In giving me her pendant, was my mother not only wishing me well on my journey but handing over our family’s story?

Standing next to my mother, I watched the flames leap up around the coffin and thought about my grandmother’s body inside, the death horoscope next to it. Had my grandmother been fated to have an unresolved relationship with my mother because of her troubles with her stepmother? Was I doomed to follow the same pattern with my daughter and carry on a struggle that had endured over three generations?

My grandmother planned never to marry. I first heard this in my twenties, when I stayed with her in Darjeeling after graduating from college. I wondered if, like me, she didn’t trust marriage. Having seen my parents and most of my friends’ parents divorce, I’d made a pact with myself: I would never marry; I’d live alone with a dog by the sea and write…