Pramoedya Ananta Toer – Grandmother Satima and mother Saidah, according to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, made him who he is.

Two women gave me life. Two women of one flesh and blood, but sundered by fate. Two women who then defied that fate. Two women who taught me that the individual matters, above anyone or anything else. Two women who are my heroes.

I don't know when my grandmother Satima was born-back then, during the 1890s, they didn't keep records – but it was in a fishing village in central Java, near the town of Rembang. By all accounts she was a pretty girl. Pretty enough to catch the eye of the powerful head of local religious affairs, a Javanese man working for the colonial Dutch administration. She was taken by this man in marriage and became what was known as a "practice wife," a woman who fulfilled a man's personal and sexual needs until he decided to marry a woman of his own class. She slept with him and helped take care of his Rembang residence, a sprawling complex of houses, pavilions, stables and even a mosque. The "marriage" bestowed prestige on my grandmother back at her fishing village because she was seen to have ascended to a higher class. But it did not take long for her to fall to earth. The Javanese man owned her, and he could discard her-which he did after she had given birth to a baby girl, my mother Saidah. My grandmother was just 14.

So young, yet my grandmother was already a nobody. No husband, no home, no child (my mother was taken away from her to remain at Rembang), no job. Too ashamed to return to her village, she instead made her way south to the town of Blora. There, she met and married an itinerant worker. But everything this new husband tried-farming, selling soup, hawking spare parts-he failed at; he was a loser and when he drifted away, she decided she was better off without him. The accumulated heartbreak over the years would have been enough to shatter anyone, but not my grandmother. She resolved to no longer depend on others, on men, just on herself.

It was my grandmother I wrote about in my novel Girl from the Coast: "Her skin was golden, her body small and slender. Each day she carried a large basket tied to her back by a length of cloth. She went to the houses of the nobles. She bought old clothing, empty bottles, even broken things, then sold them in the marketplace. She lived in a hut on the edge of town. The walls were of woven bamboo, the holes plastered over with cow dung. Anything she couldn't sell, she stored under the wooden platform on which she slept." My grandmother was poor, but she had regained her dignity. No matter how hard life was, she walked with her head high. Her example taught me that no one is ever too down to never come up again. During my harsh years of incarceration on Buru Island, my memory of her enabled me to keep going.

My mother Saidah, meanwhile, was living a very different life-at least for a while. Though she was a girl-and merely the daughter of a concubine-she was privileged, even if she did not quite possess the status granted children of her father's "main" wife from his own social class. She didn't have to lift her finger for anything; she was even forbidden from entering the kitchen. The plentiful servants took care of all that. My mother also received a good education. The Dutch encouraged schooling for women, and Javanese aristocrats followed suit, if only so their women could converse intelligently with their Dutch counterparts.

My mother met my father Toer at home. The Dutch rented rooms in the huge Rembang house for their staff, and Toer lived there because he was a government teacher. The stepmother encouraged their relationship-she had children of her own to raise and wanted my mother out of the house. After they married, my parents left for Blora, where my father got a job at a school promoting nationalist teachings. Saidah helped run the school, raised funds to pay the salaries of teachers (they never got any money from the central administration), printed a school newsletter, opened a kindergarten for poor children, planted crops on our small parcel of land and brought up eight children, of whom I was the eldest. She read all the time-in English, Dutch, Javanese, Arabic-and she read to me.

Saidah grew to believe fervently in the nationalist cause. Independence-for herself and her nation-became her rallying cry. She insisted that just as a people have to be in charge of their own destiny, so must an individual be in control of her life. She pushed me to excel at school (urging me to persist when I wanted to quit after failing sixth grade), to complete my studies and to enroll in a vocational institute in Surabaya where I learned to be a radio operator. She taught me to love to work, that it didn't matter what I did, so long as I did not do it for the colonial government – because that would be tantamount to participating in the colonization of our own people. Never beg, my mother stressed, never ask for something you don't deserve. Even if it's just a school notebook, obtain it yourself rather than have it given to you. I bought into the idea of self-sufficiency. With the money we made selling produce at the market, I bought some hens. With the money selling eggs, I bought some goats, and so on. I have been independent ever since.

Now the story takes what would be a fictional turn-if it weren't astonishingly true. One day, a woman showed up at our home seeking our old and unused household items to resell. My mother asked her to come in and sit down. They started talking. The first question we Indonesians habitually ask strangers is where they are from. The visitor replied Rembang. Me too, my mother said. In a big house on the square. And so, mother and daughter rediscovered each other-after nearly 20 years. They displayed little emotion. They had hardly ever known each other, and they were too different: one illiterate, the other educated, one poor, the other relatively well-off. My mother invited her mother to stay with us; she refused. She never said why, but I figured it was because she did not want to be beholden to anyone, not even her daughter, her only child. What the two women had in common-stubborn individualism – is what prevented them from growing closer.

I visited my grandmother often in her shack. But the time she really needed me, I was not there. My mother had died from tuberculosis and post-labor complications. To support the family, I worked in Jakarta as a typist for a Japanese news agency. I am not sure what exactly happened, but this is what my siblings later told me. Grandmother Satima was at our place in Blora when she complained of stomach pain and said she wanted to return to her shack. My family tried to persuade her to stay, but she refused-she did not want to trouble anyone. She left to walk home, and died by the roadside, quietly, alone.

Neither my grandmother nor my mother are forgotten. The literal meaning of the Indonesian word for hero, pahlawan, is a person – not someone necessarily great, just a regular person-whose life benefits others. My grandmother and mother benefited me. They are my role models. They live in all the many strong women characters who people my writings. And they live in all the people who have ever had to fight to be themselves.

[Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's most celebrated writer, is the author of The Buru Quartet, among other books.]