4 ideas
An educated son, formed by mission schooling, has to decide whether to treat his brother's collapse as psychiatric illness or as a debt owed to the ancestors. Each generation that postpones the ritual reckoning passes the affliction, and the argument about it, to the next.
When a family reads individual suffering as the return of an unresolved wrong committed by its ancestors, the sick person stops being a patient and becomes a ledger entry. The question shifts from what is wrong with him to what his lineage owes and to whom. The same symptoms then produce different treatments, obligations, and blame depending on which reading prevails.
Formal Western-style education gives the son a vocabulary of science, medicine, and individual responsibility. The result is a family that can no longer agree on what counts as a cause, so every crisis becomes a contest over whose explanation governs the response.
A wrong that one generation declines to name or repair does not vanish. It resurfaces in descendants as affliction, silence, and division. The cost of avoiding the reckoning grows with each handoff, because later generations inherit both the harm and the habit of not addressing it.