Pritam's Blog
From Partition to OCD to Divorce: The Family Curse I Couldn’t Escape
I wasn’t born. I was flung into existence like a bottle smashed against the wall. Not some leaky condom mistake, not some drunken stumble where my father tripped, fell into my mother, and out popped me. No, it was an accident of history, a goddamned accident of blood and borders and men with too much hate in their hearts.
Daadu—my grandfather—called it an accident, the riots. Like the way a car hits a pedestrian, just some bad luck, bad timing. Hindus, Muslims, machetes, flames. His wife—his first wife—wasn’t home that night. She was miles away in her parents’ village, which was burning. They ran, she and her family, running for their lives like rats out of a sewer, crossing some line in the dirt that turned them into refugees. Camps, chaos, shit everywhere.
Meanwhile, Daadu was in his village, dodging his own brand of trouble, but still, he went looking for her. His wife. Days, weeks, months—maybe years. North East India, all hills and hell, no maps, no phones, just empty hands and grief. He didn’t find her. He gave up, like people do when the pain weighs heavier than hope. He remarried. Three daughters, the youngest was my mother. Then me. Firstborn of the youngest, the accident’s aftershock.
You see the line, don’t you? No riots, no partition, Daadu doesn’t lose his first wife, doesn’t remarry, doesn’t make my mother, doesn’t make me. It all goes back to that damned partition.
But that’s not the story. Not the whole of it. The story is about the curse. The rot that spread through my family like mold in the walls. Daadu couldn’t shake the ghosts—his lost wife, his dead second one (my Didu), the empty beds. He drank himself to sleep most nights, or worse. And the daughters? They were raised in the rubble. Trauma in their bones, in their veins. My mother got the worst of it. Married into a bad hand, tried to play it better than her father, but that rot, it just sat there, festering.
She decided we’d be different. That I’d be different. But her version of love was all rules and walls. She squeezed the life out of us trying to make it perfect. That’s how I learned control. And when I left home, got out, finally free, the control didn’t leave. It turned inward. Into OCD. The doors, the gas, the endless handwashing. My life ordered down to the molecule because the big stuff, the real stuff, was chaos. The kind you can’t scrub clean or lock out.
I told this to my therapist today. She nodded like they do, all knowing, all calm, and she said, “Maybe that’s where your OCD comes from. That family history. That mess.”
No shit, lady. It’s a chain, isn’t it? Partition to Daadu to Maa to me. And the kicker? The OCD was the final nail in my marriage. My ex couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t handle me.
Bukowski was right. Love, family—it’s all a gamble. Most of the time, you lose.