Great discussion on the sisters, everyone! My knee-jerk reaction was also to question what kind of family members these sisters were to abandon their brother when he was at his worst. But after some thought, I am pretty impressed with how this subplot links to the story at large.
Like DQ explained, Ishwari set a lot of these faultlines up in the way she arranged her household, and she made the overall structure so weak in her attempt to retain complete control that the moment she lost the most important connection with Dev, the whole thing toppled over. In the Bose house, on the other hand, no one person weilds that much power. If Bijoy goes out of line, Asha, Dadi, and Saurabh are there to police him, and vice versa. The Bose kids were taught to have and nurture relationships with each member in the family individually, rather than answering to one head, so if Sona and Bijoy were not seeing eye to eye, for example, she still had a plethora of people she could rely on to understand her feelings. That is the skill that the Dixits had not yet developed, and one that Dev was picking up from Sona early in their relationship, when he cried in Sona's lap and then went to comfort his sisters after Neha's bidai.
But when Sona left, those efforts were still very kaccha, and Dev didn't have any relationship to speak of with his sisters. I am guessing that in the interrim, they tried to get through to him, because if money was in fact all they were after, they would, like Mami and Vicky, have been perfectly happy to stay in the house and leech off Dev but they wanted more. The fact that it hurt them to be treated like that speaks to the kind of relationship they wanted to have with him. Moreover, Dev and Ishwari were supposed to be the "bade" of the family and they always treated the sisters, even Neha, like "bacche." I doubt whether they would have been taken seriously even if they did try to help. In the end, they all experienced what Neha had faced in her childhood, and it made them feel unwanted, so they left.
I think the reason Sona feels so desperate to make this reunion happen is because it is such a poignant echo of her own journey in S2. She spent seven years believing that she didn't matter to Dev, that he had thrown her out without a second thought, and moved on with his life, to make his mother happy. In the end, all she had to do was come into his line of vision to learn how wrong she had been. Dev barely wasted a moment, from the time he set his eyes on her, in beginning his quest to prove that she cared, openly revealing how much he still cared in the process. When Soha came into the picture, his efforts became even more intense and he moved heaven and earth to be a part of his daughter's life. When he realised that Sona's anger and bitterness came from her pain and heartbreak, he made it his mission to soothe her fears and force her to speak. Of course, he made mistakes along the way, and Sona was a huge part of the process, but the point is, once she made the first move and appeared before him, Dev couldn't rest until he had done everything in his power to validate their connection, and then make her part of his life again.
Poised at this juncture, when she has been through all that and understood Dev better than ever, Sona is uniquely capable of understanding both the sisters' POV and Dev's. The sisters believe that Dev doesn't love or want them anymore, and Dev believes the same of his sisters. In truth there is a lot of love and hurt on both sides. Sona knows now (especially after that story he shared about Elena teasing him for waiting for Sona) that Dev's indifference/temper hides his pain, but the sisters never knew him that well. Just like Sona did, they probably assumed that Dev didn't care about them anymore, never suspecting that the distance came from the feeling that he wasn't worthy or capable of real relationships with them. With her experience since she came back to Delhi, Sona does hold the key to this impasse. She believes that all she has to do is bring his sisters into Dev's line of vision -- give him one indication that they are angry and not indifferent -- and Dev will once again move heaven and earth to bring them back into his life... because that is Dev.
Edited by Samanalyse - 8 years ago
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