Remembering My Ancestors On Mahalaya Shraddha

I don’t have exhaustive knowledge about my ancestors. Truthfully, very few people do. But I know my great-grandmother was widowed at a tender age. She never remarried, managed agriculture on her own with her two little boys, and survived with bare minimum resources in a male-dominated village in early 1900s.

I know of the struggles my grandfather faced when dacoits ransacked our ancestral house and stole everything they could - jewelry, valuables, everything.

I know of the untimely deaths in my lineage, children and young ones, some taken by disease, some by causes never explained.

I also know of certain souls in my lineage who behaved harshly with some family members whom they occupied, torturing and controlling (preta, brahmarakshas, and the like, as we were explained by the experts of subject matter during those days, late nineties to be precise).

There are also stories of someone building temples, someone devoting his entire life to serving his mother, and yet someone who wasted every family resource available at that time.

Many seasons, many colors but the dominance of grey remains a theme. I think it's true for almost everyone. Griefs are longer and stronger than joys, at least as perceived by the mind.

Little is known to me from my maternal side. They were farmers - my great-grandfather and those before him. My Nanaji worked in a well-known publishing company, A H Wheeler & Co., the one famous for bookstalls at railway stations. My Naniji died of tuberculosis at the age of 35. Nanaji never remarried.

When I was still in my mother’s womb, she once woke up past midnight to go freshen up and saw someone in the courtyard. She felt something abnormal, but convinced herself it was her sister-in-law walking around. In the morning, she asked, but all the sisters-in-law had slept peacefully through the night. She strongly believed that had she spoken to that entity, the shock might have caused her miscarriage.

But this is only a single page from the vast, unknown book of my ancestry. The majority remains lost to the passage of time. People, desires, hopes, laughter, happiness - all vanished. I often wish someone had maintained a record. But it’s all right. I am trying to preserve what little I can.

Today, while performing Mahalaya Shraddha, I wished all my ancestors peace, safety, and contentment. They went through so much in their lives - struggles, poverty, fears, oppression, pains.

Since I began doing tarpana, guided by manuals created by Sri PV Narsimharao Ji (creator of Jagannath Hora astrology software), something has changed within me. Earlier I felt helpless, merely a passive spectator to the past, playing the same CD in a loop, experiencing the same emotions everytime. Now I feel that through tarpana, I can send them my love, respect, and care, and perhaps that is all they truly need.

For more than a year, I have offered them self-cooked food twice daily. I do it because I feel good doing it. There's no compulsion of it, doing tarpana is more than enough. My mother always loved me, fed me well, cared for each of her children as though each were her only one. Now I feel it is my duty to feed her, along with all my ancestors, to keep them happy. And many times when I am making food for her, or offering her, or doing tarpana, I cry.

Please do it. Think of the sacrifices your ancestors made for you. Think of the pains they endured in their lives. Think of their hardships in the lokas where they now dwell. Offer them tarpana. It will bring them comfort, peace, and safety. It will help them exist wherever they are with more ease. And this is what every family member must ensure. You are connected to them. Everything they feel somehow dictates what happens in your mind and life to a good extent for the bond is biological.

There will never come an 'ideal' day for it. Don't wait for it, you'll yourself become a memory but that day may not come probably. Do not fall for the thought that someone else will do it. Do not fall for the myths so widely prevalent in the society that lure one to believe that only pundits can do it for their yajamans. If you feel a stirring of remembrance for your ancestors, it is a sign - you must start offering tarpana.