Ancestory Now Discontinued.

---

The grandmother began it, as grandmothers often do, without warning and without apology.

She leaned out of memory one afternoon and said, “You still don’t know how to look at a goddess.”
Then she vanished, leaving Akshara standing with a half-formed thought and the stale smell of incense that never quite burned properly.

He realised she was right. Saraswati, Sharada—he could not see them beyond the laminated calendar art of Ravi Varma: porcelain skin, obedient veena, eyes permanently lifted toward an abstract heaven. The goddess, frozen mid-blessing, had the same relationship to living thought as a landline phone to grief. Useful once. Decorative now.

This failure unsettled him more than leaving home ever had.

Akshara had believed—naively, heroically—that departure was cure. That by exiting his childhood house with its locked cupboards, silences thicker than curries, and emotions folded away like winter clothes, he had escaped the machinery of inheritance. Geography, he assumed, was therapy.

Ptah disagreed.

Sri-ji, as Ptah styled himself in his Indian guru incarnation, listened patiently while Akshara explained his theory of distance-as-liberation. Ptah nodded, smiled, and then dismantled the idea with the gentleness of a man loosening a screw that holds up a ceiling.

“You didn’t leave,” Ptah said. “You relocated the furniture.”

Akshara frowned.

“You are still running your life on ancestral software,” Ptah continued. “Fear of not having enough. Talent for withholding affection. Advanced certification in secrecy. Very stable operating system. Very old.”

This was how Ptah created chaos: not by shouting, but by making sentences that rearranged your internal organs.

“Heal your ancestral baggage,” Sri-ji advised, sounding like a brochure that had swallowed a prophecy. “Otherwise you will pass it on, gift-wrapped, to people who did not ask.”

Akshara protested. His grandparents had suffered. His parents had endured. Surely these patterns were historical artifacts—tragic, yes, but respectable. Ptah waved this away.

“Suffering explains repetition,” he said. “It does not excuse it.”

The transmission, Ptah insisted, was not inevitable. Family cycles were not immortal. They only survived because no one ever revoked their lease. Somewhere, in some ordinary life, a person could become the terminal point—the place where fear exhausted itself and went quietly out of fashion.

This sounded suspiciously like responsibility.

Ptah leaned in. “Breaking patterns is not betrayal,” he said. “It just feels like betrayal to ghosts who enjoyed the arrangement.”

Akshara began to see it then: the inherited emotional stiffness, the irrational loyalties, the reflexive silences. These were not personality traits. They were heirlooms. And like all heirlooms, they came with the unspoken instruction: Do not alter.

The epiphany did not arrive with thunder. It arrived as irritation. A small, persistent annoyance at the way his life kept repeating itself with different faces. He realised that freedom would require permission—his own. Permission to change without asking the dead for clearance.

“This is why pioneers are lonely,” Ptah added helpfully. “They walk ahead while everyone behind them calls it arrogance.”

The chaos deepened.

As Akshara loosened the grip of inherited values, something unfamiliar happened. His feelings became articulate. His needs stopped apologising. The goddess, slowly, imperceptibly, stepped out of the calendar frame. Saraswati did not glow. She did not float. She simply sat down and asked better questions.

The grandmother, somewhere, said nothing. Which, for once, felt like blessing.

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Footnotes

1. Ravi Varma’s calendar gods function less as theology and more as visual syllabi: standardized, examinable, and safely inert.
2. Ptah’s preferred method of instruction is misalignment—he tilts a single assumption and lets the rest collapse on its own.
3. “Ancestral baggage” should not be confused with history; one can respect suffering without reenacting it.
4. Most family cycles persist not through force, but through emotional convenience.
5. The term pioneer here refers not to courage but to liability: the first to be blamed if things go wrong.
6. Some gods resist contemporary interpretation because they threaten to become mirrors instead of decorations.