The Perfect Home is the one That's Still There

"Don't let them get away with it," my father, 3 weeks before he passed away. 

Every villain in history thought they were doing the right thing. There was a reason for their myopic greed. Not a good one perhaps, but good enough for their minds to justify it to themselves. And that is the most important person you need to convince of such things - yourself. 

Indian Dreams/Indian Nightmares

My parents came from very different backgrounds. My father's parents were quite well off. They lived in the city. They owned acres upon acres of land. Ideally, it should have been enough to sustain generations without much trouble. But something, somewhere went quite wrong. 

You see while there was plenty of land to go around, wealth wasn't exactly shared equitably. Some became very prominent through education. Others weren't so gifted and became dependent on getting lucky with a property deal or on their siblings or cousins for handouts. 

One can easily imagine how in this environment, envy, distrust and even paranoia began to grow over the years. Stories of betrayals went back many decades. Some would stop talking to each other for years, until some wedding or funeral would force everyone under one roof. 

Not exactly the family values to be proud of. 

Humble Backgrounds 

My mother's background was quite the opposite. She grew up in a fairly rural area. Everyone in the immediate family had to scratch and claw up the social ladder through education and government jobs, which weren't paying that great back in the day. My mother was a topper from school to college (whereas my father never actually finished his college degree and would bunk exams at every opportunity). 

Yes, this is clearly not the easiest way to make money but there was something with them that I never quite saw with my father's side of the family - a satisfaction with what they had in life. 

That isn't to say that there weren't problems - there were. But it was never to the extent where you felt it was beyond repair. 

My mother deserved better than the family she married into. It wasn't soon after marriage that she found herself in a family stuck in a perpetual financial crisis. She was more strong-willed than most people realised though. She was the real provider of the house. She was the glue holding everything together for more than 20 years. Until she was gone. 

I suppose she took comfort in the hope that I would somehow find myself in a better position than her with time. I don't think she ever imagined things would end up as they have done. 

Home

The house that I grew up in wasn't a particularly modern one. It was your average Trivandrum house, many decades old by the time I was born. It was showing its age from as long as I can remember. Leaky roofs, creaky doors & windows, lots of stray animals and insects. 

But the fact is that I spent 25 years of my life there. It was home, in a way that nothing else could be. The idea of a home is not based on how big or expensive it is. It depends on the memories you made there. 

I remember my mother's cooking. The old maid who helped look after me when I was a small kid while both my parents were far from home. I remember all the late nights studying for exams which was only possible with my parents support. I also remember crying my eyes out at my mother's funeral. Memories, good and bad, all with strong meaning. 

Meaning that few from my father's side of the family actually understands.

Something Wrong

Even when I was a child, something always seemed off about Aunt May. It was clear that she had a strong hold over almost everyone on my father's side of the family and she held respect as a prominent person in her job. But she just never struck me as genuine for some reason. Every time, she'd do something nice, it seemed to have an asterisk attached to it. And that feeling would only become more and more justified as the years went by. 

There was also this unsaid notion that my father was the black sheep of the family. Both elder siblings were doctors. Their families lived a different lifestyle to ours.  

Probably because of the above, I never really found myself bonding that much with my cousins. It probably didn't help either that there was a fairly big age difference between us too and I was a natural introvert. They all seemed to be from a different world. That's not to say they're bad people or anything, we just never quite vibed so to speak. 

Maybe to an extent, this was the reason why no one cared enough to do anything about what happened. 

The Point of No Return

The real tragedy was that everything fell apart just as my father was finally getting his life together. The college dropout finally found a stable job. He found meaning in life. He was respected in his office. And then one day, he got a stroke and couldn't function as he used to anymore. 

Aunt May, despite all her education and all the wealth she'd built up over time, was just as big an idiot with money as anyone else in the family. She was badly in debt at an age when she should have been enjoying retirement in comfort. And she decided that selling our house and selling out her own brother when he was most vulnerable was her way out of the problem. 

Say what you say about her, she was always a master manipulator. Turning people against each other. Making blatantly false promises in front of people's faces, while planning other things behind their backs. It all came all too naturally to her. She made it out that I was quite the irresponsible fellow in the months leading up to it. 

I wonder if there was any hope for our extended family. Whether as generations passed, we'd move past the differences and start actually behaving like how an actual family should. Like being there for each other without a "You owe me" attached to it.  I really don't know. 

What I do know is that any hope of that happening died once and for all the night Aunt May dragged my father out of his house. I still remember my neighbours watching in shock as they saw it happen. I was too broke and vulnerable at that time to do anything but watch too. 

My father passed away a few months later. 

Become Your Enemy

I still get the odd relative telling me how "I should let it all go" and "Move on". It always pisses me off when I hear that. While me "Moving on" would certainly be quite convenient for a lot of my family members. Many knew what was happening and stayed silent or helped make it happen. 

I am a forgiving man. I forgive a lot of things and have forgiven a lot of people. But forgiveness is earned. The man who deserved an apology was my father. Instead, what he got was verbal abuse and gaslighting from people he actually cared deeply about for most of his life. When he was too weak to do anything about it. And then he died. 

Even after all these years, every time I pass my old house, the one I can never call home again, all those emotions just come rushing back. Pain, sadness, anger. 

And that's what makes me wonder. Will I become another family villain with time? For another generation. A petty old man holding grudges for decades. Is that inevitable?

Perhaps this family is just cursed.