Chapter Five

Of all the emotions in the world, the one that Vansh disliked experiencing more than any other was anger. Rage killed brain cells. Well, he didn’t know if that was true, but anger was simply unnecessary to accomplish anything. The world today put too much of a positive spin on rage. Rage was a form of hate. How could anything positive come from hate?

Naina had certainly made rage boil up inside him a few times. How dare she dismiss him this way? Vansh turned the speed up on the treadmill and lengthened his stride.

Jiggy Mehta had not offered to work with him because of his last name. Nor had he done it because Vansh was the governor-elect’s brother. Mehta was simply aware of the fact that Vansh had spent his life understanding problems and working to solve them hands-on, at ground level.

Emma Project, indeed!

He’d show her exactly how much this was not an Emma Project.

He had gone to bed at seven that morning. Not because he was out drinking like other twenty-six-year-olds, but because he had spent the night trying to convince Hari that Vansh was going to get him safely off the street and then making it happen. This involved packing up and safely storing Hari’s belongings—which, naturally, Hari was very possessive about—and finding a hotel and then staying with him until Hari stopped crying and self-flagellating about how he had messed up.

Hari had made Vansh promise over and over again that he would not tell anyone—especially Yash and Nisha—that he was homeless. Holy shit, Naina had riled Vansh up enough that he’d let slip that Hari and homelessness were related. Naina was simply too smart to not suspect some sort of connection between the two. Vansh looked at his phone and wondered if he should text her to remind her that it was confidential information. No, that would just confirm her suspicions. He’d wait to tell her in person.

Poor Hari. Vansh would never forget the expression on his face when he’d become overwhelmed with emotion after Yash’s speech. Sure, mistaking mimosas for orange juice was funny, but the man was more guileless than anyone Vansh had met in a very long time. There was not a trace of self-interest in him. Even on Vansh’s missions around the world, the friends he made always had an agenda. Hari was just trying to exist and having such a hard time of it. If anyone needed a hand, Hari did.

Keeping this secret meant Vansh could not go to the family for help.

He upped the speed on the treadmill even more and spent another twenty minutes running too hard to think. Then he lifted for forty minutes. Fortunately the gym in his parents’ house was down the corridor from his room. Even more fortunately, Ma was probably too tired after Yash’s party to join Vansh. When he was home she liked to walk on the treadmill next to him and catch up with him. Usually he was grateful to have her. Today he was grateful to be alone. Working out helped him think. Today, not so much.

Shaving and showering made him feel a little better. He spent an extra-long time drying and styling his hair, but the angry churn inside him was being stubborn. He took the foyer stairs down to the kitchen. Sometimes the grandeur of his parents’ house grounded him. Again, today something was different.

He went looking for J-Auntie, his parents’ housekeeper, to see if she’d make him a sandwich. Only because she would act all wounded if he made one for himself. His stomach growled. He always lived at the Anchorage when he came back to California. Yes, his parents’ estate had a name. Yes, he knew exactly how pretentious that sounded. Now that he had decided to stay in California for the foreseeable future, he had to figure out where he would live.

Oh, who was he kidding? Ma would go into full-blown Extra Ma mode if he suggested living anywhere but here. He knew Ma hated that they all had their own places now that they were adults. It used to be the Indian way to live with your parents until you were married, and even after that if you chose. His older siblings had moved out after college. They’d had that tangible threshold to cross. Vansh hadn’t gone to college but he’d lived mostly out of the home since the age of sixteen.

Ma had worked hard to make their family home a sanctuary for them, and he was glad for it. The Anchorage was even more comfortable than the palace of his ancestors.

The Rajes had ruled the kingdom of Sripore for a century before the Europeans colonized India and the British took over Sripore. Growing up, their mother had dragged them to Sripore every summer, intent on keeping them acquainted with their royal Indian roots.

Sagar Mahal, the Sripore palace, was a magical place, especially for a little boy with more energy than anyone knew what to do with. Every summer there was something new to discover, a chamber no one knew about, a tower with a secret staircase, a trapdoor in the back of a closet. Being the youngest of his siblings, five years younger than Ashna, who was the closest to him in age, Vansh had been left mostly to his own devices.

He was also the only one of his siblings who wasn’t obsessed with reading. He’d heard one of the nannies at the Sagar Mahal tell one of the servants that the Baby Prince was more energetic and harder to handle than the others because he didn’t read.

Having a learning disability in a family where academic brilliance was taken for granted wasn’t fun, but it had been a while since Vansh had felt the sting of it.

Naina was one of the few people who knew how much he’d struggled with dyslexia. She’d read textbooks to him before exams when she’d hung out at the Anchorage. She’d had a way of doing it without making him feel stupid. And yet she had brought up a book and used it to treat him like he was stupid and lazy. But no, anger was never the answer. It’s just that it was Naina. For all her scolding and teasing, he’d never known her to be mean. Unlike his sisters, who could be brutal, Naina was careful about how she treated people.

Most people saw her as cold and prickly, but that was because she didn’t know how not to be honest in her reactions to people and she was uncomfortable with exposing any kind of vulnerability. Then there was the fact that she thought she was always right. Truthfully, though, who among us didn’t?

That was exactly the reason why when she’d treated him like he was stupid, it hurt. He knew being dyslexic didn’t have anything to do with his intelligence. No matter how severe his dyslexia, it didn’t reflect on his ability to process information. He had proved that over and over again his whole life.

Hadn’t he?

As he passed the empty den, he stood outside the glass-paned French doors. This was where he’d been standing when he’d overheard his parents. He’d been in kindergarten. It had been years since he’d even thought about that day.

Trisha knew the periodic table by heart at four,his father had said, his voice too angry for those words.

You know Trisha is not regular, she’s an exceptional child, his mother had said, her voice too sad for those words.

All the others were reading chapter books by kindergarten. He can’t even read words. How can one of my children be stupid?

Vansh had heard that children who walked in on their parents having sex never forgot it, no matter how young they were. There was just something innocence altering about that experience that made it indelible. There were few other experiences like that. Experiences that involved being violated in some way. Experiences like hearing your father call you stupid with such finality.

Vansh remembered everything about it. Like a scene in a movie imprinted inside his brain. Clear and stark and sepia toned.

His parents had the kind of relationship that made their friends roll their eyes with envy. Vansh had seen this his whole life. Children noticed things. His parents were always gentle with each other. Much more so than any other couple he’d ever seen. But that day, Vansh remembered his mother stepping into his father’s space, not a hint of gentleness in her. He is not like the others. You can’t have the same expectations for him as you do for the others. But if I ever hear you call one of my children that ugly word again, I will walk out of this house with all four of them and never look back.

There had been no raised voices. His father had responded only with the softest, Sorry.

After that there had been endless special ed teachers, therapists, experts. Whatever form of dyslexia Vansh had, it had taught him one thing early on: the only cure was to not read. Through school, he had access to all materials on audio and visual aids. He always took all tests separately from other students. Every teacher was unerringly kind. Every principal, who always knew him by name, made sure of it.

At home the pressure on his older siblings to excel was brutal. The quiet silence in that space when it came to Vansh was palpable. The Raje children were universally acknowledged as gifted learners. So, strife over academic pressure was rare, but every once in a while there would be tears over grades, fights over how unfair this or that teacher was. None of these meltdowns ever happened with Vansh in the room.

He only overheard them because like all youngest siblings he was adept at the art of eavesdropping. Without exception, everyone in his family was only ever complimentary about his schoolwork. About everything he ever did, really.

The truth was that he could never explain quite how much work it took to process something everyone else took for granted, to memorize and work around words. To hide. Consequently the need to have anyone understand that part of him had died a long time ago.

In eleventh grade he had chosen to go to a boarding school all the way in Northern India that promised alternative learning. There were no tests there, and he’d been surrounded by artists and musicians. He’d learned that the pursuit of success was a hamster wheel he could choose not to get on.

After high school, when he said he wanted to take a gap year and travel the world, his family had nothing but encouragement for him. After the gap year, when he decided not to go home but to join the Peace Corps, everyone acted like it was the most brilliant idea ever. After that he decided to go to Sripore and work with his aunt on her foundation for a while, and everyone acted like it was the most selfless and admirable thing to do. He never brought college up again and no one else did either. There was just never any time as he raced from cause to cause, project to project.

For the first time in his life, the need to run seemed to have exhausted itself out of him. It was strange to have this realization hit him here, outside these glass-paned doors. He liked who he was. It no longer felt like that wasn’t enough. Now that he’d helped Yash achieve something amazing here, his parents’ home no longer felt like the place he had to leave to prove things. This corner of the world had always felt different from everywhere else. Now it felt less complicated, safe. Vansh wanted to follow the urge to see how long it lasted.

As for Naina Kohli’s vision of him not matching his own, it was just a matter of plucking out the nail she’d hammered into his self-esteem. Good thing pulling nails from his self-esteem was one of his many talents.

“What are you mumbling to yourself about?” J-Auntie asked as Vansh made his way into the kitchen, which was the size of the last apartment he’d shared with two people.

She was arranging cucumber sandwiches on a platter. A steaming teapot of chai and teacups sat neatly on a service trolley.

Vansh picked up a sandwich and popped it whole into his mouth. If J-Auntie’s cooking could be counted as evidence, then his parents’ home was definitely the best place on earth. Picking up two more sandwiches, one in each hand, he proceeded to stuff his face.

“Delicious, Auntie! How do you make cucumber taste like this?” Paper-thin slices of cucumber, delicately spiced Greek yogurt spread, and pillowy whole-grain bread. This was the life.

“His Highness was looking for you earlier,” she said instead of acknowledging his praise, expression flat and respectful, the way it always was when she brought up his father. When anyone brought up the venerable HRH. That’s what Vansh and his siblings called their father, His Royal Highness Shree Hari Raje. Behind his back, of course. He was a prince, and nothing fit him better than HRH.

Vansh finished the rest of his sandwich in one bite. It was not usual for HRH to ever be looking for him.

“But then he had to leave,” J-Auntie said.

Vansh tried not to heave a sigh of relief and threw another hungry look at the sandwiches.

She handed him the platter. “Why don’t I warm up a bowl of chicken makhni and rice for you.”

“Was Yash here for lunch?” Yash was scheduled to move into the governor’s mansion in a couple of weeks. He had a condo in San Francisco, and India had partially moved in with him, although she still ran her family’s yoga studio in Palo Alto. But if there was chicken makhni in the house, that could only mean that Yash had been over for a meal.

J-Auntie smiled fondly. Yash and Vansh were her favorite people on earth, much to their sisters’ chagrin. “Yes, Yashu came over with Ms. India but he left with your parents for a meeting. Ms. India is upstairs helping your grandmother and Esha with some yoga. Nisha brought baby Ram over and she’s with them.”

“Ram’s here?” Vansh couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice. He grabbed the tea tray from the trolley. “I’ll take this up for you. Oh, and, J-Auntie, can you toss me a salad instead of the chicken makhni, please? I think I just ate seven of these sandwiches.”

If he could help it, Vansh preferred not to fill his body with chicken soaked in cream sauce like his brother, who had the eating habits of a portly Indian uncle. Or as their sisters put it, the appetite of a PMSing woman. Fortunately for Yash, he was as blessed in his metabolism as he was with everything else. Even more fortunately, he was in love with a yoga instructor who’d hopefully inspire him to better his eating habits so he didn’t have a heart attack in his forties.

Vansh couldn’t exactly complain about his own metabolism either, but what was the point of working out for hours every day if you didn’t respect your body? Vansh liked looking the way he looked, and the governor-elect of California certainly did not have a body like this.

Taking the tray with him, Vansh ran up to the suite on the third floor where his oldest cousin, Esha, and their grandmother lived.

Esha had never left the estate since she’d first moved here when she was eight, more than thirty years ago and long before Vansh’s birth. Her parents, HRH’s older brother and his wife, had died in a plane crash along with every other passenger on board except Esha, who had miraculously survived. But after the accident, Esha had started to have seizures, accompanied by visions when she came in contact with any new person.

“Look! The Baby Prince has arisen from his slumber!” Nisha called as Vansh carried the tray into the open living room that led to his grandmother’s and cousin’s bedrooms.

“A mere servant, Princess. I come bearing your favorite sweetmeats.”

Nisha shivered. She hated the word sweetmeats, for no good reason except that the staff at the Sripore palace used that word to describe mithai, or any dessert really, and Nisha hated thinking about meat in her dessert. Which was 100 percent Nisha.

She grabbed two sandwiches from the plate and blew Vansh a kiss with a thank-you. India and Esha took only one sandwich each like civilized humans.

“Nursing mother. Must make milk.” Nisha pointed at her breasts with the sandwiches and Vansh rolled his eyes. No way was he reacting with embarrassment. First, his sisters had beaten any embarrassment about womanly things out of him young. Second, if he reacted, they’d lecture him about how breastfeeding was perfectly natural. It was. Even so, a lecture about it over cucumber sandwiches wasn’t at the top of his list of fun conversations.

India Dashwood was kneeling on the floor beside his grandmother with her hands on Aji’s knees. She was massaging above the kneecap with careful movements.

Vansh dropped a quick kiss on Aji’s head.

“I haven’t seen you since breakfast last morning,” their grandmother said. It was her way. Aji always started every conversation with her grandchildren with when she’d seen them last. This usually involved tears when Vansh was away and talked to her on the phone, at least a few times a week. It was much more lighthearted when he lived in the same house as her.

“I had lunch with you up here yesterday, Aji,” he said without much conviction because he knew what she was going to say in response.

“Well, scarfing down a salad in ten minutes and then running off does not count. How do you have these big muscles when you don’t eat anything?”

Vansh scooped up his nephew from his baby carrier. Ram had come into the world on the day Yash won the election, and Vansh didn’t think there was another being on earth he loved more than this guy. Maybe Mishka, Nisha and Neel’s older daughter, who was nine going on nineteen. But it was close.

“Ram Raje Graff, you are unarguably the most beautiful baby ever born on God’s green earth,” he told his nephew, who listened with rapt interest, his lovely blue-gray eyes twinkling. “You have the legendary lashes of your Vansh Mama. Now, this isn’t for the faint of heart. It brings with it far too much attention from women. But I will share my tricks for managing the adulation. And don’t worry about the cheeks. They might be the chubbiest cheeks in existence, but they will give way to this finely chiseled jaw.”

“Will he also grow into the obnoxious vanity?” Ram’s mother asked, not looking in the least bit worried.

Ram grabbed Vansh’s nose with his chubby fist, an act of solidarity Vansh appreciated. He pulled away and blew into his nephew’s pillowy stomach, making him giggle. “Already my man is holding his own amid all these scary women.

“‘I’m not afraid of them,’” he added in baby Ram’s voice. “‘I have a gavel like my daddy.’”

India and Esha spurted laughter. Even their grandmother laughed. Nisha kicked Vansh without stopping in her chewing. “Look, Ram, your uncle is wearing one of your shirts.”

They all thought that was terribly funny too and guffawed some more.

“Don’t listen to them,” he said to his nephew. “It’s a muscle shirt. It’s supposed to be fitted to your muscles. But old people don’t know that.”

He sat down next to Esha, crossed his legs, and settled Ram in his lap.

“You look well,” Esha said. She always said that to him, and it made him happy because it seemed to make her so happy when she said it. Then she frowned, studying his face. “Whom did you fight with?” Did he mention Esha was clairvoyant?

“Disagreement over work with someone.” It was always best to stick with the truth with Esha. Everyone in his family had a sixth sense about when he lied, but Esha’s clairvoyance was foolproof.

“Work? Are you leaving again? So soon?” Nisha asked, not looking happy at the prospect. Usually, any attempt from the family to keep him from taking off made Vansh restless. Today, it felt nice.

“No, actually I’m thinking about staying for a bit.”

Nisha studied his face, eyes brightening, then getting skeptical. “A bit? Like how much a bit?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

Nisha and Esha sat up excitedly.

“Vansh! That’s amazing,” Nisha said. “That’s the best news ever!”

“It is,” Esha said. “It is a really good choice.”

Until Esha said it, Vansh hadn’t realized that there had been a prickle of doubt nudging at him. Now he felt like this was exactly what he needed to do.

J-Auntie brought up Vansh’s salad, and after some good-natured but still entirely too nosy ribbing about his “himbo” eating habits, he ate in peace as they watched Ram try to jam a precocious fist into his own mouth.

When India came back out after helping Aji to her room with her achy knees, Nisha asked when Siddhartha was getting in. India’s brother, Siddhartha, was an award-winning wildlife photographer who had spent the past eight months in Papua New Guinea photographing birds. Vansh had never met him, but he felt an odd kinship with him. Two men with wanderlust and a higher purpose.

Siddhartha was supposed to have arrived a few days before the election in November, but he had developed a fever and had to delay his visit until he was healthy enough to travel. That must have been some fever if it had taken two months to recover.

“I was hoping to meet him at the victory celebration,” Vansh said. He had been totally disappointed when Siddhartha had not shown up.

“It’s pretty amazing that he’s a finalist for the Goodall award,” Nisha said.

“Isn’t it? I can’t believe he’s a finalist again,” India said proudly. “He was a finalist seven years in a row but never won. Then he stopped entering. This year a friend entered him and he’s a finalist again. I’m not sure he’s happy. I don’t think he enjoys the attention and he doesn’t believe he’ll ever win. But I think this year is different. You have to see the picture that finaled. It’s amazing.”

India reached for her quilted backpack and took out a magazine. “He refuses to text or email his pictures. But he always remembers to mail us the magazines. We just have to wait for the mail, and these days that feels like the pony express.”

Vansh had never imagined India Dashwood could sound so gushy. She sounded like his sisters sounded when they talked about Yash.

India started to flip through the magazine until she came to a page with an eagle-like bird. The joint breath of every person in the room drew in as one. It was magnificent.

The bird’s plumage was almost bright red in the sun, and it made a stunning contrast with a head and breast of pure white. The thing that jumped off the page, though, was the obsidian, knowing depth of its eyes. When you looked closer you saw that it was perched on the rusted butt of an old cannon.

Even with that detail, it might have been just another well-taken photograph until you noticed a ring of dragonflies circling its proud head like a floating crown. Every one of them gasped at the sheer power of the captured moment.

Next to Vansh, Esha went utterly still. She reached for the magazine and took it from India, her face drained of color. Vansh had watched Esha have several seizures through his childhood. They were rarer now, and it had been a while since he’d witnessed one. She stood on unsteady legs, magazine clutched so tight it made her knuckles white, eyes glued to the page.

The moment hung on to itself.

No one moved.

Without a word, Esha turned and went into her room, magazine pressed to her chest, and shut the door behind her.

Nisha squeezed Vansh’s hand.

“I hope it was okay that I took out the magazine like that. I’m so sorry,” India said worriedly.

“Esha reads newspapers and magazines. So, it wasn’t that,” Nisha reassured her.

“Should I go in and check up on her?” India asked.

Nisha looked unsure. “Let’s wait a little. She probably just needed a moment. Sometimes she needs that. She likes us to help only when she asks for help.”

For the next few minutes they sat there in silence, staring at the door to Esha’s room. The hands on the grandfather clock ticked in silent jerks. Ram had fallen asleep on Vansh’s lap and was sucking on his fist. He’d finally figured out how to get it into his mouth, and small exhausted snores escaped him.

Finally Esha came back out, face as calm as ever. The magazine was no longer in her hand.

Ram gave another snore and Esha smiled, which made them all breathe again.

“You never told me who you fought with,” she said to Vansh as though she hadn’t left two minutes ago like someone who’d seen a ghost.

“Naina,” Vansh said, because he had no idea how to lie to Esha.

Nisha opened her mouth, then shut it when she remembered that India was in the room.

Mad as Vansh was at Naina, he didn’t like what he saw on Nisha’s face. He’d never understood why his sisters were always so awkward around her. Admittedly Yash and Naina’s relationship hadn’t been conventional. They’d spent more time together when they’d been friends than they had after they had started “dating.” Which made sense because it had turned out that it had been fake dating all along.

Vansh was sketchy on the details, mostly because, in true Raje fashion, only the part of the information necessary to move on from the problem had been shared. Yash behaved as though getting into a fake relationship with his best friend to avoid dating was a mere misstep. And Naina behaved as though using it as a workaround for her daddy issues was none of anyone else’s business. Pretty much like everything else about her life. Her resting face was a giant fuck-you to the world.

Why it suddenly bothered Vansh so much when it was directed at him, he had no idea. But when Naina took an interest in him, there was no dishonesty to it, no pretense. Just like when she disapproved, she held nothing back. Which made her opinion hard to dismiss.

Obviously his sisters didn’t feel the same way. Ever since the fake-dating secret had come out, they’d acted like she was the Wicked Witch of the West Coast.

For a long moment Esha studied him, her eyes flickering with understanding as though she could hear his thoughts.

“Naina,” Esha said finally, picking up a cucumber sandwich and examining it as though it were an irreconcilable piece in a complex puzzle. “I don’t think you should back down.”

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