Family History--Back to Bombay!

I haven't talked much about my family in this medium. Part of the reason being that they have factored less in my life over the last 10 years than they did in the first 18 but another salient point is to protect their collective dignity--no, thankfully they don't read this little outlet for my neurosis. Clearly this preface reveals that I will now proceed to air decades of dirty laundry and rattle some closeted skeletons...because I can. My apologies to those masked by annonymity in advance.

MY GRANDPARENTS
My grandparents marriage was arranged to meet my grandfather's family's growing debt. His father was an alcoholic fisherman who lost the love of his life to what we suspect is cancer--no one really knew what it was back then. My great-grandfather married my grandfather's mother, a stern teacher, because he was expected to have a family and she bore him 9 children, 7 of whom survived puberty, my grandfather is the oldest. My grandmother's family consisted of a schoolteacher mother to whose iron will the agrarian father bent out of love or necessity no one knows. The union of my grandparents was far from romantic and while it wasn't as feudal as land exchanged it did aid my grandfather's family in marrying off their daughters. Dowry that goes around, comes around! In June 1948, the 16-year old farm girl married the 26-year old printing press worker.
The story goes that my grandmother was grossly mistreated by my grandfather's family for her dark complexion and the reality that the additional mouth to feed would lead to diminished income for the whole family. My grandmother moved to Bombay to join my grandfather in 1950 where she bore him three children, my mother being the classic middle child and sole daughter. My grandfather continued to support his family, a self-made man, he set his younger brothers up with printing presses of their own and raised his children by providing for them financially. My grandmother did all the actual rearing of said children. She channeled all her unfulfilled desires into them, launching one doctor after another and finally failing with the third who has become a wealthy man of commerce to her chagrin.

MY PARENTS
My father married my mother as a result of an arrangement my grandfather made with him. My mother's older brother was a dentist in America and agreed to sponsor my mother and her new beau to start a beautiful life in the New World. My father who wanted to escape the tyranny of his own parents and the obsessive Indian need for medical professionals felt this was his way out. He was a General Practitioner but wanted nothing more than to live an academic life surrounded by his books and waxing philosophically on existentialism. My mother, a pediatrician, knew nothing of any of this...all she knew was that her parents would collectively commit suicide if she were to not marry a man of their choosing. Yes, Bollywood's flair for melodrama comes from its palpability across Indian subcultures.

Since the immigration papers were taking longer than expected, my grandparents sent my parents to the Gulf in 1982. My father was not impressed with the restrictive life in that part of the world and returned shortly thereafter to his parents family abode in South India, my mother toiled on to make the requisite monies that would be needed for their eventual life in America. When I was about 7 years old, she returned to Bombay and set up a pediatric polyclinic all her own. She was successful but the stigma of being separated resulted in gender biased attacks. Married men constantly came onto her in crude ways feeling that as the mother of a child no longer locked in wedded bliss she was primed for mistress duties. Women fearing for their marriages reviled her for their husbands, albeit unwelcome, advances. Additionally, covert female competitiveness which was only exacerbated by her financial success and independence led to unending discomfort in the social realm. Despite my mother's strength and general "I care not for what soceity thinks of me" stance, it was tough. When her sponsorship papers for America came through in December 1989, she decided to give her marriage another chance and truly establish a new life for herself.

My parents attempted a reconciliation which failed and led to their eventual divorce in 1995. My father, disappointed by his unfulfilled ideation of streets paved with gold and unmitigated freedom from familial responsibility, returned to south India sometime in 1990 after less than a year living his dream. I was delivered to my mother by her mother in Jamaica, Queens in May 1992. Prior to that date my memories of my mother involved coiling and uncoiling rotary phone wires and packages with dolls with flaxen hair and blue eyes who talked and walked. I bore her no ill will but I knew that my home in Bombay was no longer my home and my grandparents were no longer my primary care givers. I don't remember it being difficult to assimilate, but looking back I know it was.

THE UNCLES
My oldest uncle, M, married the janitor's daughter at 19 and ran away from home. When he realized that love doesn't put food on the table and their first child was stillborn, he came home. My grandfather banished him to America because he was ashamed of his disrespectful display and in an effort to help him live an unfettered life in the new land. The tale he tells is one of hard work and loneliness which led him to four wives and twice as many children in and out of wedlock. He returned to India in 1997 with two young sons after their mother got him shot in his New Rochelle driveway. He had to give up maxilofacial surgery and now focuses on cosmetic procedures since he had a long recovery from ths shot to his vertebrae.
His departure to India may have saved his life but it also continued in a Western bent the East doesn't accept. He married a divorcee of my grandparents choosing, who he has since divorced to take up residence with a woman half his age with whom he has a daughter. He is also having an affair with the manager of his booming medical practice--a divorcee with two grown daughters. He recently made this woman wife number 5 upon what he claims was my grandfather's decree, but my grandmother was unaware of the situation.

My younger uncle migrated to the United States in 1987, thanks to M's sponsorship.
Seeing the dysfunction around him, he has cut all ties with the family. His Russian wife (blamed for his distance, obesity, and childless status) and he live in Long Valley and hope to retire to a mansion they are building in south India. His correspondence with my grandfather is strictly business. He remains a member of the family who surfaces rarely in matters of domestic politics.

THE PRESENT
Now, the reason all this history is relevant today is that I've volunteered to go to India for the month of January in an effort to get my grandmother into therapy or at the very least medicated for her condition. The actual condition remains a mystery.

On the day of the Mumbai attacks, she had a blowout fight with my grandfather--the straw that broke the camel's back: my grandfather's insistence that M. marry the mother of his most recent child in our parish in order for my grandfather to be buried there in the event of his death (it is unclear WHY my uncle needs to get married in the church my grandfather has been a member of for the past 55 years in order for him to be buried there) but my uncle went ahead with it without consulting or notifying my grandmother. She found out about the marriage through the church grapevine then my mother confirmed that my grandfather had insisted on this union under God. Her furiousness led to the removal of a substantial amount of gold from her person and a weeping departure from her home in a housecoat via rickshaw.
She disappeared for five hours on one of the worst possible days in the history of the city.
M. called my mother at 2am on Thanksgiving morning, whilst she and I chatted beside a fire in suburban New Jersey, to inform her of the situation. A transatlantic shouting match of the blame game ensued. Shortly, thereafter he called to quell her worst fear; my grandmother had been found standing on the rocks at Bandstand praying and crying. A suicide attempt thwarted; they've medicated her heavily since and my conversations with her have been stilted due to their side effect: disoriented affect, grogginess, and exhaustion.

ME
I am going back to India.

My grandparents raised me and I love them, I also owe them. My mother loves her mother, despite the hysteria, and she'd riddled with guilt. She was just in India for a few weeks and will be returning in February for a family wedding, but she doesn't have the luxury of taking off for months at a time. She has a medical practice to run. Additionally, her American husband isn't going to understand, let alone accompany her on a voyage to her motherland to care for her physically well/psychologically failing mother. Not that he can be expected to but he cetainly won't. I have neither a husband nor a career, I will go. My mother mired in the guilt of a filially pious upbringing can stop self-flagellating because her emissary will represent.

My career choice of mental health is both timely and soon-to-be-tested. I will return to my Bombay to ensure that my grandma gets the helps she needs--stigma be damned! Finessing my grandfather to allow this will be an epic journey in manipulation and wiles. It may take more than the month of January, but I intend to go back after any interviews I may garner as part of the clinical psychology doctoral application process and stay as long as is needed to begin the healing to hearth.

"Piety starts at home"