Life

I think about this sometimes.

About my great-great-grandfather. He must have suffered a lot. Coming from a poor rural Indian family, he must have faced so much stigma and pain and humiliation at the hands of people who felt they were superior. But no matter how bad things were, he lived.

He must have been a child once too. I wonder what his dreams might have been. Maybe he wanted to become a singer, or a painter, or maybe a poet. But he worked on someone’s field. Bonded labor. Would have been extremely tough. But still, he lived.

Many a time he would have slept with an empty stomach, low on hope and happiness. But still, through all of it, he lived.

There would have been days when he would have thought, “This life is not worth living, so what’s the point?”. But still, he lived.

Then my great-grandfather would have arrived. A strong sense of joy would have filled his heart that day. Maybe having a child would have given him some happiness, some hope, to live.

He would have faced millions of problems while raising his children, but still he somehow overcame all of them. His children survived. My great-grandfather survived. But he died in his early 30’s. A short and difficult life.

Come to think of it, his life may seem inconsequential. But he left a part of him on this earth. And when I think about it, maybe 100 years from now only a handful of kids and grandkids will have any memory of my life. 200 years from now, at most I’ll be a photo in an old family scrap book (or maybe Instagram) with my name in the margin space. 300 years from now no one in my family will know I existed outside of a half-finished family tree.

Yet, ultimately all of their hopes and pains, successes and failures, dreams and depressions will be the direct result of my having existed. So it isn’t that bad.