What is and what will never be

The names of certain individuals have been changed to hide their identity 

"To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them."
                             - Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Lockdown has now reached 50 days. That's 50 days of mostly being stuck at home alone save for some brief interactions with neighbors and stepping out for essential shopping every couple of weeks. This is a perfect environment for old memories to start quietly creeping through the curtains of my mind. And most of them, unfortunately, are not very pleasant.

Most of the tragedies in my life have been due to fate but some of them were caused by the malevolence of others combined by own naturally passive behavior. This was most apparent during the time when me and my bedridden father were unceremoniously kicked out of the house I called home for my entire life until that point.

The Backstory

Now it is difficult for me to tell this story without relying on hearsay from relatives (who I'm sure have their own agendas) because some of the background goes way back to the time when I was a toddler. But I still want to share my thoughts because most of my relatives have given precious little thought to the pain I have had to endure because of this.

So let's start sometime in the mid-90s. My father was having very severe financial troubles because of ill-advised business deals. Some of my oldest memories of that time was that he wasn't around at home much, possibly trying to avoid people asking for money. He had sold some of my mother's jewellery which soured their marriage to a great extent. He needed to pay off his debts somehow.

So the rest of the family came up with a compromise (why it was arranged in this manner, I'm not entirely certain). Aunt May (yes, her again) would loan my father 15 lakhs to settle his debts and in return, the rest of the family wrote their share of the house where we lived over to her. Apparently, the plan was that my father would repay the loan later (and get back his share of the house?).

My grandmother's original idea was that the house should go to my father. His siblings, being doctors, were much better off than him and had places of their own. I'm assuming this is why we stayed on in that house. And from here on in, the story gets really convoluted.

My father's side of the family had a lot of land and there is a lot of "He sold that back then", "But she was irresponsible with the cash" and even stories of a forged signature. Let's just say conclude that the vast majority of people on my father's side of the family were really not very smart with money. At all. This gave rise to a lot of mutual mistrust.

Unsurprisingly, my father did not pay Aunt May back, which is the most significant backstory for the events to come. But it isn't as black and white as Aunt May would like it to appear. My father would become more financially stable over the years while Aunt May would get more and more financially desperate. I know for a fact that my father did try to help out Aunt May when she got in trouble. There was even discussion about my father getting full share of the house a few years before he fell ill (this was what I assumed then, I believe now it was more likely that he was trying to get his share back).

I think it is a good time to interject here. I know I have painted a very bad picture of Aunt May on this blog (and with good reason) but she has done good things in her life too and helped her share of people out. But I suppose that sort of made me unprepared for the things to come. Everyday villains are not born evil and are not bad to every person they know. But in the right circumstances, their materialism and greed can lead to very cruel endeavours.

I was always at a disadvantage in this story. This was because neither of my parents told me any of this. They probably figured it was best if they left me out of the madness but they also probably didn't envision the horrible diseases that would come their way, which made me the head of the house sooner than they expected.

Fast Forward 20+ Years

The first sign of trouble started when my father was still in the hospital recovering from stroke. I had started my house surgeoncy at that time too, so the house was empty for some time. One day, I had gotten news that my neighbor's mother had died so I went there to see him.

Surprisingly, my neighbor brought me aside and advised me against selling my home. He had apparently heard someone say it was being put up for sale. Looking back now, I really really should have taken this much more seriously than I did. The problem was that I was still under the impression that my father had some share in the house and it couldn't be sold without our permission.

Another problem I faced was that no one in this family was ever likely to tell me this entire story. The only reason I have the little background I have now is from people at my father's funeral. I was always in the dark, until it was too late.

Over the next few months, random people started showing up at the house to take a look at it. Most of them came in my absence I presume. When I was there, I rarely refused them entry although my displeasure was certainly palpable. I suppose Aunt May might have interpreted that I was trying to sabotage her but the thing is, she never bothered to explain to me what was happening. If you're going to sell the house someone has been living in for almost a quarter of a century, a heads up would have been nice.

My biggest mistake was assuming that Aunt May would eventually sit me down and tell me her plans like an honourable person would. In fact, I even paid a good amount of money on house maintenance a few months after this issue first popped up since it was unoccupied for some time before we moved back in.

I had a lot of other huge problems in life to deal with - trying to make enough money to take care of my father was a full-time job in itself. When you worry about how you will pay the bills each month, everything else can take a backseat in your mind.

Aunt May did not speak to me directly about selling the house. But she did offer to buy me a PG seat in Assam.

"Medical colleges in Assam are outstanding," she said.

Now I have no idea if they are but 1) I had my own career goals in mind and going to a private college in a far off state was not one of them and 2) I was fairly certain that Aunt May didn't have that kind of money at that moment and even if she did, she probably wouldn't spend it on me. In hindsight, it was obvious that it would have been very useful for her to get me as far away from Trivandrum as possible.

She then offered me a job at her hospital with double the pay a person with MBBS would usually get. This also struck me as quite odd but I did consider it since I needed the money. Ultimately, I decided against it because sometimes people offer to help you only to use it against you later on and this offer was more than a little suspicious. 

It was also around this time that Aunt May and/or her son started telling stories about how I was an alcoholic (because having a drink once in 6 months or so counts as an alcoholic now?), possibly to insinuate to other relatives that I could not be trusted with money. I didn't pay much attention to this at the time because I had much bigger problems in my life to take care off than neighborhood gossip and the person who told me this had his own issues with Aunt May so I could only take it with a pinch of salt. But looking back, there were so many signs here of an impending betrayal that I was completely blind to.

An Unholy Betrayal

And then the inevitable happened - the house was sold while we were still living there. Now, one would have thought that by this point at least, Aunt May would come and have an honest conversation about what was happening. Hell no.

It turns out her plan was to come to my (well not mine anymore) house with her son, verbally abuse my bedridden, dementia suffering father to get out of the house.

Eventually, she did have a conversation with me where she completely avoid the awkward parts of the conversation to say that she got a flat for us to stay on rent. She said it was my father's responsibility to tell me that we had to move. She promised me that she had no reason to screw me and would pay the rent for the flat (spoiler alert - she didn't and I would be harassed by the flat owners in the coming months).

Words cannot do justice to how pissed off I was about this. First of all, she should have enough functioning brain cells to acknowledge that I was the person paying the bills of that house for almost 2 bloody years by that point and so I should be the person she should talk to about this matter. Secondly, how is a bedridden person with dementia supposed to do anything? Should he be blamed for not appropriately responding to this situation? He was struggling with depression from his illness, how can you justify putting such stress on a helpless human being? Thirdly, why do I have no fucking say over where we go from here? Why do I have to go the flat she rented? To make her look good in front of relatives ("Oh look what I did for them!")?

I learnt from other sources that the house was to be sold for somewhere around 1 crore 70 lakhs. We got nothing. At a time when we were financially struggling to get by, we not only lost our house but got nothing for it. The apathy of our other relatives just made things worse. My own cousin, whose college fees were paid by my father at one point, came with his mother to help Aunt May get us out of the house. I guess some people have short memories. Yes, there were betrayals in betrayals.

My father did not want to leave that house. He told the home nurse that he'd prefer to spend his last days there. Unfortunately that wasn't possible. Months later when he passed, his funeral had to be done at a distant relative's house because we had none that we could call our own.

My father was literally dragged out of that house in the middle of the night while neighbors looked on in shock at this turn of events. But I refused to leave and Aunt May accepted that. For the time being.

Too Little too Late

In a desperate last-ditch attempt, I tried to negotiate something for us out of this mess. I want to make it clear that if Aunt May had discussed things out like a reasonable person, I would have had no problems in moving. I've never been in interested in money more than that needed to get by. But the sheer disrespect shown to me, my father and even the home nurse for God's sake (who was verbally abused because Aunt May always needs to look commanding) was too much to just let it slide.

And to make matters, Aunt May decided to lease some part of an undivided ancestral property to a well-known hospital for a cool 50 lakh advance plus 3 lakhs per month. This was not legal. But she knew that no one would do anything to stop her. I had no money to get the sort of legal team needed for a long, drawn out court battle. It was absurd that one person could do all this while everyone else in the family just sat back and watched.

Now people who were also wronged by Aunt May offered to help by this point including local communist party workers but I still held on to the hope that there could be a somewhat amicable solution to this instead of starting a civil war within the family, which if started could drag on for several years.

But the only offer Aunt May gave me was around 50,000 Rs for coaching classes, something I could make by just working a few more months anyway. This was just another slap in the face that I rejected right away. What she and all the other stupid relatives who think this is OK fail to realize is that there is a big fucking difference between selling empty land and selling a house that someone has lived in for almost a quarter of a century. All of my childhood memories were in that house. All of the memories of my late mother were in that house. It was bad enough that we had to leave but to get kicked out, humiliated, given false assurances about a flat that we had no say in choosing and then be offered a paltry sum of money was insulting.

Needless to say, I didn't get anything in the end. Eventually, this asshole started a satyagraha of sorts outside the house to get me out which was easy to ignore since I had lost all respect for her at this point. But then one day she asked for the key so she could "show the house to the buyer" and when I came back from work later that day, the locks were changed. This was a bullshit move since I still had all my stuff there. I got her to open the door that night but I knew I had to leave. It was all just too much by this point.

But that evening I did give Aunt May a piece of my mind after restraining my self till that point. I spoke in a tone that one normally does not use with an aunt. But I didn't care. And she just accepted it because she knew very well the bullshit she was pulling. I suppose she was really that desperate for money. When I left the next day, I wished the place would burn to the ground even though I knew it wouldn't happen. All I could do was to curse it so that none should prosper from the seed of betrayal.

I really didn't want to move to that flat. But I couldn't go anywhere else because I had no money at the time. This helplessness shattered my mental health into pieces and little did I know that other people in my life would soon kick me further into the abyss. But that's a story for another day. 

Forgiveness or Revenge?

That house was an old one. It wasn't particularly appealing to youngsters and none of my friends really enjoyed visiting their even though most of them did not say this openly. The reason it fetched so much money was it was a roadside house in the heart of the city close to Palayam, Medical College and the airport. But for me, it had a sentimental value that will never be replaced by any other house. Now, every time I pass that house while traveling on the airport road, my heart fills with both anger and sadness. These are emotions that I fear will never fade with the passage of time but will forever stay dormant within me. 

After my father died, some people came and told me to avenge my father by righting some wrongs regarding the property issue. But I don't know what that would do to erase all these bad memories. Those few weeks kick-started the worst months of my life and I still haven't recovered from it. I think about forgiveness and I think about revenge but ultimately, neither one particularly appeals to me.