I am a practicing hematologist-oncologist in the U.S., standing here against all odds I could never have imagined overcoming. It was not a linear journey; I arrived here carrying the unfinished lives of generations of women before me.
Today, I live independently. I earn my own money. I make decisions about my own life and, as a physician, the lives of others. And yet I feel as though I have borrowed this life from someone else.
Because when I look closely, I see ghosts. The ghosts of dreams never allowed to become real. The ghosts of women who came before me. This is the story of my grandmother Vasu and her daughters.
My grandfather Baba was a complicated man. He was a tailor sewing women’s blouses in a small village of India. He earned enough to feed his family, but little else. After discovering his wife’s infidelity, he left the household and married sixteen-year-old Vasu. She had no say in the marriage.
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He left the village for a remote place with no electricity, no running water, no grocery store, no roads, only dust. Baba had never completed high school, but he knew how to work hard. He apprenticed under a family physician, learning by observing and assisting. Eventually, he opened his own practice and became known as a rural medical practitioner.
Vasu moved with him into a mud house with rats running through the rooms and rain leaking through the roof. As if the universe itself was crying.
She walked 5 miles to collect water from a well, carrying it on her head. She had many pregnancies; I don’t even know the exact number. She had no access to birth control and no meaningful say in her pregnancy. Baba delivered all of their children. Five survived: three daughters and two sons.
The roles of men and women were clearly defined. Men worked outside the home, earned money, and handled all dealings with the outside world. Women handled the kitchen: cleaning, cooking, caring for their husbands, bearing children, and raising them. Boys went to school while girls stayed home to learn kitchen work and care for younger siblings. That hierarchy was unquestioned.
I never remember Vasu speaking about what she wanted. The only thing I remember clearly is her smile and a familiar gesture with her neck and hand that seemed to say: “This is how it works.” That was all.
Baba was progressive in one important way: He believed in education. He had seen how his life changed when he moved from being a tailor to becoming a medical practitioner, and that transformation shaped his thinking.
He sent his eldest daughter, Radha, to a community boarding school so she could earn a diploma in education because the village school ended at tenth grade. But his decision came with consequences.
In the arranged-marriage system of the time, people often questioned the virtue of girls who had lived away from their parents for any reason. A prospective groom’s family might consider a girl’s appearance, her father’s financial status, and countless other unspoken expectations. Education was supposed to expand her world but became a liability.
Prospective families hesitated, and it took several years for someone to marry her. She had done everything Baba had asked her to do. Eventually, the man she married was less educated than she was. Her opinion was never asked. I never remember Radha talking about what she wanted; she just settled with the life that was chosen for her.
My mother was younger than Radha. Baba had learned a lesson: “Going against social norms did not work out well.” So, he continued to believe in education. But not for his daughters.
My mother wanted to become an elementary school teacher just like her sister. She dreamed of becoming an independent woman. But her education ended where Baba decided it should. Her future, like that of other women, was determined by her father.
She completed her tenth grade and married at seventeen into a family of handloom workers. They lived in mud houses with metal roofs.
Whoosh. Click. Clack. The handloom was the soundtrack of my childhood. The bright pink, green, yellow, and blue dye stained the women’s hands as they colored silk. The men sat in a dark, muddy room working the handloom for hours, their hands moving back and forth while their feet worked the pedals in rhythm.
I was born when my mother was eighteen. I watched her young, inexperienced hands struggle to provide for a growing family. Early in my life, I began to wonder: What if my mother had been allowed to become a teacher? That question became a small dream inside me: the dream of education. It never left.
I wanted to make the choices that Vasu had never been allowed to make. The choices Radha had been denied. The choices my mother had inherited.
Today, when I see patients in my clinic, I examine them with my hands. I draw diagrams of their cancer. I write the names of chemotherapy medications and their side effects on the paper.
And sometimes I look at my hands. I see the hands of men working the loom. I see Vasu’s hands carrying water. I see Radha’s hands teaching young children their first letters. I see my mother’s hands working relentlessly in the kitchen. I know those women are with me, helping me to take the light further.
Vasu could never have read the words I write for my patients. Radha never had the freedom to choose the life her education prepared her for. My mother never became the teacher she dreamed of becoming.
But somehow, they brought the pieces of their unfinished dreams into my life. In my hands. In my work. In the choices I can make every day.
I used to think I had escaped their lives. Now I understand that I carry them with me. This is what it means to inherit more than a family history.
Sometimes we inherit unfinished dreams.
This is a true account. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of family members.
Rashmika Potdar is a hematologist-oncologist.
