Family History: A Curse and a Promise

My grandmother, Nageshwari

There is a legend in my family about death. Several deaths, in quick succession, of my great grandmother’s entire family in Sri Lanka. My great-great-grandfather was said to have killed a snake and in doing so bore a curse upon his family: He and his sons would all die and die soon. Who would have thought the misogyny of curses would save my great-grandmother’s life? One by one, her father and brothers died, leaving my great-grandmother to be raised in a convent. At 15 she was expected to marry, but with the help of a friend she ran away. I do not know if this story is true, but it was viscerally so to my grandmother, as she told me this in the final weeks of her life. In a frantic desire to collect every fading memory of hers I could, I asked her about her wedding day. She answered me with this story, of a curse. For it was the son of the friend who had helped my great-grandmother escape, whom my grandmother was later forced to marry. She cried her entire wedding day.

What a violence, I remember thinking. I could not understand how my great grandmother could save herself from an unwanted marriage, build her own life, have her own children, only to then force her daughter into a marriage. There were no artifacts left of her for me to even guess at her justifications. No even imagined conversation to be had. No nuance to be afforded. A one-dimensional story of grief was all that I had of her, a woman whose choices afforded me this life.

 My grandmother was a brilliant woman: a reiki master, a phenomenal chef, an independent sharp-willed force of nature. Yet she lived her life through a lens of pain that formed in that moment. The moment her life was no longer her own. And still, she lived on. She had children, the eldest of whom is my mother. In comparison, my mother’s life is her own in a way her mother and grandmother would never understand. She is a doctor. She married a man she fell in love with. Yet, she too has a lens of pain that crystalized in moments of compromising her life for others. One day I found myself peering through the same lens. How easy it is to pinpoint the sacrifices made by women before me. How strange to be unable to do so for myself.

I have spent many years learning to see beyond the boundaries of pain, learning how to reclaim my life as my own – not only for myself but for my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, and those before them whose stories have been lost to me. I have learned that to build a life in honor of the past is to build a life in hope for the future. I am a moment in time, but perhaps my actions will be spoken of on the deathbed of a loved one. Perhaps their story will not start with a curse, but with a promise.