The Grandmothers Who Taught Us Silence

Breaking the Silence, Part 7

This continues directly from my Mother and Surinder Masi Ji's story — the daily phone calls, the silence they carried together, the way it lived so quietly in their chests and throats long before it ever reached words. That silence did not begin with them. To understand where it came from, I have to go back one generation further, to the two women who raised the women who raised me.

The Hardness She Had to Grow

I don't have many memories of my Nani Ji. She passed away when I was still in elementary school, and most of what stayed with me is small — butterscotch candies pressed into our hands when we visited, the particular sweetness of that gesture. But I remember, even as a child, sensing something unyielding beneath her. A hardness that never quite softened, even around her own grandchildren.

My cousin remembers it more clearly than I do. She recalls being at our house once, a house full of family, and watching my Nani Ji say something that made my Mother and my Aunt cry. I don't know the words that were spoken. I only know the shape of what was left behind — that my grandmother had a way of cutting that her daughters carried quietly into the rest of their lives.

When I asked my Aunties about her — what she was like, what it was like growing up in her house — I received so little. One Aunt said she was nice, and offered nothing more. My Mother and Masi Ji, when I asked them, went quiet in that same closed-door way. Nobody wanted to say anything that might sound unkind about their own mother. That loyalty, I think, is its own kind of silence — the kind that keeps daughters from telling the truth about the women who raised them, even when the truth might explain so much of what came after.

One story did surface, from my Aunt, from a time before she was married and still living at home. She and my Nani Ji were alone one day — my Nana Ji was out at work. They lived in Rajasthan, near the Punjab-Pakistan border, in a region still living inside the aftershocks of Partition, where soldiers still moved through the land and nothing had fully settled. That day, soldiers came through their fields. My Nani Ji told my Aunt they had to stay silent — turn off the radio, sit still in a closet, make the house sound empty. Two women alone, with no man home, were not safe. Even soldiers from their own country could not be trusted around that fact.

I think often about what that does to a woman — learning that safety depends on disappearing. That the correct response to danger is silence, stillness, the holding of breath until a threat passes. I don't think my Nani Ji learned that lesson only on that one afternoon. I think she had already been taught it, long before, and passed it to her daughters the only way she knew how — by becoming hard enough that nothing could get close enough to hurt her, and by teaching them, without ever saying it aloud, to do the same.

She had seven children. I don't know how many pregnancies came before or between them that didn't survive — no one ever spoke of those either. Seven children, or more, carried inside a body that was also expected to run a household, keep a family safe, and hold whatever silence the family needed her to hold.

I don't say any of this to excuse what her hardness did to my Mother and her sisters. I say it because I've come to understand that hardness like hers is rarely where a story begins. It's usually where an earlier story ends — a woman deciding, somewhere far back, that softness was no longer something she could afford to keep. Whatever else she was, my Nani Ji survived. And the hardness she grew to survive it is not something she carried by accident. It is something she built, the way you build a wall, because the world gave her every reason to build one.

The One Who Was Listening

My Dadhi Ji, my father's mother, never made it to America. Some of her children built lives here, built comfort here, built the kind of ease she spent her whole life without — but she stayed on the land, in the house, doing everything by hand until the end. She cooked on a mud stove. I have a video of her making roti for my father, her hands moving in a rhythm repeated so many thousands of times it looks less like labor and more like breath. I watch it sometimes. It's the closest I can get to knowing her.

By every account, she was sweet and strong at once — the particular combination so many of these women carried, because gentleness alone was never going to be enough to survive what they survived.

But she also carried something that wasn't fully her own. My father believes this now, later in his life, after his own spiritual path opened something in him that wasn't available to the family back then. He believes a spirit — a woman who had been killed in the family generations before — was trying to reach my Dadhi Ji. Trying to be heard through her. Trying to finish something that had been left unfinished by force.

At the time, no one had the language for that. No one had the willingness. They called her crazy instead. A woman speaking to something no one else could see was not understood as spiritually sensitive — she was understood as broken, as difficult, as someone to be managed rather than believed.

I think now that my Dadhi Ji may have been a healer who was never given the chance to become one. Clairvoyance and premonition seem to move through my father's feminine line — his sisters, my niece, my cousins, all of them women, all of them touched at some point by visions, by knowing things before they happened. I don't think my Dadhi Ji was the exception. I think she may have been close to where it began — a woman with a real gift that no one around her had the understanding, or the safety, to nurture. Instead of being taught how to hold it, she was left alone with it, until it looked less like a gift and more like an illness.

I sit with this now, in my own body. I know I carry some version of what she carried. I feel it at the edges sometimes — the same porousness, the same sensing of things before I have words for them. I am not rushing it open. I want to know I am safe enough, held enough, and steady enough in my own mind before I let it open all the way. My Dadhi Ji never got to choose when or how hers opened, or whether anyone would believe her once it did. I am choosing to open slowly, with support, so that what was unbearable for her can become, in me, something tended.

What the Guides Showed Me

A few years ago, I began ancestral lineage healing work with my teacher, Gita Thandika — tending all four of my lines at once: my Mother's mother, my Mother's father, my Father's mother, my Father's father. She asked me to learn what I could about my grandparents, so the work would have somewhere real to land. Much of what I've written here came from that asking — the questions I put to my Aunties, the story of the soldiers in the field, the truth about my Dadhi Ji.

In the deeper part of that work, I sat with the psychopomp guides — the ones who move through a lineage backward and forward, seven generations in each direction, tending what was never tended in its own time. I asked what caused the suffering in each of my four lines, and when it began.

For all four lines, the answer came back the same: somewhere in the late 1400s to 1500s. Around women being misunderstood. Around a severing of women's connection to the moon, to the womb, to the earth. Around a forgetting that women needed to be protected — not controlled, but protected, and that these are not the same thing at all.

It is not lost on me that Guru Nanak Dev Ji arrived into the world around that same window of time. A Divine Masculine presence strong enough to stand between women and what was being done to them. Women in the Sikh tradition were given swords. Their honor was something to be defended, not policed. Our Gurus revered women — perhaps not with the same totality as the ages when the Goddess was still openly worshipped, but enough to teach, clearly, that every person enters the world through a woman's body, and that this alone made her worthy of equal standing.

The teaching was given. Punjabi culture, so many generations later, still hasn't fully received it. The patriarchy that predates Sikhi has outlived, in so many homes, the medicine Sikhi offered against it.

What My Own Body Remembers

I carry this in my own body too. My neck. My shoulders. My back — the tightness that lives there and rarely fully releases. I've come to understand it as related to speaking truth: generations of women who were never permitted to name an injustice out loud, running quietly underneath my own reluctance to take up space with my voice. In one healing journey, I glimpsed a past life in which I was beheaded for speaking up about how women were being treated. I don't share that to be dramatic. I share it because the body seems to remember what history doesn't record, and mine has been asking me, for years, to finish the sentence that got me killed for starting it.

What Was Given to Me

There's a poem by Rupi Kaur I return to often — one that names something I sit with almost daily. She writes about being the first woman in her lineage with the freedom to choose her own life. To speak her mind without the whip of the lash behind her. To taste her own desires, when the women before her weren't permitted to feel them at all.

I feel this every day. I am, as far as I know, the first woman in my family with the real freedom to choose — whether to marry, whether to have children, how to speak, how to live. And still, even with that freedom, I notice how the culture around me hasn't fully caught up to it. In most rooms, I am still introduced in relation to a man. That's so-and-so's daughter. Her father is such-and-such. Her uncle is so-and-so. Rarely does anyone say, she is Kuldeep's daughter — using my Mother's name as the reference point. And yet lineage, biologically, runs through women. A daughter is born already carrying the eggs of her own future children, which means I existed, in some form, inside my Nani Ji's womb before my Mother was even born. I carried her, in a sense, before I carried myself. And I carry what wasn't resolved in her too — which is part of why I do this work, so it can be healed rather than passed forward unchanged.

I don't have children. I may not. And I've stopped needing to explain that as loss. Some people find their deepest purpose through raising children, through the lessons only parenting can teach. I honor that completely. But it isn't the only path to purpose, and I no longer let anyone's pity convince me my life is incomplete because it looks different from theirs.

What Is Still Happening Now

I want to be honest about something: this isn't only history. Honor killings still happen — in Pakistan, in India, and yes, in the UK, in countries people assume have long left this behind. Women are still punished, sometimes with their lives, for choosing themselves. For loving the wrong person. For leaving. For speaking.

This is part of why silence still feels dangerous to break, even now, even for those of us with more freedom than our grandmothers ever had. The fear isn't imagined. It's inherited — and in some parts of the world, it's still current.

But I no longer believe silence protects us the way it may have once. I believe silence is what allows these patterns to continue unnamed, generation after generation. I believe the way forward isn't loud defiance, necessarily, but truth spoken with care — the kind of truth my Mother and Masi Ji never quite found their way to, even across all those daily calls.

What the Heart Carries Forward

I think of my Nani Ji, learning that safety meant disappearing. My Dadhi Ji, punished for perceiving what no one else would face. My Mother and her Sister, loving each other completely and still never finding the words for what hurt most. And I think of myself — the one who gets to ask the questions they couldn't ask, who gets to speak what they couldn't say, who gets to choose a life none of them were ever offered.

I'm not interested in blame. I'm interested in completion — in being the one, finally, who lets the story finish instead of repeat.

What is being asked of you to interrupt, so the women after you can live lighter?

And what would it mean to speak the thing your mother, and her mother, were never permitted to say?