Blood is thicker than Water

This post is not entirely original; I am riffing off of / slightly remixing a story I read some time ago by Jhumpa Lahiri. If you haven’t read her before, please do. She rocks.
Shiva and her brother, Madhu were very close growing up. They had to be in order to survive their oppressive parents. Surely immigrant parents asked too much of children born and raised in America? When Shiva left home for college, she was 17 and Madhu was 14. She returned after the first semester with a case of beer, a pack of cigarettes and several naughty secrets. She slipped the beer into her brother’s room with a finger pressed to her lips as soon as she could get away from the parents, shut the door quickly and asked him to turn his music up. They laughed, talked and drank with abandon for hours, even if Madhu spat at the initial taste.  Whenever they heard even the slightest suggestion of a sound on the stairs, they shoved the beers under the bed or at the bottom of the closet underneath the old boxes and shoes. It became their private habit over the long holidays; their parents remained in the dark.
But two more semesters at college and horror stories of friends being gang raped while “under the influence” convinced Shiva that she preferred to keep her wits about her at all times. She gave up drinking. She decided that she would only indulge much later in her life with demure sips at cock-tail parties where it was polite. She graduated summa cum laude.
Madhu, on the other hand, began to drink obscenely and did not stop. He got into an Ivy League college, simply because he was brilliant but remained there only long enough to decide that he liked the world better when he viewed it on unsteady feet. He did not hide the bottles anymore from his parents. He experimented with drugs. He left his room only to get fresh supplies. His parents were ashamed. His sister grew guilty and ashamed.
Ten years passed. Shiva met the love of her life in an Englishman named Henry and ran off to London to live with him. Madhu could not haunt her there. Or he would not, until the next year when he showed up on her doorstep with a sheepish smile and a solemn promise that he had been sober for a year, and could they start over?
Shiva saw the little boy who had followed her around when they were younger. Her heart turned over in her chest; she took him in. She was impressed by his new behavior, and he was a wonder with her two-year old son. She almost began to regret hiding away her husband’s wines the day Madhu moved in. There had been no need.
Henry said to her the next week, “Darling, when was the last time we were alone together? Let’s go out to dinner tonight.” Shiva agreed, reluctantly, because she missed her husband and because she had never been away from Baby since he was born. Henry said, “Madhu will take good care of Baby, don’t you worry.” She agreed reluctantly.
They returned early that evening because both found that dinner was uneventful without Baby’s goo goo sounds, and Shiva looked at her watch every five minutes. It was oddly quiet when they entered their house. Shiva called, “Madhu?” She got no answer. In the kitchen, they found the evidence of Baby’s dinner, the white mashed food everywhere, the discarded bib, the high chair overturned on one end. Shiva called again, “Madhu?” In the living room, she found the television on; Tom was chasing Jerry. Now she became frantic. “Baby? Baby?!”
A horrible suspicion dawned on her and she rushed to her husband’s study. She had forced a few of the wine bottles behind his books and plaques on the highest shelves. It was a good hiding place, she had told herself, and Madhu would never think to look there. The first thing she saw was the giant stain on the carpet and the empty bottle next to it. There were other empty bottles on her husband’s desk. Only one bottle remained half-empty. She found Madhu by the window in an unnatural position, one knee half-drawn up and his other leg flung to the side. His mouth hung open and the saliva dripped from one corner of his mouth. While she stared at him in disgust, he began to snore. She began to shiver and shake and cry.
“Henry!” she screamed, “Did you find Baby?” She banged through the rest of the rooms in the house until she found her husband standing frozen just outside the bathroom door. “Why are you just standing there? Why are you not saying anything?!” Her voice seemed to climb an octave with each question. She pushed Henry out of her way. The bathroom door was ajar; water was seeping out from under it. When she kicked at the door, she saw Baby’s yellow duckie tilting from side to side with his stupid duck smile—he could have been at the pond on a bright summer’s day.  Shiva’s breath came in loud gasps. She took hesitant steps towards the bathtub so that she could get a better look inside it. She saw a floating pink. There were no bubbles on the surface. Her screams tore through the night.