The Oedipus's Deed

The monsoon clouds hung over Kathmandu like a damp, grey blanket, mirroring the desolation that had taken root in my heart. The air was thick, heavy, a physical manifestation of the unresolved tension that had been the atmosphere of my home for as long as I could remember. My emotions, I’ve come to believe, were never my own; they were inherited, a heavy, toxic legacy from my father. His world, and by extension ours, always revolved around the bottle—not the local raksi, which at least possessed a certain honesty, but expensive imported whiskey that he would quaff until his gait became a galling, unsteady dance. The very scent of it—a sickly-sweet perfume of oak and ethanol—was woven into the fabric of our furniture, our clothes, and the linings of my own memory.

He was a haunted man, a soul shackled by an unseen torment (I don’t want to imply anything paranormal here, though the effect was certainly supernatural in its dread). In the dim light of our sitting room, a single bare bulb casting harsh shadows, his face could look truly devilish—his eyes bloodshot and unfocused, his once-handsome features now a lumpy, weathered map of his regrets. He was only a man in his fifties, yet he carried the burden of centuries. His face blurted out such strong, visceral emotions, as if his soul was coupled with some sorrowful, unseen entity that only the temporary oblivion of alcohol could quell. I watched him day after day, year after year, and felt a perverse sympathy curdle into an absolute, righteous hate.

My mother, however, was his exquisite opposite. She never complained, her calmness was a fortress of her endurance. To me, she was the epitome of grace, a woman embellished with a miraculous patience that I found both astonishing and maddening. She possessed a quiet beauty that felt profoundly out of place in our tense household: kind eyes that held a universe of unspoken stories, and a gentle strength evident in her tiny, Lilliputian physique as she moved through our home. Her calming presence against the relentless storm of my father’s addiction was a baffling paradox.

My love for her was not merely filial; it was a hungry, desperate devotion. I doted on her, for sure, not with lust, but with a fierce, desperate hope that she would somehow see the gaping void within me and flood my life with the solace she seemed to effortlessly possess. I yearned for her to turn that ocean of patience and tenderness toward her son, to acknowledge the fear and pain that were my daily bread.

But it was quite the opposite. Only my father, despite his horrendous persona, would always get a soothe from my mother’s tender patience, a silent, inexplicable absolution. It was as though her reservoir of gentleness existed only for him, for the man who was systematically destroying them both. To me, she offered silence—a silence so impenetrable it felt like a cold, sheer wall, leaving me stranded on the other side, yearning for the warmth that was never mine to receive. Her quiet endurance felt less like strength and more like a chosen abandonment.

My thoughts often wandered into twisted corridors of passion and protectiveness. A whirlpool of desperate desires churned within me—the desire for a normal life, for a love that wasn’t mediated by the clink of a glass or the sting of slurred words. I felt a consuming, demoniacal need to save her, to save us all, from this endless cycle of quiet horror. This feeling, I now understand, was merely a disguise for a deeper, more selfish impulse. In truth, it was never solely about saving her—it was fundamentally about saving myself, about filling the monstrous, echoing void that I carried within my own heart. I was convinced that by eliminating the source of our collective misery, I would finally inherit the love and peace that my father selfishly consumed.

The true source of my deepest, most corrosive agony was the understanding of their intimacy. The thought that this man, this hideous-looking father whom I loathed veritably, could still evoke a response from her, could still be the recipient of her silent, enduring devotion, was unbearable. The fact that he would always get a soothe from my mother’s tender patience, and that his love and affection were showered towards her through the act of love-making, each night after getting liquored up, twisted the knife in my soul. It wasn't love I saw, but a grotesque, nightly ritual that cemented my exclusion.

So, on a night when the rain had paused and the moon itself metamorphosed into a glistening orb breaking through the clouds over the valley, casting the city in a deceptive, fragile silver light, I decided to try a different kind of salvation. I asked my mother to prepare a succulent dinner. “Let’s eat together, like a family,” I said, my voice barely a whisper, a desperate plea for a moment of normalcy. She agreed, and I saw a flicker of something in her eyes—a fragile, almost extinguished hope that mirrored my own desperate gamble.

She cooked a succulent feast, a final, beautiful gesture of domestic peace: momo with a perfectly spicy achar, a bowl of steaming dal bhat—the cornerstone of every Nepali meal—and for my father, a small plate of grilled buff sukuti, his favorite. The setting of the meal itself was the act of war I planned. The idea was to dine with the whole family, including my father, to finally confront the lie of our existence.

We sat at the wooden dining table, the three of us, a perfect, tragic triangle. The only sounds were the soft, metallic hum of the refrigerator and the distant, muffled honking of traffic on the Ring Road. We ate in a silence that was heavier than the monsoon air, a silence saturated with years of resentment and unspoken grief. With every tiny nibble of my food, my being was glued to my father. I watched him, searching for the fiend, the brute, the excuse.

He ate slowly, methodically, and to my horror, a surprising conviviality appeared on his face as he enjoyed the meal my mother had made. After swallowing a piece of the sukuti, he finally looked up, his eyes slightly clearer than usual, the whiskey's hold momentarily loosened by the food. “This is wonderful, sanu,” he slurred softly, the term of endearment sounding so fragile, so tender on his tongue. A faint, flirty blush crept onto my mother’s cheeks, a beautiful ghost of the woman she must have been. It was a tiny victory for her, a shred of the loving man he might have been if not for his demon.

But instead of relief, a cold fury that I had never known before washed over me, crystallizing years of bottled-up pain. This small kindness felt like a cruel, magnificent joke after years of absolute neglect. It was a fleeting, agonizing glimpse of what I could have had, a truth so simple yet so unbearable that my heart got crushed in vain. In that instant, the weight of all those years of misattributed anger and desperate, corrosive love became too much to bear. It wasn't him I hated; it was the love he was capable of giving only to her, the love that was always denied to me.

My hand, acting on an impulse that felt both alien and preordained, closed around the heavy brass kerosene lamp on the table—a relic from the days before load-shedding ended, a symbol of the darkness we had endured. In one frantic, explosive motion, I swung it. It connected with the side of my father’s head with a sickening, wet thud. He didn’t cry out. He simply looked at me, a profound, disbelieving confusion in his eyes, a look that tore through my righteous anger and exposed the naked horror of the moment, before slumping forward onto the table. A slow, thick trickle of blood, the color of spoiled wine, began to ooze out of his temple and stained the white dal in his bowl.

The silence that followed was deafening. It was a total absence of sound, a vacuum where the universe had ceased to exist. Then, my mother let out a sound—a choked, guttural wail that was more terrifying than any scream. It was the sound of her fortress crumbling, of a lifetime of silently endured hope brutally and permanently extinguished. She didn’t move towards him or me; she just stood, her tiny hands covering her mouth, her body shaking with silent, devastating sobs.

I dropped the lamp, the brass clattering on the concrete floor, the sound a final, sharp punctuation mark. The deed was done. Maniacal, possessive, demoniacal—as any judge, any neighbor, any rational human being might infer. But for me, it was the catastrophic end of a twisted passion that had curdled into havoc. I had not saved me and my mother; I had only sealed our fate in a bond of blood and irreparable trauma. The storm of my misdeeds had finally broken, and it would haunt the rest of my days in this city, under the same crushing weight of the monsoon sky.

My father’s unseen demon had not been slain; it had simply found a new, more horrifying home within me.

I look at the blood, at the terrible, profound confusion frozen on my father's face, and at my mother's shattered grace. I stand here, not as a savior, but as a murderer. The truth is a shard of ice in my chest: I have done a horrendous deed. This was not justice; it was a grotesque act of selfish, misdirected rage. I do not feel triumphant, but merely empty, a hollow shell filled only with the deafening roar of my own guilt. There is no solace here, no peace. The man who drank away his life with whiskey is dead, but the son who hated him has merely become a newer, colder, more terrifying version of his torment. I deserve whatever comes next. I am guilty. And the weight of this knowledge is heavier than the brass lamp that lies cold and bloody at my feet.