and the strange book had become a family heirloom. When it had fallen to tatters, Aji had tucked it into a plastic sleeve and put it in the storage room where it had disappeared along with their childhood.
The book had also given birth to an entire family of nicknames. That’s where “Shasha” came from. Between being the tallest and gangliest of the girls, and between it somewhat rhyming with Trisha, she had forever become Shasha, the clumsy giraffe who always missed out on things because she did not fit into places.
Yash, of course, was Shambhu, the lion who was a domineering control freak who didn’t always know best. But they had all long lost their ability to poke fun at Yash. He had turned into someone you couldn’t mock for any reason. Nisha was Rimbo, the hippo who kept the peace. Ashna was Tombo, the elephant who was always trying to be someone she wasn’t. Esha was Siya, the detached swan, although she was never in the thick of their shenanigans so the nickname had barely stuck. Vansh had been too young to be deemed worthy of a nickname.
Trisha’s was the only nickname that had stayed firmly in place.
Today the Animal Farm was all gathered on the upper floor, where Esha and Aji had their private suite of rooms. It was Trisha’s favorite part of the house. Even more beloved than her own childhood room with its canopy bed and ceiling painted to resemble the Simpsons’ sky from her favorite TV show growing up.
Trisha had always believed that every place had a pulse, a native texture to its air as it sank into your lungs. The air here in America vibrated at an entirely different frequency than the air in India. It was one of Trisha’s earliest memories: the change when they landed in Mumbai on their trips. Then they would take their family’s private jet to Sripore, and the air there would feel entirely different from Mumbai. Sometimes when Trisha found herself alone, which was almost never given how many of them there were, she would stick out her tongue to see if the air tasted different. It did. The air in the Sagar Mahal tasted clean and sweet, like rosewater.
The air in Aji’s room tasted just like that. And the comfort of it alleviated some of Trisha’s nerves. Still, she peeked around the corner of the sitting room. Sure, it was silly to slink around as though she were some sort of thief but she needed to know where everyone was positioned so she could strategize which corner to disappear into. But the walnut-paneled sitting room was empty.
Two life-size portraits of Sita and Parvati by Raja Ravi Varma, arguably India’s most renowned classical artist, hung on two sides of a life-size dancing Ganesha statue carved from a single piece of sandalwood. All three of the deities gave her their benevolent smiles, and Trisha felt forgiven for all the sins she might ever have committed, which she suspected was the purpose of the pieces in the first place.