Secret Daughter Read Free Page B

her peasant blouse and was glad she had taken time to change.
    He shook his head and took another big gulp of his pink drink. “No, I’m going back to India for the summer. Last chance I’ll get before rotations. My mother will have my head if I don’t.” When he smiled then, his dimples appeared. She felt a tingling travel from the pit of her stomach up to her head and wondered if she’d had too much punch already. She fought the urge to reach out and smooth the tousled black hair falling into his eyes, which made him look like a little boy. As he would tell her later, he was smitten with the way her green eyes sparkled in the light of the tiki torches, and how she laughed at everything he said that night.
    They began studying together every evening, drilling each other before exams, pushing each other to do better. Kris enjoyed sparringwith her intellectually and didn’t seem to mind when she occasionally outperformed him. It was a pleasant change from her last boyfriend who, after two years of struggling through premed classes and preparing for the MCATs with her, had dumped her once she got into Stanford and he didn’t. It had taken Somer years to realize that she wasn’t the one who should feel badly about this.
    As much as she enjoyed sharing the intensity of school with Kris, it was his tender side she loved most: the way he spoke, when they lay in bed at night, about missing his brothers back home, or walking along the ocean wall with his father. “What’s it like?” she would ask him repeatedly. India sounded intriguing. She envisioned tall swaying coconut trees, warm tropical breezes, and exotic fruits. She had never traveled outside the country except to Canada to visit her grandparents. She had always longed for a big family like the one he described: the two brothers with whom he did everything, the pile of cousins that formed an impromptu cricket team at family gatherings. As an only child, Somer had a special relationship with her parents, but she couldn’t help feeling she had missed out on the camaraderie of siblings.
    Those early years of medical school were blissfully simple, when they spent their days and nights in a tight circle of friends. They had a single purpose, and they were all students living the same modest lifestyle. They studied all the time, and their whole world was contained within the outer limits of the Stanford campus. Vietnam was over, Nixon was out, and free love was in. Somer spent hours showing Kris how to drive on the right side of the road. Later, he would tell her how much he appreciated that she didn’t make him feel self-conscious about being different. But the way she thought about it, they were more alike than they were different: she was a woman in a man’s world, just as he was a foreigner in America. Besides, they were both struggling med students before anything else.
    By the time of their first board exams, Somer had fallen deeplyin love. It was the first thing in her life that had happened without much effort on her part. Soon, they were so intertwined in each other’s lives she could not imagine a future without Krishnan. When their final year of school arrived, they began discussing their choices for residency programs—pediatrics for her, neurosurgery for him. The University of California at San Francisco had good programs in both, but it was competitive.
    “What are our chances?” Krishnan asked her.
    “I don’t know. Six spots for my program, maybe fifty applications? Ten percent for me. Definitely lower for you.”
    “What if we applied together?” he said. “As a couple. A married couple.”
    She looked at him. “I’d…say…our chances would be better.” She shook her head a little. “Wait, so…is that what you want?”
    He wore a hint of a smile and shrugged. “Yeah, don’t you?”
    “Yes.” She smiled as well. “I know we’ve talked about it, but now?”
    “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s just a matter of timing, if