Looking at his father snore was like watching over a baby, Karna thought.

He still couldn’t believe that just an hour ago, the two were at each other’s throats in a shouting match and now? The old man had the most peaceful look on his face like he had accomplished everything he’d set out to during the day.

Karna wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He was afraid of not only waking his father but also breaking the silence that had settled into the room. Instead, he pulled the covers over his dad’s body, right under his chin, and walked off to his room.

He closed the door with tenderness. Leaving the lights turned off, he gazed out the window at the radio tower in front of his room. The blinking red lights made him feel like he was in some dystopian movie. In such audacious musings, he found a bit of peace.

It hadn’t always been like this, right? He hadn’t always drunk like this?

No. He had. That’s why I left for America, Karna thought. But distance, as we all know, has a way of making the heart grow fonder, and being away from his father, from home, had made the boy look up to the man in a way he hadn’t for the first 17 years of his life.

He remembered one of their phone conversations a couple of years ago. Karna, drunk himself, had called his dad after a particularly rough day at college. “Dad,” he’d slurred. “Yes, son,” was the reply, and just that kind tone in his voice had made the boy bawl and let out everything in his heart. Those calls had become regular, and that’s how he’d been fooled, in a sense, to return home, thinking things would be different.

But they weren’t. He could see that now. His father had tried, but the pull of alcohol was too strong, and within a week of Karna being back, his dad was off, every night around 8, to drink with his friends. These friends were the store clerks and taxi drivers that hung around their apartment complex.

Dad had often told him why he hung out with them. “To them,” he stated, with a voice so proud and his chest all out, “I’m the height of envy. Look at me, I don’t have to work because my son has come back from America to look after me.” Karna had felt proud hearing that. Who wouldn’t be proud to know their parents could depend on them? But now, it was starting to feel like a curse.

And so, the drinking grew. Soon it got to a point where his dad, who was supposed to be the one that picked up and dropped off Karna from work, wouldn’t show up. Karna tried hard not to blame him at first. Maybe there was a special event, he thought. But there are only so many excuses you can make for someone else before your understanding turns into anger, and anger then turns to resentment.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to fully resent his father, because, at his core, he understood. He understood that drinking is just so damn fun.

Karna looked away from the tower and pulled back the curtains. He sank into his bed but couldn’t bring himself to fall asleep. He didn’t want to. He didn’t feel like resting. His mind was racing a mile a minute. In fact, he was horrified to realise that he felt like a drink.

No, that was something he didn’t want to do anymore—more so because his father was passed out in the other room. He thought back to his first weekend at college. Surrounded by new friends, new people and a new environment, the sway of a Friday night had helped him wander to a frat party where, before he could say anything, someone had handed him a drink. Before he knew it, he’d drank five cups of beer and was doing shots in the kitchen with some white guys he’d never seen before and would never see again.

He slapped himself to forget that image, but in his heart, he knew that he missed it. “No,” he muttered under his breath. “Think about Aliya,” he whispered aloud as if there was someone else in the room conversing with him.

Aliya, his ex-girlfriend, was supposed to still be here. They had planned to return to Nepal together and start the process of getting married. But no. The last time he’d seen her was at the foot of the bed, mascara running down her face, watching in disbelief as he was kissing another girl.

She then left without saying a word, and he was too drunk to care. Too hungover to text the next day. And too ashamed to try to fix things after that. Last he heard, she was in San Francisco, dating someone else. “She’s happy now,” was the last thing her best friend had told him. No, actually the last thing her best friend had told him was, “Let her be happy.”

Maybe music would help. He looked around for his earphones. They were on the bedside table. He put them on and started looking for a song. Nirvana. Guns and Roses. Lou Reed. All drunks. All addicts. All introduced to him by his father.

We really are so similar, he thought. He didn’t want to listen to anything now. He didn’t want to do anything now. All he felt was a thirst.

He went outside where his father, who’d instinctively turned to the side so as not to choke if he vomited, no doubt a result of years of practice, was snoring like an elephant. Karna looked for the keys, opened the door, locked it from the outside and stepped out into the night air.

The stars greeted him with their shimmering twinkle and the cold November air was something he’d always been familiar with. So, what now? A voice in his head whispered. He put one foot in front of the other and walked to the liquor store.

The next day, Karna’s father woke up before him and slouched in the bathroom, which was in Karna’s bed. Despite his own breath still reeking of alcohol, he could smell that his son’s room was too. He felt a prick in his heart but kept walking on.

Hearing his father shuffle to the toilet woke Karna up. The onslaught of a killer hangover headache ensured that his eyes stayed closed. Still, at that moment, with the father struggling to reach the bathroom and the son trying hard to go back to sleep, a singular thought occurred in both their heads that, if they had communicated to the other, it would have either resulted in a long howl of a laugh or the saddest stream of tears to ever grace a human face. That thought was simple, as all great truths are. That thought was: I need a drink.