to sort out some land business, dad and i drove down to thirukadaiyur. apparently a tiny piece of my family's history has been sitting there all this time.
the story goes that my grandmother's father was from this town. he worked as a driver in singapore for years, saved up enough money and came back to buy quite a bit of land around the village. it's honestly funny to think that working as a driver back then could buy you acres of land. today you'd be lucky to buy a parking spot.
unfortunately, he passed away not long after. from what i've always heard, my great-grandmother was far too trusting, and the "oor kaaranga" somehow convinced her to give up a good portion of the land. nobody in the family seems to know exactly how it happened anymore. the story has changed a little every time i've heard it. thankfully, the documents didn't disappear along with it.
so, about fifty years later, dad and i found ourselves driving around the same village trying to locate land that neither of us had ever seen before. the plan was to find the land, finalize the sale and head home before dinner.
naturally, none of that happened.
we had a buyer waiting, but after a lot of discussion we couldn't agree on the price, so the deal fell through. in the end, all we really accomplished was proving that land disputes can outlive the people involved.
since we were already in the area, we decided to visit a few relatives in nagapattinam. from there we drove to a small village called thirumeignanam to meet my grandmother's uncle.
this is where my family tree completely stops making sense.
my grandmother is seventy-six.
her uncle is seventy-seven.
apparently, when they were young, my great-grandmother raised him because he was the youngest child in a very large family. that was fairly common back then, with older siblings often becoming a second set of parents.
we ended up talking to him for almost two hours.
his story was actually quite heartbreaking.
being the youngest in the family meant he spent his entire life working on the family's farm. he did the hard labor, but when it came time to divide the property, there wasn't much left for him. every time he tried to leave the village or find a different job, his older siblings would convince him to stay because there was always more work to be done.
somehow, decades passed like that.
at one point he smiled and said something that has stayed with me ever since.
"i'm sitting here exactly as i was born. i don't have anything more... just the clothes i'm wearing."
it's one thing to hear stories about family history, but it's another to sit across from someone who lived through it. all of a sudden, the land we had been arguing about the whole day didn't seem nearly as important anymore.