24M — I spent years trying to escape my dysfunctional family. After my father's death, I'm back in the middle of it
24M from Maharashtra, living in Delhi — my father passed away and I don't know how to deal with everything that happened before it
Hi, I’m 24M from Maharashtra and have been living in Delhi for the last few years for my education.
A few months ago, I got a call from home saying that my father had suffered a heart attack. I left Delhi immediately, but a few days later, he passed away.
I was obviously heartbroken, but after the initial shock, I realised that his death had left me with a much bigger problem. To explain it properly, I need to give a lot of context, so please bear with me because this is going to be a very long post.
My mother comes from a poor background. Growing up, I don't remember many days when there wasn't some kind of fight at home. A lot of the time, the fights became serious. I was also never allowed by my mother to talk to or meet my father's side of the family. She was a housewife for most of my childhood, while my father had almost nothing when he married her. Over the years, he built his business and made a considerable amount of money. He invested a lot of it in property, and many of those properties were jointly registered in both their names, partly because that was the practical thing to do and partly because of the usual Indian mindset around family property.
As my father's wealth grew, my mother's behaviour also started changing. She began making investments and financial decisions without my father knowing. Then, at some point, she decided that she wanted to make a movie. My father refused because it required a huge amount of money, but she kept pressuring him. Eventually, she took a massive mortgage to finance the movie. She started working on it and essentially moved away from being a housewife, but at the same time, her behaviour towards my father changed drastically. She started disrespecting and harassing him constantly, even over things that seemed completely unnecessary.
Then came the part that completely changed my life.
During the making of the movie, my mother started having an affair with a man from the same industry. He was also involved in criminal activities. He influenced her to drink, go on expensive trips and stay in five-star hotels, with him paying for many of these things. I was the first person in the family to find out. I was in school at the time, around 9th or 10th standard.
I confronted my mother, but she denied everything. Later that same night, I received a call from this man asking me to meet him in his car. I went. My mother was already there, and they were drinking. They eventually admitted to me that they were having an affair. Then he broke a bottle and held the broken glass against my chest and told me, "You can't tell your father about this."
I was terrified. I didn't tell my father. I was a child and had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with something like that.
Later, I found out that the money needed for the movie was not as straightforward as I had initially thought. A lot of money had gone into the project, and this man was also benefiting from it. Eventually, the money started running out, and he began demanding more from my mother and blackmailing her. She started ignoring him. One day, he died by suicide and left a post on the internet mentioning my mother. Somehow, my mother managed to keep the situation under control, but the damage was already done. That entire episode was one of the biggest traumas of my childhood and had a huge impact on my mental health.
Not long after that, she started seeing another man. He was a clerk in a government office and started coming to our house almost every weekend and staying with the family. Whenever we questioned her, she said he was "just an assistant." The movie was obviously a financial disaster, and the loans taken for it started piling up. Around the same time, my father's business also started struggling, so he had to sell some of the properties. Since many of them were jointly owned, my mother demanded half of the money from the sale. She got it, and from what I witnessed, a significant amount of that money was spent with this new man, in a way very similar to what had happened before.
My younger brother also ended up getting dragged into this. When he was around 13–14, my mother took him to South India with this man. At the hotel, he found them in what he understood to be an intimate situation, and he was beaten and threatened to keep his mouth shut. There have been many incidents like this over the years. My father was emotionally destroyed, my brother was traumatised, and I was carrying my own trauma from everything I had witnessed and experienced. The biggest problem was that my mother always seemed to have control through manipulation and fear, which made it incredibly difficult for any of us to do anything about it.
At around the same time, I was dealing with a lot in my own personal life. My mental health was getting worse, COVID happened, and I was struggling even with small everyday things. On top of that, my mother constantly pressured and nagged me. I genuinely felt like there was no way out of this dysfunctional family. Eventually, I attempted suicide by jumping from a building. I survived, but I broke my leg, spine and hand.
That was probably the lowest point of my life, but somehow I started working hard to rebuild myself. I eventually got admission into a college in Delhi, which gave me the opportunity to get away from home. I spent the next few years working on my mental health, socialising, making friends and, for the first time in a long time, just living normally. I slowly started healing and genuinely thought I had finally managed to get myself out of that environment.
But things at home continued getting worse.
While I was in Delhi, my mother filed for divorce and also filed an FIR against my father. The legal and financial pressure became enormous. My father was already dealing with a lot of stress, and over time his health deteriorated further. Eventually, he suffered heart failure and passed away.
And that's where I am today.
I'm 24, I've lost my father, and I'm left trying to deal with everything that happened in our family for years — the property, the financial situation, the legal issues, my relationship with my mother, and, honestly, my own mental state after everything I've been through.
There is a lot more to this story, especially everything that happened after my father's death and the current legal/property situation. But this post is already extremely long, so I'll write another post for the continuation.
I'm not really posting this for sympathy. I genuinely don't know what I'm supposed to do from here, and I would really appreciate some perspective from people who have dealt with complicated family, property or legal situations.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading.