Inherited beliefs and trauma.
There are two things a man should never trust after sundown: a politician offering a moral lecture, and an educated Indian boasting that he has outgrown his grandmother.
Every week, some distressed soul walks up the stairs to my consulting room, sinks into my leather armchair, and pays me a tidy sum of rupees only to discover that their great modern tragedy was actually scripted in 1948 by an illiterate uncle. As a doctor and a hypnotherapist, I have listened to enough confessions to conclude that the human ego is mostly an uncredited theatre company performing old village plays.
Consider Prajal. A fine-looking lad, sharp as a tack, first fellow in his family to cross the threshold of a university, now laboring over a PhD and translating high literature for a respectable salary. He came to see me wearing the weary, martyred expression of an ascetic who has spent forty days fasting in the sun.
“Doctor Sahib,” he sighed, hands folded like a petitioning clerk, “I do not understand women. The relationship is going to the dogs. And yet, I do everything for her. I anticipate her headaches before she gets them. I pack three umbrellas if a cloud appears over the Western Ghats. I plan her weekends down to the bus schedules. I am practically killing myself to keep her comfortable, and she sits there looking at me as if I am an imperial jailer holding the keys.”
The poor fellow was utterly clueless. He genuinely imagined himself to be a knight in shining armor, while the girl was privately suffocating in the corner, eyeing the nearest fire exit.
I told him to close his eyes, breathe slowly, and let his mind drift down past the PhD certificates and the highbrow pretensions. Under the rhythmic drone of the induction, the chivalrous hero dissolved. His shoulders slumped, his voice cracked, and out came the squeak of a frightened schoolboy:
“If I don’t spot the trouble first, she will disappear. If I don’t fix every ditch before she steps in it, she will leave me. Just like they left.”
There it was—the antique family ghost, dressed up as romantic devotion.
Prajal’s grandfather had ended his own life when Prajal’s father was still in short pants. The father, quite understandably, took refuge inside bottles of cheap country liquor. Prajal’s mother had lost both parents in childhood, growing up on the thin, stingy gruel of obliging relatives; she survived by holding Prajal so tight around the neck that the boy could barely swallow, insisting he must never leave the village.
To Prajal’s subconscious, disaster was not a possibility; it was an appointment. Safety meant surveillance. Love meant keeping both hands on the steering wheel until your knuckles turned white. When his girlfriend simply wanted an afternoon alone to read a book, the boy’s limbic brain heard the trumpets of doom.
Then there is Prajakta, who came to see me the following Tuesday.
Prajakta has three degrees, speaks flawless English, and possesses a brain that could easily run a public sector bank. Instead, she works as a junior copy assistant in a dusty firm, earning barely enough to keep herself in tea and Marie biscuits. Her wardrobe consists exclusively of faded khadi kurtas that look like they were laundered in ash, and she keeps her modest savings stuffed in old Horlicks jars behind the kitchen spices.
“I just lack ambition, Doctor,” she told me with a resigned shrug. “Whenever a promotion comes my way, I get terrible stomach cramps. I choke in the interviews. Fate simply intended me to live a quiet, humble life.”
I put her in the chair, took her into a trance, and went rummaging through the attic of her family memory.
Her great-grandparents had been wealthy landholders in the borderlands. During Partition and the communal skirmishes that preceded it, their haveli was ransacked three times. They were stripped of their brass utensils, their cattle, and their gold mohurs sewn into quilt seams. The family survived only by smearing mud on their faces, putting on rags, and weeping loudly so the raiders would think someone else had already cleaned them out.
The sermon drilled into four generations of daughters was simple: The moment you display gold, the dacoits arrive. If you look prosperous, you will be plundered. Stay ragged, stay small, stay alive.
Prajakta was not lacking ambition; she was dutifully playing the village beggar so the bandits wouldn’t come back. Every time the managing director offered her a cabin and a fat pay raise, her bloodline screamed: Tear your blouse and jump into the ditch!
Our pundits and astrologers call all this Pitru Dosha—the wrath of ancestral shadows requiring cow-dung rituals, black sesame, and priests at the ghats. The white men in universities call it transgenerational epigenetics and hypervigilance, requiring five-syllable words and multi-million-dollar research grants. It is the exact same tamasha, only the holy water has been swapped for an MRI scanner.
The body remembers what the conscious mind never knew. Your DNA is merely the brass instrument; your family’s unresolved panic is the drunken brass band playing the tunes. You march into modern drawing rooms convinced you are a free thinker making independent choices, wholly unaware that you are ducking from bullets fired seventy years ago across a harvest field you have never seen.
The cure, when it comes, is neither dramatic nor holy. There are no trumpets or celestial lights.
It is simply Prajal sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon, itching to reorganize his girlfriend’s life, feeling the panic rise in his gullet, and forcing himself to do the most unnatural thing in his bloodline: sit still, shut up, and drink his tea.
And it is Prajakta, sweating with genuine terror, finally walking into an interview room, asking for the corner office and the fat salary, and whispering to the ghosts of the haveli that the dacoits have been dead for sixty years.
Before you lose your temper tonight, or turn down a good thing, or strangle someone with your unsolicited affection, pour yourself a stiff peg and ask the only question that matters: Whose panic am I performing now?
Because God knows, life is short enough without having to live your grandfather’s indigestion all over again.
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