Dev, Sonakshi OS/Drabble: How We Move On

Ishwari watched as he stumbled up the stairs, green bottle in hand. She didn't need to look at the clock to know that it was well past midnight, but perhaps there was reason to be hopefully, it was still earlier than usual. Long gone were the days where she would call him frantically at 9 when he didn't turn up for dinner, her phone calls to him had turned into long meetings with her self-loathing, rising in magnitude with every unanswered ring. She knew where he was coming from, having learnt that her son would drive himself to various parking lots near 123 Sunshine Suites, where she lived with her husband; before drowning his sorrows in whiskey.

He had tried to hide the drinking at first- he had never been drunk in the house, showering the smell away in the office and making a beeline for his room as soon as he got home. There were incidents of course, like the day after the wedding (she had seen the shiny red card in the post), where she had walked into a room filled with broken glass and the stench of alcohol and her son passed out in the middle of it all. She had convinced herself that it was okay, that it was because of the stress of the job, that it had nothing to do with her. Oh, how the regret killed her. She had run away from it for as long as she could, feeding her brother unconvincing arguments about how there was nothing to worry about until it grew so glaringly obvious that even she couldn't ignore it. A faint smell and a stumble up the stairs turned into a permanent, prominent stench and a drunk driving incident. She watched the number of green bottles grow in number every time she entered his room. She watched him wake up at noon and return home at 3 am, and spend less and less time at the office he once loved so much. She watched Ria take up more responsibility and attend more meetings and was sure that she was now running things, under the name of her brother. She watched his sisters grow scared of him, avoiding him, not that he was ever around. She watched him alienate himself from her, aashirvad long forgotten, she hadn't even heard the word Maa, in weeks. She watched herself lose him, not to his own joy but to his demons. She watched, helplessly.

Sometimes, when the guilt was too suffocating to breathe, she told herself she had tried. She had tried to find Sonakshi, turned up at the address Mr and Mrs Bose had given her, only to be greeted by a charming young man who would serve her tea in a cozy apartment with honeymoon pictures on the walls, the same charming young man she had handpicked from a lineup of photographs to drive her son to the breaking point. She had tried to arrange other rishtas, put her all into it, only to apologize countless times on Dev's behalf, as he would refuse to look at the girls when he showed up to the meetings. She had agreed to Nikki setting up appointments with a psychotherapist, or whatever they were called, only to watch him skip every appointment after the first. She had braved countless fits of anger in her attempts to get through to him, and still did, futilely, knowing that each time he was even further away from her.

She wanted to cry at how pathetic her efforts were.

He had tried too, after a particularly nasty incident with Neha made him put away the bottle and get his act together. For a few days, everyone had waited with bated breath and hope until a rumor of a new baby at Sunshine Suites sent him crashing back to the very bottom, worse than ever before.

Oh, how she wished she hadn't been so selfish, so greedy, so gluttonous, so insatiable, so damn needy. Oh, how she yearned for a chance to go back in time, so that she would have never swallowed those damn pills, never have called the damn marriage broker, never have been swallowed in her own ocean of self-consuming, destroying, pathetic, hopeless insecurity. Oh, how she wished she hadn't been so caught up in convincing herself that everything was okay that she turned completely blind to her own son, the apple of her eye, the pride of her life, destroying himself, piece by piece. Oh, how she longed for a single chance, a tiny window, a crack, a crevice, anything to make things okay again. She had amazed herself, she thought bitterly, amazed herself at her own ability, to create something as beautiful, as precious, as magnificent as Dev, only to destroy it with a single blow of her own hand.