Family Betrayals

 

    My maternal great-granddad is on my mind today along with my dad. They share one part of their names too despite being born across the country from each other and in different generations. Fate took both of them early. They didn't get a chance to extend their protection to their wards. But I believe they're both guardian angels from the heavens now protecting the lineage and protecting the daughters. 

The women not too far up in the ancestry on my mother's side were failed by the men in their lives.

My grandmother grew up without knowing her dad. He passed before she was born. Look at the post titled 'The Wants of Childhood' for that story. 

Her uncle, my great-grandfather's younger brother, and her older brother made decisions about her life that uprooted it and flipped it on its head. Her brother was in charge of making marriage decisions for her, in those days of yore of the 1940s. She was the daughter of the guy who was set to inherit his family's rulership - a bunch of villages. 

My great-grandfather was the oldest son of the the ruler of a collection of villages that had come down to that family from their ancestry going seven generations up. 

Waited on hand and foot, my grandmother lived a life of palanquin and horseback travel. By the time she was of the standard marriageable age of the times, her uncle was creating chaos with how the inheritance flowed down. The distilled version of it is that the uncle had the inheritance that was meant to pass on to my great-grandfather's kids rightfully, be transferred to him by nefariously scamming everyone's signatures on the transfer papers. On the other hand, my grandma's older brother gave her hand in marriage to my grandfather, whose family was much lower on the rung financially. 

The sum total of those actions enacted by her uncle and brother was that my grandmother was robbed of a rightful inheritance from her father's wealth and given in marriage strategically to someone who would not be able to provide her with the means to contest her inheritance in court. This latter part she always knew intuitively. I believe her intuition. My great-grandma objected to the marriage alliance being fixed for the only daughter she had. She was very sensitive to what that lower financial station would mean for my grandma's quality of life. That brother glossed the concern over with stating that my grandfather would earn later in his life.

I've often felt that my grandma's life story has mirrored mine. She went from a life of abundance to a life of just-about-enough through great loss financially, materially, and emotionally. After her marriage, my grandfather did not have enough money outside of just sustaining the family daily to be able to help her fight for her rightful inheritance legally. If she were married to someone richer, she would have gone after reclaiming her inheritance. She always maintained that. 

I've sort of come to the same position in life as my grandma. Chasing after buses and autorickshaws after traveling on horseback and in cars. Her loss came about from her own family cheating her out of her inheritance and an abundant future. My loss came about from someone I trusted to become the wind beneath my wings. The same hardship - different generations. 

My maternal grandfather's family had his own share of family losses where he went from having his grandparents weigh the coins coming in from their flourishing family business because of an abundant, ever-flowing income stream to needing to get a government job due to losses faced in that business. 

My paternal grandparents gave away large tracts of land they held to their impoverished relatives. However, by the time my dad grew up, it was in a family that struggled financially. The children of the family had to overcome severe obstacles to even get an education, needing to walk several kilometers to get to a school. My father helped out my paternal grandfather in tending to the family's livestock. He was overwhelmed with burden and responsibility as the older ones likely do.  

So, I know how it feels like to be used to an abundant way of life that makes the daily grind easier and simpler to a scare way of life where the smallest of daily needs comes from jumping through several loops of difficulty. 

I relate.

I feel like my great-grandfather would never have let that happen with his daughter had he been in her life as would my dad with me and my siblings. 

But, this pattern stops with me. Additionally, this pattern changes back to abundance again, with me.