I found the below sentence again. Previously I made out its meaning, but now I am not sure if I was right -
That explanation seems likely enough, but I know it to be untrue. The truth is that I did not want to think of her as a relative: to have done that would have diminished her and her family – I could not bring myself to believe that their worth in my eyes could be reduced to something so arbitrary and unimportant as a blood relationship.
From start of the sentence till the colon is fine, but what that sentence after colon mean? "to have done that" is the subject, and I think "to have done that would have diminished her and her family" means "If something was done, their value would have reduced". But what is that something? Is it referring to "Not thinking her as a relative"? But the very next line "I couldn't bring myself ..." suggests that "I have deep respect for them, much greater and beyond the blood relation".
Context:
In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father’s aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib. It startles me now to discover how readily the name comes off my pen as ‘Mayadebi’ for I have never spoken of her thus; not aloud, at any rate: as my grandmother’s only sister, she was always Mayathakuma to me. But still, from as far back as I can remember, I have known her, in the secrecy of my mind, as ‘Mayadebi’ – as though she were a well-known stranger, like a film star or a politician whose picture I had seen in a newspaper. Perhaps it was merely because I knew her very little, for she was not often in Calcutta. That explanation seems likely enough, but I know it to be untrue. The truth is that I did not want to think of her as a relative: to have done that would have diminished her and her family – I could not bring myself to believe that their worth in my eyes could be reduced to something so arbitrary and unimportant as a blood relationship.
