Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(80)

Her snarkiness gave her no peace. A pathetic part of her wished she could pick up the phone and tell HRH what had happened with DJ and the cop. What if he had a different theory about reporting the incident? The cop had insisted that he’d just been doing his job, but would he have done his job differently had DJ looked different? Dad would know what to do. He never faltered when it came to knowing right from wrong.

But she knew she was kidding herself. Even if she hadn’t promised DJ she would stay silent, she knew that the time when she could have a conversation with her father about something that was bothering her was long gone. She was also fully aware of the fact that Nisha was right. This could destroy Yash’s campaign. If Yash found out, he would want to do something about it. He would not be able to let it go. Yash’s political charm might piss the hell out of her sometimes, but that didn’t change the fact that his integrity was untouchable.

Their dad had drilled that mantra into them with a sledgehammer: Do something about things that bother you.

And he’d lived by that mantra. Even though somewhere along the way his focus had shifted to making sure that a political win came before everything else because you needed power to truly bring about change.

If she was being honest, she was the one to blame for that. Had she not exposed Yash to Julia, HRH might not have become so aware of—and paranoid about—how fragile their dream to see Yash take office was. If not for her, her father would not have had to spend the past fifteen years obsessed with making sure nothing destroyed that dream before it had a chance.

That day at the orphanage for the blind, his words had changed her life forever. And even after losing him, she had always followed his words. That compass inside that told you something wasn’t right. That is your greatest gift. Do something with it.

Until today she had never realized how easy it had been for her to follow that edict.

DJ had stood there helpless as a cop reached for his gun for no reason other than fear based in prejudice. DJ’s defense had been to withdraw into himself and to let the reality unfolding around him wash over him like a wave, his eyes closed, his breath held to minimize damage.

Trisha didn’t want him to be standing there in that inequitable ocean, unable to do anything about it. She wanted to live in a world where the waves hit everyone the same way, where everyone could choose how they surfed them. Where the only thing that mattered was ability.

And she had allowed herself to become oblivious to the fact that they did not live in that world.

Ma’s pet peeve was how the Western world misunderstood the theory of karma. “I mean it’s the Bhagavad Gita they’re bastardizing. What is all this ‘karma’s a bitch’ nonsense!” Ma loved to say.

The entire “what goes around comes around” thing was a backward view of karma. Karma was simply Sanskrit for action, and the theory was that your actions are the only thing under your control, as opposed to the fruits of your actions, which are not. And since actions always bear fruit, you were better off focusing your energy on your own actions, rather than worrying about the results you wanted them to produce.

Until now it had seemed simple enough.

Now her naiveté at thinking it simple felt irresponsible, harmful.

While it was true that you only had control over your actions, your power to choose those actions didn’t exist in a vacuum. DJ was right; she had been ignorant to push him into breaking into the car, to negate his experience when he warned her. And later, she had been able to stand up to the cop because she’d had the power of Yash’s name and she’d pulled it out without a second thought. Was it a metaphor for everything she had achieved in her life?

Of course she’d worked hard, but growing up in the Bay Area in a family like hers, she had never borne the weight of being seen as different. She had never had the odds stacked against her.

She stared at her computer for a while. Emma’s latest test results were in. It had been eight days since she’d discharged Emma. Nothing had changed. Trisha started flipping through her images, back and forth, zooming in from the lateral view to the anterior. The tumor was wrapped snugly around the nerves, like a fist squeezing two ropes together. She clicked the crosses on the screen, mindlessly taking measurements, poking at the mass of tissue that would kill Emma if she didn’t wake up soon. The clicks of her mouse punctuated the silence.

Click. If you feel the need to mete out justice, find a way to get my sister into the OR.

Click. She’s all I’ve got.

Click. Click. My sister is not live tissue . . . Click . . . she’s an artist who lives for her art . . .

Click . . . this will change her life forever.

Click. Click. Click. The blind girl’s hands on her face. Click. You’re pretty.

Click. Click.

What if they could find a way to not take Emma’s art away?

She thought about the basket of knickknacks at the orphanage. Colorful pieces of felt and leather, stamped and glued and perfectly beautiful.

She typed “Artists and Blindness” into Google. And an entire world opened up in front of her.

Artists who were blind from birth, artists who had lost their sight and transferred their need to create to another medium: sculpture, weaving, pottery, metalwork, yarn work. There was an entire slew of associations of visually impaired artists, of books by artists who created art without sight. She downloaded as many as she could find, soaking up the words, taking them in, letting them churn. And churn. And churn.