Neat thread! I’ve got a cool story to share…
So where my family originates, it’s very typical for couples to get arranged marriages. For my parents and all of their friends, there’s no story of “how they met”: it’s just generally assumed that they got arranged married at some point (and the occasional odd person who married out of love is the oddball and the anomaly of the group).
The story of how my parents met isn’t a particularly significant or fascinating one
…
How my grandparents met on the other hand is quite an interesting tale.
First off I should mention that there’s a generation gap in my family (on both sides of my family actually). This is the story of my maternal grandmother and grandfather. My mom was the youngest of 7 children; my grandmother is my only living grandparent (87 freaking years old!) and the only one that’s been living since I was born (i.e. all my other grandparents died before I was born… my grandfather on my dad’s side lived to be 97 and still died way before I was born).
The story of how my grandparents met takes place 70 years ago.
At that time it was very rural in India... India was a united country back then so India, Bangladesh and Pakistan were all one country (my parents are both from Bangladesh).
There was no means of communication during this time outside of writing letters (and this was like India so it was ridiculously rural all around: they’d cook with gas and didn’t have fridges and didn’t have the bulkf of the technology that other parts of the world did at the time).
Disclaimer: not sure if any of you believe in ghosts or spirits… but I guess you’ll have to for a second for the sake of the story.
My great grandmother (my grandmother’s mother) had a jinn that was her friend and that she could communicate with (a spirit/ghost essentially; there’s allegedly a spirit world alongside a human world).
My grandmother lived in a village in Bangladesh (technically still India then). She had a cousin who was studying in Calcutta, India (another country’s distance away). My grandfather was also studying in Calcutta…
My great grandparents were looking to get my grandmother married but couldn’t find many suitors for her in her village.
The story goes that my great grandmother’s jinn told my great grandmother that there was a young man in Calcutta who would be studying in the same hostel that my grandmother’s cousin had been studying.
The jinn described his physical characteristics and personality in detail and where he would be, what he would be studying, and the apartment number of where to find him (humanly impossible to do; they lived a few hundred miles apart, communication or transportation between them was a matter of days at best, and they were complete strangers!!). The jinn explained that the young man there would be a good husband and that he was looking very actively to get married despite being young (it was rare for men to get married young; my grandmother would be 17 and my grandfather 21: unheard of age difference … usually men would be much older than their wives). It was true…
my grandfather’s mother was dying; even though he was still studying, he wanted to rush and get married young so that his mother would get to see him married before she passed away.
My great grandmother wrote to the cousin, and he went to the room number given by the jinn and met my grandfather and they talked and arranged to get married. My grandmother took the trip down to Calcutta (which took a long ass time because there weren’t cars to take them back then) and got married.
They happened to like each other quite a lot… I know this and the other pieces of the story in detail because my grandfather was a writer!
Although my grandfather died many years before I was born, he was an obsessive and prolific writer, and his writings lived on to become legacy for future generations (me) to read (very unique because typically people in matriarchal societies such as these wouldn’t have quirky habits or hobbies like that).
He would write day in and day out and after he died his journals and writings and notebooks lived on. He was quite brilliant and wrote about philosophy and literature and poetry about mundane things… but was also quite the romantic and wrote some really beautiful letters to and pieces of poetry about my grandmother…
That’s the story… I’ve heard quite a few other stories about my great grandmother and her jinn, though ideas of supernatural aren’t entertained as much in the west (not making a judgment either, just that’s what it happens to be).
And I could choose to believe it or not too I suppose… but I believe it and it puts a smile on my face considering that I was born as the eventual result of advice of a ghost to her human comrade
