This is a little bit of a departure from the ongoing discussion, but I wanted to put down something that struck me over the last few episodes. We have discussed to death Dev's ability, or lack thereof, to balance his mother and his wife, but I realised that we have never really discussed how that balance played out in Sona's life. To be honest, I don't think she was much better than Dev at maintaining the balance between her maika and her sasural; she just has a different pattern. If Dev is impulsive and caters to whomever demands his attention at that moment, Sona is like a pendulum -- when she is wrapped up in her equation with Dev, she completely forgets to take her family's feelings into consideration, and when Dev breaks her trust and hurts her family, she completely swings in the other direction, to the complete neglect of her relationship with Dev.
This has been true ever since the first confession, when she swung totally in Dev's direction, back to her family for the Ritwick episode, back towards Dev during their short marriage, and then towards her family after slap gate. So it remained for the last seven years, until Dev proved himself a worthy father to Suhana. Now once again she is totally on the Dev-ward upswing, taking her family for granted and bringing Dev and her complicated equation into their lives. What we end up seeing very little of in all this, is Sona taking an independent stand for herself; she does everything for others, and harbours the expectation that the people she takes action for will make it worth her while. Now, because of Soha, Dev and her family are in close quarters for the first time and applying the same logic won't work in the long term.
In the last 48 hours (since Soha made her decision to go to Kolkata and Bijoy obliged) she has used Dev as a threat against Bijoy -- when she said that if Bijoy took Soha to Kolkata, Dev could do anything -- and has used BIjoy as an implied threat against Dev -- if you don't come and live with me, Soha will go off to Kolkata. It isn't fair to either of these men, and she is inadvertently pitting them against one another. When she is in Dev-land she gives Dev the impression that Bijoy doesn't need to be taken seriously, and when she is in Bijoy-land, she allows him to think that Dev was her perpetrator and a villain who made her life completely miserable. It's misleading on both counts, and is largely due to Sona's lack of assertion and clear communication.
I thought it was important that Dev, when they were discussing their living situation in his office, reminded her, the responsibility wasn't totally on him, she had also promised Soha and would have to tell her if they didn't come up with a plan. What I heard, in retrospect, was, "don't you dare switch sides on me now that we have taken on this challenge as a team." Yet again, yesterday, when Dev tried to sit down and talk but Jatin made it a point to tell him he wasn't part of the family, while Bijoy asserted that Jatin was, Dev didn't take it upon himself to deal with the issue. He recognised that Sona was the only one who had all the information -- both about him and about who was and was not part of her family -- and left her to sort it.
I don't think he is doing this in a completely deliberate sense, but just by focusing completely on Soha and weeding out anything that doesn't have to do directly with her, Dev is forcing Sona to take her share of the responsibility and to communicate clearly with all parties involved. It's something he didn't do in their marriage or relationship, thanks to his firm belief that Sona was always right. At that time, because he had such blind faith in her judgment, he put all his cards on the table. He later came to realise that she had never done the same with him and that that was a problem. Now that Sona is equal to Dev in wealth, and Dev is equal to Sona in emotional strength (what they have been working on respectively for the past 7 years), I am looking forward to less defensiveness and more proactivity.
Edited by Samanalyse - 8 years ago