Hidden Family History
I never liked my grandmother. She was really mean and said all sorts of hurtful things about my parents. At one point, I started to dislike her so much that I stopped hanging out with her entirely. I refused to talk to her on the phone and left all of her texts unanswered.
What she did had me that mad at her. After 10 years, she left the state and went to live in the UK with her daughter. One day, my aunt called up my father and said that she wanted her mother to live there with her permanently. She asked my dad if he could pack up her things in the house and send them over.
He said yes. Meanwhile, I’d just graduated and came back home for a break, so I tagged along. The house was on the outskirts of the city, so it was a long drive. When we arrived, my dad and I headed straight for the basement.
In all the years he lived there, my dad was not allowed to enter the basement, so had wanted to see what was there. I helped him break the lock as we couldn’t find the key to the door. I should have known then we should have turned back. What we saw when we entered made our jaws drop.
There were large greenish, metal trunks everywhere. The room was surprisingly neat and there was some dust that had settled on them. My dad opened a couple of trunks and found old, brittle books. At some point, I noticed an odd-looking brown trunk and jumped across to it to see what was inside.
It contained old photos of my grandmother and my grandfather, both in some sort of a uniform. They looked like defense uniforms, but not Indian. I fished out more pictures that showed more people wearing the same uniform and standing in some hilly region.
Behind every one of the photographs, there were numbers written down, which I assumed were to indicate the year they were taken. I asked my dad about these pictures and he, from the other end of the basement, said that my grandfather was in the Indian army.
I told him that the uniforms looked different, but he said that the uniforms had undergone many changes over the years and I just didn’t recognize some of the earlier iterations. I brought over the photos to him and pointed to a symbol on the lower right-hand corner of the photographs.
When he saw it, his face went white. He asked me which trunk these photographs were in and I pointed to the brown trunk where I’d found them. He made his way over and fished out the other pictures, studying each of them carefully. He then opened other nearby trunks.
From one of them, he pulled out a small box that contained large envelopes sealed with wax. He tore them open and was immediately shocked by their contents. It was the birth certificates of my father and his three siblings.
The date on my father’s “Indian” birth certificate did not match the one listed on the document he had one file, but that wasn’t what bothered us the most. The name that was written on the birth certificate was not my grandfather’s.
It turned out that none of them shared the same father except for the oldest sibling. Oh, the plot thickened even more. The locations of their births were also not the same—they were all born in different parts of the world and not in India as they had always thought.
My father’s document said he was born in Russia and I asked him if he remembered anything. He said he didn’t. That night, we didn’t go home…we opened all the trunks, uncovering different secrets from each one.
My father and I took the photos and visited his friend who worked as an archivist for the government. I will never forget the look on the man’s face when he told my father that those uniforms were old Soviet uniforms. But that wasn’t even the worst part.
In actuality, the uniform my grandmother was wearing was not Russian at all, it was Chinese. My dad went back to the house to open the other trunks but didn’t find anything on his mother’s time in the army. He wanted to ask her directly, but I didn’t let him because he seemed too agitated to talk calmly.
I went back up to the master bedroom and was startled by my phone. It was my aunt—she asked me if everything was okay, as she’d not heard anything from us since she last called.
I told her everything was fine and that we just had some difficult clients to deal with at the office. At that point, I opened my grandma’s cupboard and saw the locker. I asked my aunt if there was anything in the locker that had to be sent over to them, but she wasn’t sure.
I asked dad if we should open the locker and he said that he’d do it. That evening, we broke it open and found even more mind-boggling documents. A lot of the files were about my grandfather’s enlistments and tours.
There were also some documents on certain high-ranking army officers, including my grandma. We now think that she was one of the many spies sent out by the KGB to India. Seriously, my head was spinning at this point.
There was a code under her name, too: T.W.o.B. Unfortunately, we could not go through all of the files as my father sent everything to be examined by the archivist.
We are still waiting for the news, but we did get an answer to one mystery that had been bothering us for weeks—my grandmother was never a teacher and her name isn’t real. She is not even Indian by blood.
My grandmother has since been made aware of all of this. She recently had a massive heart attack and has still not gained consciousness.