Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(39)
This was getting annoying. Nisha was acting like Mishka was leaving for college. On Mars! Neel and Mishka’s trip to England for Neel’s Oxford reunion had been planned for a year. Her hyperorganized sister had probably had Mishka’s bags packed for a month. And she knew Trisha knew that.
There was only one possibility Trisha could think of that would explain her sister’s bizarre behavior. It was almost too idiotic to contemplate, and yet . . . Nisha couldn’t possibly be freaking out about Neel going back to England because his ex still lived there, could she? Surely her sister knew that was a nonissue.
“K. But you’d better tell me if something’s wrong,” she sent and got a very unconvincing smiley emoji back. She’d have to go over later.
WHEN TRISHA GOT to the Anchorage, she found her mother on the uppermost floor in the storage room, which was basically the attic that covered one-half of the mansion’s footprint. The sloping roof used to have fifteen skylights when the house had first been built but those had been closed up and covered with solar panels that powered the entire estate.
On the inside, the walls of the commodious room were lined with climate-controlled storage cabinets. Their grandmother insisted on not throwing away a single thing she deemed meaningful. Everything, from each one of their first shoes, rattles, chew toys, clothes worn for various ceremonies, report cards, was wrapped in tissue and naphthalene balls and packed in trunks and then stacked in the storage cabinets.
Someday all this would be shipped back to Sripore for record keeping the way it had always been done for all the royal children. However, between HRH and Ma, there wasn’t consensus on when that would be. Trisha suspected that HRH wanted the keepsakes—at least the ones that belonged to Yash—to stay stateside, where he fully expected museums to be interested in them not too far in the future.
Trisha found Ma in the special room where Yash’s things were kept. Ma was wearing a linen summer dress and Trisha thanked her stars that she had changed out of her scrubs and into shorts and a blouse. She always kept a change at the office and in her car because she often came to the Anchorage directly from the hospital.
Percussion beats of Zakir Hussain’s tabla lilted in from the speaker system. Ma was sitting cross-legged on a low, tufted stool cleaning Yash’s wheelchair, her movements keeping time to the four-beat cycles. Her mother never did any cleaning in the house. A cleaning service under J-Auntie’s hawkeyed supervision made sure the Anchorage glistened at all times. But this room, none of the help were allowed to touch.
Trisha’s stomach cramped at the sight of the wheelchair. She hated that thing, had hated seeing her brother in it. The accident had happened when she was ten years old. A drunk driver had hit Yash biking home from volunteering at a pet shelter. At the time, the wheelchair had been the answer to their prayers. When Yash had gone into the OR, they hadn’t known if he would come out alive.
Nisha and Ashna had dragged her into the nondenominational chapel in the hospital. There Trisha had promised whichever nondenominational gods were listening that if they helped Yash that day she would always help anyone who asked her for help. Always. All she wanted in return was for Yash to live. And she’d meant it. That child’s prayer had made her keep Julia’s secret years later and ruined everything.
Being taken in by Julia’s words would never stop haunting her. You have to help me, Trisha, you know how badly I want this! I have no one else!
Ma patted the tufted stool next to her. Crossing her legs, Trisha sank onto the stool and watched her mother spray and wipe.
“Is Nisha okay?” Trisha should have known that would be Ma’s first question. Ma’s radar when it came to her children was a scary thing.
“Busy with sending Mishka off with Neel. I think it’s the fact that it’s Mishka’s first trip without her. She’s taking it hard.” Spinning crap for Ma for the benefit of her siblings came easily. They’d all done it all their lives, covered one another’s asses with Ma—a movie instead of a study date, the rare return home intoxicated. Because to call Ma protective was the wildest of understatements.
Through school they were never allowed sleepovers at friends’ houses. They had only ever hung out with friends who were also Ma and HRH’s friends’ children. It was something no one could budge Ma on. Trisha believed it had something to do with Ma’s own untraditional childhood as a child star. She treated their safety as though it were a fragile bauble in her keeping. Even a hint of a threat to their well-being sent her into a tizzy of trying to manage their lives for them and they were all united in their quest to avoid that at all costs.
Between Ma’s overprotectiveness and how packed she’d kept their schedules, Trisha had never learned to make friends. The only time she had tried her hand at it was in college with Julia and that had ended badly enough that fifteen years later her mother was still pulling her into “meetings” like these. After Julia left, the rest of Trisha’s time at Berkeley had been spent being gun-shy of any attempts at friendship. By the time she got to medical school at Stanford, not having time for friends had become a way of life. Every once in a while she went out for a drink with her colleagues, but otherwise the Rajes were it. And despite the tension with HRH and Yash, they had been all she’d needed.
Ma gave a delicate nod, making the sharp edges of her auburn-highlighted bob swish around her jaw, and gave the wheelchair another wipe with her gloved hands. It was a rare thing for Trisha to have Ma all to herself. As a little girl one of Trisha’s favorite things had been to watch her mother. Just watch her as she talked on the phone, listened to her favorite Indian classical music, or worked on her charities and events from her office. For all her fierce protectiveness, Ma had this dignified acceptance of the world. It was a dichotomy Trisha had never understood nor been capable of emulating.