The Inheritance No One Asked For

It took me a long time to understand that it was never just you, Mamu.

The chair Dad sat on like a throne.
The kitchen you ran like a machine.
The belief passed down like sacred scripture—
that girls adjust and women endure.
That daughters carry silence as the fate they were born with.

You didn't invent that culture,
you didn't make the rules in that house.
You were just trying to survive inside it.
But you took it over like a baton in a relay race
and started running the same culture like your life depended on it.

I see that now.

But Mamu, seeing it doesn't mean it didn't hurt me.
Knowing why you were the way you were doesn't undo what you became to me.

You became the first person to make me feel ashamed of my body.
The first person to teach me that love is conditional.
The first person to turn your back when I needed to be held the most.

That's the inheritance you passed down without meaning to.
And I've spent years trying to spit it out of my mouth.

I used to think if I could just get far enough;
another country, another name, another life, maybe…
maybe I could leave it all behind.
But it followed me.
Every new day, every new year, every new city and every new apartment.
Your voice in my head.
Your disapproval in my mirror.
Your fear living inside my body.

I tried blaming you.
I tried rebelling.
I tried forgetting.
Nothing worked.
Even when I made myself the villain,
it did not work.

But now I know, none of those things free me.

What frees me is naming it.
What frees me is saying, out loud:
You hurt me.
You didn't know better.
But you still hurt me.

And I don't need you to apologize anymore.
I don't need you to understand every detail.
I just need to stop carrying what wasn't mine to begin with.
I am done being the storage unit for generations of grief.

Mamu, I see the tired girl you once were.
And I see the tired girl I once was.
And I refuse to pass this weight any further.

It ends here.
The generations of trauma, it ends here.

With me.
* Kanchhi