Chapter 15: The journey till now
The chai was perfect—cardamom and ginger biting through the sweet milk—but Dev couldn’t taste it. He watched Priya curled at the other end of the vast sofa, her feet tucked under her, sipping from her own mug. The city lights painted shifting patterns across her face. The apartment’s silence was a held breath.
“So,” he said, the word too loud. “This place. The designer. The… everything. Your promotion was a big one, huh?”
Priya waved a hand, a dismissive flutter. “It was just hard work, beta. You know how it is.”
“No,” Dev said, putting his cup down on the glass coaster with a definitive click. “I don’t. Last I heard, you were a senior accounts manager. Nice salary, but not… this.” His gesture took in the twenty-foot ceiling, the silent waterfall feature on the terrace. “This is capital. Not salary.”
A faint line appeared between her brows. She wasn’t used to this tone from him—interrogative, slightly sharp. “Dev, what’s this about?”
“How did you pay for it?” The question hung, blunt and ugly. He saw a flicker in her eyes, not guilt, but something guarded. “Did you… is there someone? A partner? An investor?” The words tasted like bile.
She stared at him, then let out a short, surprised laugh. “Oh, Dev. No. No, nothing like that.” She looked down into her chai, her expression softening into something wistful. “It was just… a series of awful events and a lot of sleepless nights.”
She told him. Her voice was steady, factual, but Dev heard the exhaustion layered under every word.
Mr. Sodhi, the firm’s aging, charismatic owner, had dropped dead of a massive coronary right in his leather chair. No succession plan. Only debt, panic, and a son in Vancouver who wanted nothing but a fast sale. The firm—a mid-sized boutique agency handling luxury retail accounts—was days from being cannibalized by competitors, its thirty employees facing the axe.
“I was there for twenty-two years,” Priya said, her gaze fixed on the dark window, seeing a different scene. “I knew every client, every overdue invoice, where the bodies were buried. The son offered me a severance package. I refused.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to the bank. I mortgaged the old flat. I cashed out every fixed deposit your father and I ever made, every little safety net.” She spoke quietly, as if recounting a crime. “I offered the son a buyout. A fraction of what the brand was worth, but more than the vultures were offering. He took it. Why wouldn’t he? It was clean cash.”
Dev’s mind reeled. The modest, prudent woman who’d clipped coupons was gone. In her place was this gambler.
“But that just bought the debt,” he whispered.
“Then I worked,” she said simply. “You were away. There was no one to cook for, no one to worry about coming home to. I’d be at the office at seven, leave at midnight. I renegotiated every contract. I fired the deadwood. I begged, frankly, on the phone to clients, telling them the truth. Some stayed. I used the retained fees to buy out the smaller partners who wanted to flee. Month by month. Share by share.”
She finally looked at him, her eyes gleaming with a pride that was fierce and vulnerable. “It took two years. Two years of nothing but that. And now, sixty-three percent of the company is mine. The firm is profitable again. Not wildly, but it’s stable. This apartment… it’s the first thing I’ve bought for myself since your father died. A sign that the risk was real. That I did it.”
Dev was silent. The laughter from the hostel far below was mute. The scale of her secret endeavor, conducted in the empty theater of his absence, was staggering. He had been drowning in the petty miseries of college, obsessed with snide remarks and his own awkwardness, while she had been quietly waging a war.
His inadequacy, always a blunt weight, now felt like a planetary mass.
And yet, a corrosive, brilliant thought erupted through the awe. She had done it all because he was gone. His presence, his neediness, had been the barrier. Her transformation, her triumph, was independent of him. It was the most adult revelation possible, and it felt like a abandonment.
“You never told me,” he said, his voice thick.
“You had your studies,” she said, leaning forward to pat his knee. The familiar gesture, now in this unreal context, sent a jolt through him. “My struggles weren’t your burden. My job was to be your support, not the other way around.”
But that was the old contract. She had rewritten it. She was no longer just his support. She was a CEO. A property owner. A woman who wore linen tops that showed her arms.
“I’m… amazed, Mom,” he said, and the word was true, but it was also a cage.
She smiled, mistaking his stunned silence for admiration. “So, no mysterious men. Just your old mom, turning into a shark.” She grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “Now, aren’t you proud of me?”
“Of course I am,” he said automatically. The script required it.
“Good.” She uncurled herself, standing up. “I’m exhausted just talking about it. I’m going to turn in. Tomorrow, we’ll have a proper breakfast. I’ll make poha.”
She walked past him, her hand briefly ruffling his hair—the boyish, dismissive affection that now felt like a branding iron. She disappeared down the hall. A moment later, he heard the soft click of her bedroom door.
He didn’t move. He sat in the magnificent, quiet living room, a monument to a version of his mother he never knew. The jealousy he’d felt earlier mutated, hardening into a terrifying resolve. If her world had expanded so dramatically in his absence, he needed to become the center of it again. Not as her son, but as the only man whose admiration, whose attention, could possibly match the scale of what she’d achieved.
The idea, once a vague, shameful ghost, now took solid, desperate shape. It was the only solution. To bridge the gap she had created, he would have to change the nature of the connection. Completely.
He got up, turned off the lights, and walked to his sterile room. As he passed her door, he saw a thin blade of yellow light beneath it. He paused, listening. He heard the faint rustle of fabric, the clink of a bottle on a glass shelf. The intimate, mundane sounds of her private world.
He didn’t go to his bed. Instead, he walked to the floor-to-ceiling window in his room and pressed his forehead against the cool glass. Fourteen floors down, the world teemed with life he couldn’t join. Up here, there was only her.
And his new, terrible purpose.