Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(24)
Attending any of the public Raje shindigs was out of the question. Her nerves couldn’t take the overstimulation and it brought on seizures. Ambition was too violent an emotion for the eldest of the Rajes of this generation. If that wasn’t an irony, Trisha didn’t know what was.
Trisha had never met His Royal Highness Maheshwar Rao Raje, Esha’s father, but from everything she’d heard he had been a version of HRH on steroids. A barrister, and India’s youngest ever and most charismatic member of parliament, he’d been earmarked for prime ministership and leading India out of the chaos that colonization had left behind. All it had taken to derail that plan had been a failed airplane engine.
Esha’s episodes had started after the airplane crash had killed her parents along with thirty other passengers, leaving Esha the miraculous sole survivor. The seizures caused her to go catatonic and were followed by debilitating migraines. All the medical scans in the world had not been able to come up with an explanation for why they came on—or for her visions.
A week after the accident, six-year-old Esha had dreamed of their Sripore estate manager, J-Auntie’s husband, being crushed under a tractor. They had found his body that same day, mangled by the machine. A spate of visions about everyone who worked at the Sripore palace had followed, turning her into a shaking terrified mess.
Just the rumors of her clairvoyance had brought throngs of people seeking their futures to the palace gates. No amount of refuting the rumors had dissuaded the crowds. They took to leaving offerings for the little goddess outside the palace. Before the news spread further, HRH had whisked his dead brother’s daughter off to California where Trisha’s mother had been pregnant with Trisha.
In California they had found that not leaving the home kept her seizures under control, and it kept the visions restricted to the people Esha was connected to. She had seen Yash in a wheelchair before his accident. She’d seen other things about Yash too. Things that fueled the family’s dreams.
Aji had moved to California when they had brought Esha here. She never left her side. She guarded Esha’s periods of meditation and her trances with her signature soft fierceness. Trisha believed it was her way of paying for the death of her oldest child. Atonement, because she had insisted he get on that plane and take his family on vacation, because he worked too much. Everyone had tried to convince her that it wasn’t her fault. But guilt had tenacious tentacles. It burrowed under your skin and possessed your entire being until you couldn’t exorcise it without losing yourself.
Trisha blew Aji a kiss and was about to turn around when Esha raised her head, skewing her heavy bun to one side. “I’m sorry about your patient,” she whispered, her eyes still shut as though opening them would hurt. “Good thing you never give up.” Then she laid her head down and went back into her trance.
Chapter Seven
Gathering up the oversize canvas bags of groceries from his trip to the farmers’ market, DJ let himself out of the Palo Alto flat that was costing him a kidney to rent. He made his way across the eight blocks that led to Curried Dreams, his friend Ashna’s restaurant.
As he took High Street, every cell in his body seemed to want to turn toward University Avenue and go back to Emma. But he had promised Ashna that he would help her work on new recipes for the upcoming summer season. Plus, he had no idea how he was going to face his sister. Now that she had lost her blooming mind.
Her words still stung like oil burns on his skin, but he deserved them. She was right about all of it. It was too late to change their history, too late to change the choices he’d made. He couldn’t bring their mother back, couldn’t change the fact that he was responsible for her death. But he could keep Emma from taking her own life.
It was suicide. There was just no other word for it. And it was not going to happen, not while he still breathed.
He forced himself to turn toward Forest Avenue. The homes in this part of Palo Alto were unlike the mansions a few miles away. This was where the scale still felt somewhat urban. Not quite like the tightly packed flats of avenue de Flandres but a little like the town houses in Richmond, old money so insouciant it needed to make no effort at all to be shown off.
Sunshine filtered in and out from behind the jacarandas lining the street and made him squint. There was something about California sunshine that kept him standing, kept him moving, and he hooked into it. How the sun touched you here was different from anything he’d experienced before. It carried a little more heat than Paris and definitely more light than London.
The Clapham flat they had lived in before his father died had windows that somehow trapped what little sunshine fell upon London and streamed it into their lives. DJ barely ever thought about that home anymore, or of his strapping, hazel-eyed father sitting in his threadbare tweed chair with the Times open in front of him, throwing headlines at the family as though he couldn’t keep his newfound knowledge about their world to himself. DJ couldn’t remember the last time he had thought about the car that had jumped a red light and run his father over on his walk home from the factory. DJ had been twelve.
After Dad died and his family threw Mum, Emma, and DJ out of their home and onto the street, they’d moved to the attic rooms of Ammaji’s Southall house. There had been one dormer window in the attic that overlooked a tiny patch of backyard where Ammaji hung her clothes on clotheslines. No light ever seemed to reach that little square of yard but the smell of freshly washed fabric had still infused it with warmth.