But Jaya’s great-great-grandmother got the last laugh. She cursed the ruby, something about it bringing misfortune to the Emersons and eventually resulting in a termination of the bloodline. She also made sure to circulate the news about the curse far and wide—far enough and wide enough to reach the Emersons. To make them sweat and rue the day they’d cheated the Raos, ostensibly.
Obviously, Jaya didn’t believe in the legitimacy of the curse. She was a child of the twenty-first century. Still, her great-great-grandmother’s generation had believed in it, and for many years Jaya hadn’t understood why her relative would curse an entire lineage to end. Yes, they’d stolen a ruby, but that had been in the 1800s. Why, in the mid-twentieth century, would her great-great-grandmother have done something so cruel?
Then Appa had explained to Jaya how much pain and suffering there had been during the British Raj. By stealing the ruby and then refusing to return it, the Emersons hadn’t just taken a jewel. They’d seized a piece of vital Indian history they had no claim to. Then, even when the British finally gave India back to her people, the Emersons had kept the ruby as a token of their superiority, of their arrogance, of their ultimate victory. It was this final insult that Jaya’s great-great-grandmother had been unable to abide. Remorselessness was absolutely cause for execration.
Now Jaya finally understood her great-great-grandmother’s rage. It was nearly impossible to look the other way when someone hurt something you cared for so deeply and refused to atone.
She set her bag down like Isha had and forced herself to smile. “How do you do? We’re new this year.”
“Oui, I thought so!” The boy slung an easy arm around Isha, and Jaya struggled not to tear it off. Isha hated her overprotectiveness, and Jaya was trying to be better about it. “It is no problem at all. I shall get you very comfortable. I’m Leo Nguyen, a senior as well. And this”—he gestured at a scrawny, short Indian boy who was intensely focused on his phone and refused to look any of them in the eye—“is my good ami Rahul Chopra.”
Jaya studied Rahul’s snub nose, the fringe of his eyelashes, the hint of stubble at his chin. Leo seemed friendly and outgoing, properly socially groomed by his parents. Rahul, on the other hand… His shirt was baggy, his pants were too short, and the colors clashed, as if he’d just picked clothes at random.
Something about him seemed familiar to Jaya; she was sure she’d met him before. Thanks to Amma’s gentle but insistent coaching on royal etiquette, she’d made up a visual cue to remember him. “Rahul Chopra,” she said slowly as it finally came to her: a shy boy in front of the winglike building of the Delhi Secretariat. “Is your mother Mukhyamantri Arti Chopra? The chief minister of Delhi?”
Rahul nodded and sneaked a glance at her before looking down at his phone again, his fingers tapping rapidly at the screen. With a slight prickle of sympathy, Jaya remembered his awkward fidgeting from their previous meeting. It wasn’t easy to forget someone who drew as much attention for being different as Rahul did.
“You’re Rajkumari Jaya Rao,” he said. “My mother knows your father. We met six years ago, at the wedding reception for Nehika and Pritam Gupta. You were wearing a beaded red lehenga, and your sister, Isha, was in a matching yellow one. I would say more, but I’m very invested in the outcome of this chess game.”
Jaya gawked at him, though every well-mannered bone in her body told her not to. “You’re playing chess? That fast?” His hands were practically blurry with the speed of his moves. “Surely no one could make moves that quickly?” Jaya looked at Leo, sure Rahul was pulling her leg.
Leo laughed. “Please. Do not get him started on how chess is just a formalized logic system.”
Rahul said immediately, “Chess is just a formalized logic system. If you look at the discreet graph, for instance—”
“Wait. How did you remember what we were wearing when we met? That was so long ago!” Isha said. Oh yes. Jaya had been so distracted by his swift chess fingers, she’d failed to see the more alarming part of what he’d said.
They all stood there in awkward silence until Rahul coughed.
“I… I have a knack for remembering details,” Rahul said, still not meeting their eyes. “I’m not being creepy. That’s what some people say, but my brain just works differently from most others’. I suspect those people don’t understand the neuroscience of memory—”
Leo interjected with a sudden laugh and clapped Rahul on the back. “D’accord,” he said jovially, though his smile looked like Appa’s when a teacher told him Isha excelled at physics but had the lowest grade in home economics. “Let us not distress the new girls on their first day. There will be plenty of time for them to hear the rumors on their own.”
Isha and Jaya glanced at each other, and then Jaya forced a laugh of her own. “You haven’t distressed us at all. I’m glad we made such an impression on Rahul.” It was coming back to her now, the reason Rahul’s parents had sent him away from the public eye in India. He was too different, too strange, to be a politician’s son. She’d known that some of the villagers in rural Delhi thought his mother had been cursed before he was born, due to her “mannish” (read: ambitious) nature.
“Wait just a moment. Did you say ‘Rajkumari’?” Leo said to Rahul, turning to look at them with renewed interest. “As in, princess?”
Here it was, the inevitable question Jaya was prepared for. Even at St. Rosetta’s. She shook her head. “Rahul’s too generous. India doesn’t have an authoritative monarchy anymore, but yes, we do come from the Rao family that used to rule Mysuru in South India.”
Leo grinned. “Chouette! We have a member of the British aristocracy here—Grey Emerson. Or Lord Northcliffe, to use his official title. Do you know him? Perhaps there is some kind of royal family network?” He laughed jovially.
A dozen responses flew into Jaya’s head. Know him? Not personally, but I’m no stranger to the tears and heartache his family caused mine. Or No, but my fist would love to make acquaintance with his jaw. Could you point me in the right direction? But, of course, she kept her thoughts to herself.
The thing was, refusing to return the ruby wasn’t the last of the Emersons’ transgressions. Far from it, actually. Perhaps as payback for the “curse” (British aristocrats tended to be as superstitious as Indian royal families, Jaya knew)—or perhaps because they were just cruel—the Emersons regularly released vitriol into the Indian tabloids about the Rao family. Not that the Raos just sat there and took it. Jaya remembered more than an occasion or two when they’d struck back at the Emersons in various business dealings and political connections—all warranted, of course. It was a seesawing, back-and-forth enmity that was second nature to both clans.
This time, though, the Emersons hadn’t gone after the adult Raos like they usually did. This time they’d gone after Isha. And, unfortunately, this time everything the tabloids had printed, everything the Emersons had leaked to them, was true.
Jaya remembered asking Kiran Hegde, fellow trusted royal from a different clan in the Indian state of Karnataka, why the Emersons had changed their modus operandi. “It doesn’t make sense,” she’d said to him on the phone. “Something feels off. Why now? Why Isha?”