Daughter of the Ganges

by Asha Miro

  Father Prakaast receives us warmly and pulls the registry book from a cupboard. While he prepares a copy of the baptism certificate I have asked him for, I sit beside him and let my eyes run over the lines written on my page:

  Date of baptism: May 7, 1969. Date of birth: November 7, 1967. Name: Asha Maria. They kept the name I had been given at birth and added Maria to make it Christian. Surname: Ghoderao. Father’s name: Radhu Kashinath. When I reach the sixth line my eyes fill with tears as I read the letters one by one that make up the name of the woman who gave her life in giving birth to me: Shevbai. I ask the priest to pronounce, in his language, the names of the people who were my parents. I have never seen them, nor will I ever see a single picture of them, but just hearing the music of their names helps me to construct an image. Father’s profession: farmer. Nationality: Indian. Then come the names of the godparents, the chaplain, and the place where I was baptized: the Church of Saint Anne in Nasik.

  The mists that shrouded my origins have lifted. I am walking through the town where I was born. I know how I ended up at the convent and how I got from there to Bombay and to fly on to Barcelona. All the gaps have been filled with words and specific images that describe my reality.

  Nobody ever spoke to me about my father. A few years after I arrived in Barcelona, Mother Adelina wrote to tell us of his death. The death of my father was the only news I ever had of him, and despite never having known him, remembering nothing, feeling only rancor toward him, I was still very sad. Of my mother I knew even less. I had tried to find her among the women I saw on the streets of Bombay. I would fix on a sari of bright silk, a pair of penetrating eyes, an elegant walk, and I wanted to find something familiar. If only I could see her, just for a second.

  Somewhere I have some siblings. I don’t know how many, or if they are boys or girls, or what kind of life they have, if they have children, where they live, how they live. They are the children of my father’s first marriage. Mother Nirmala, however, advises me not to look for them. They know nothing of me, they were told nothing, and they have their own lives. She thinks that our encounter might disturb them and she might be right. So, I should not worry about it anymore and ought to put an end to my research into the past.

  12.

  BACK FROM INDIA

  It has taken me seven years to put the notes of my travel diary into some kind of order, and to reread them calmly. After I returned from India I needed a couple of months to get my emotions sorted out and to carry on with my life. It was not easy. In repeating the magical route I had made twenty years ago, from Bombay to Barcelona, I was taking the first step toward digesting everything I had discovered. Every bit of pain, every spark of joy that emerged in India, is now trying to settle inside me. I absorbed everything like a sponge, open to it all. And really, none of my experiences was in vain. I have grown as a person.

  Of course, changes don’t happen just like that. The act of filling the gaps, of finding answers, has allowed me to find myself, to form a more solid identity. Now I know that I also belong to the wonderful land of India, and it is wonderful not because everyone says so but rather because in many ways I felt just like another Indian; I was happy to be a part of it. Now that everything is in order, I can look back at the past and be moved. I can talk about my story, and I can look to the future and make decisions that may or may not be right, but I am no longer floating about in uncertainty. One of those decisions was to write these pages. I needed to explain myself.

  Before going back to India, I watched every television documentary about the country. At first, with my parents and Fatima, and later in my own place. If necessary, I would record them to avoid missing any, but I didn’t feel prepared to go into it any deeper, to get to know people who could tell me about my country in their own words. I always ended up asking what would have become of me had I stayed there. I felt privileged and guilty, and that prevented me from finding the courage to learn any more. Now I feel proud to be an Indian-Catalan, and I no longer lower my gaze when I meet people from my country. On the contrary, there is mutual recognition. Moreover, the mixture allows me to carry on as I am. I grew up here, but a lot of what I am comes from over there, and I don’t mean simply the physical aspects. During my stay in India I recognized an infinite number of details in myself, such as the way I had always liked walking around barefoot, the smell of incense, striking colors, the harmony of flowers and candles.

  Coming back to Barcelona also opened my eyes to another reality. There was a whole movement of people adopting children from other countries. I felt obliged to tell my story. I couldn’t just keep it to myself because I had taken as much as I could from it. With my experience I could show people that even though things seemed complicated they would turn out well in the end. So I offered to do a few talks for those just starting out on the road to adoption. The adoptive parents-to-be arrived at my talks in low spirits. They were bewildered by the long application process. It all looked like an impossible mountain to climb, and they were having doubts. I tried to allay their fears, explaining how natural parents ultimately also go through the same process: They make their decision with all the goodwill in the world and then they have nine months to go through all the worries, to be scared, to stop being scared, to ask themselves if they know what they’re doing. But no child arrives with a set of instructions, and neither do the adopted ones. Many of the things they were concerned about had no clear answer, almost nothing is cut-and-dry, but there is one thing that I am adamant about: the changing of children’s names. There is always the excuse that perhaps they will be given a child with a difficult name to pronounce, or that it sounds strange in the language of their newly adopted country. In my view, you can’t change anyone’s name. When you are born, you are given a name and there is always a reason. That name is a part of you, it goes everywhere with you. If they had changed my name it would have been an attempt to erase seven years of my life. This child is going to face enough challenges, a new country, language, customs; how can he or she deal with another change? The hope concealed in my name has been my guide, the impulse that has seen me through since I was very small.

  The general desire is to adopt babies. By telling my story, I help them see that adopting children who are a little older is not an insurmountable problem. Those children are very aware of their situation and they deserve an opportunity. There is also a lot of concern about language, and there are parents who immediately think of sending the children to an international school. My feeling is that if children are to feel they belong, they must be integrated into their environment right from the start. They will learn other languages when the time comes.

  Their previous life has to be put to one side without rejecting it. Their natural parents have to be present in some way, but they should never be blamed for abandoning them. No secrets, and no rancor. It can be difficult to strike the right balance between explaining where a child comes from and his integration into a new family, with all that this entails. Normally, the child will mark the pace, in the way he or she expresses interest or curiosity. When I was small I used to feel terrible panic when I saw people from India, thinking they would take me away with them. Other children might not be so concerned, every person is different. What you cannot do is force them either to forget or to remember more than they do.

  Returning to one’s place of origin is also something that worries parents. They want to know when it should be done and how. Again, it should not be forced. Above all, the children have to feel secure that their new parents will not let them down. I didn’t feel capable of doing this until I was twenty-seven years old. Others are ready for it much earlier, it all depends. My sister, Fatima, for example, still doesn’t even want to talk about going back to India. It’s true that the pain of thinking about how you were abandoned is intense and not easily allayed.

  Sometimes I meet adoptive parents-to-be who ask me about racism, about adolescence, about all that can happen and everything that can affect you. I tell t
hem personal anecdotes, but ultimately the message has to be that they should put aside their worries, because in the end everything will turn out well in this adventure of love.

  I would like this book to be my little contribution to those people who find themselves going through what my parents and I went through. I feel the need to explain myself and at the same time to put my experience at the disposal of those to whom it could be useful. After reading it, future parents might be able to put some of their fears in proportion. For those who have already formed a family, perhaps they might see in this a reflection of some of their own experiences; possibly their stories have taken a completely different course, but equally enriching. This is why I have included some fragments from my mother’s diary as a counterbalance to everything that I experienced. The story seen from the other side. Two separate points of departure, at times opposing, but that finally merge together.

  For now, however, I can only hope that it will not be another twenty years before I visit India again.

  Barcelona, August 1995–September 2002

  BOOK TWO:

  THE TWO FACES OF THE MOON

  13.

  RETURNING TO MY ORIGINS

  I am returning to India again, much sooner than I had expected. It will be my second journey back to the country where I was born. Almost thirty years of life in Barcelona have passed since the first time I arrived there in 1974 from Bombay (when it was still Bombay; now it is Mumbai).

  Before I went back to India the first time, in 1995, the questions I wanted to answer were my own. My concerns were silent and difficult to share, very solitary. It was a few years later when I began to realize that I was not alone and that my questions were neither unique nor restricted to me. As I got to know other adopted people, younger than I, I discovered that they were all asking the same questions I had once asked myself.

  When we were small, Fatima and I were the only touch of color in our family circle, in school, in our neighborhood. Now, in the new millennium, mothers and fathers going into this kind of adoption are very well prepared—they have strong social support and information. They can contrast and discuss their experiences with those of a lot of other families. They can find books on the subject and consult loads of websites on the internet. They can attend discussion groups with adoptive parents from all over the world.

  The most important thing, however, is that adopted boys and girls are beginning not to feel all that different, all that special. Particularly when, from time to time, they meet other children who come from the same country of origin. They grow up knowing that there are others who are living the same adventure as theirs, and in some way I think that the life they have seems easier. To be able to share the experience of being different, as they do now, must be much more pleasant.

  There is no comparison between the way adopted boys and girls are brought up today and how they were a few decades ago, when there wasn’t a single children’s book that dealt with the differences, when the only thing that counted was the intuition of the parents, who were veritable pioneers. There are always exceptions, but I believe I can say that new generations of adopted boys and girls live right from the start with a knowledge of their own stories, short or long. Many of them are prepared to go back to seek their origins, even if they finally decide not to repeat the experience, either out of fear of being confronted with their past, or for some other personal reason.

  So much has changed since my first journey back to India. I get chills just thinking about it. It was quite unthinkable to me that the publication of Daughter of the Ganges would bring me into the lives of so many people. Their fascinating stories, without their realizing it, have helped me to better understand who I am and what it means to be an adopted child.

  Now I am going to go back to Mumbai, and to Nasik, the town where I was born, in order to transform the story I wrote into images, to convert it into a documentary for television. And it is in this moment that I recall all the questions I had before stepping aboard the plane to make my first journey. I remember the worries I had and how nervous I was about returning to the country where I was born: the anxiety of meeting once more the nuns who had taken care of me in the early years of my infancy; the doubts I had about whether I would be able to speak Marathi. More than anything, I remember the worries I had about finding out what had happened at the very beginning of my story, why I had been abandoned. This and many other questions were what I carried with me in my suitcase on that first trip. This time I don’t have so much baggage with me (or so I think).

  When I went back to my country of origin a second time, I knew before I set out that I would probably pick up on things I hadn’t seen the first time, that a lot of small details must have passed me by. The reasons for this trip are different. Now I am going back to film a documentary about my book, but I also have a secret purpose to track down someone from my biological family.

  A few days ago I received an email from Mother Nirmala, in Nasik. I had to read it several times before I began to take it in. Nirmala is one of the nuns who took care of me when I was small, and her email, which was a bit confused and written in a strange kind of Spanish, seemed to suggest that she knew something about my story that she had never told me. So, once again I am going to board a plane for India with another knot in my stomach, with serious doubts about whether I shall be capable of facing a new set of emotions.

  My first journey back to India was undertaken with the good company and understanding support of the group of NGO volunteers. This time I am lucky enough to be traveling in good company again. Coming with me are Jordi Llompart, who will direct the documentary; Mikele López and Grau Serra, the two wonderful cameramen; and Anna Soler-Pont, my literary agent, and one of the people responsible for so many of the things that have happened to me since the publication of Daughter of the Ganges.

  This is the beginning of a double adventure: the challenge of making a documentary and the will to follow through with the research into my origins. It is now that I realize that one single journey was not enough.

  14.

  EVERYTHING IN ITS PROPER PLACE

  The first time I went back I also began in Mumbai, partly to get used to the reality of India, but also because that was where the volunteer work I had come to do was being organized. Then, I was lodged with the Patil family. This time I am staying in a hotel in Colaba, which is called downtown although it is far from everything, the most remote point on any map of the city. The hotel is by the sea, very close to the Gate of India, one of the monuments that evokes the era of British colonization, and the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel.

  On the day after arriving in the city, we pass in front of the Gate of India early in the morning on our way to Regina Pacis to begin filming the documentary. Things are different now because Mother Adelina died in the year 2000. I didn’t find out until just before I set out on this trip and it was quite a blow. Mother Adelina will always be one of the most important people in my life. It was she who did her utmost to make the dream I had when I was five years old finally come true: to have a mother and a father. She was one of the nuns at Regina Pacis, the convent where I lived from the age of three to six, and it was from there that I went to meet the people who became my parents.

  The whole team (Jordi, Mikele, Grau, Anna, and I) goes in two taxis loaded with all the equipment for filming: metal boxes filled with lights and tripods are loaded onto the roof racks and practically sink the cars, old as they are, and the overloaded trunks have to be tied up with string. We pass in front of the two stone lions that still stand guard at the entrance to the main station in Mumbai, Victoria Terminal. The area in front of the building, inspired by the English colonial style, or perhaps an actual copy of a real building in London, is crowded with street vendors. The chaotic traffic brings us to a halt, which allows me to take a closer look at all that is going on in the streets in front of the station. A boy approaches the window of my taxi and puts his hands to his mouth to indicate that he wants somethi
ng to eat. Chapati is the only word I understand of what he says. I remain fixed, staring at him with all the sadness in the world, immobile. I sit there, stuck to the seat of the car, and feel powerless. A sea of black and yellow taxis, similar to those in Barcelona, moves slowly forward, tooting their horns. A sea of noise, unbearable. On one side a motorcycle comes by with a whole family on board. The father is driving with a boy of about seven in front of him, holding tightly to the handle-bars; the mother, dressed in a sari, is sitting sidesaddle on the back with a young child in her lap; and between father and mother, a little girl no more than four years old. Of course, not one of them is wearing a helmet. On the other side a bicycle appears, loaded down with live chickens. Along the pavement are stalls selling everything, lined up one after the other: piles of shoes of every kind, cut watermelons covered with flies, sugarcane or sugarcane juice, schoolbags, white cotton shirts, coconuts, pirated CDs …. There are also lots of tobacco stalls set up on every corner with baskets of eggs hanging from the roof, which you often see. They are building everywhere and lots of people live between the heaps of debris piled on the construction sites, where they can stay until another building starts and forces them off. The cars dodge around the fires they use for cooking and for keeping warm at night.

  Having crossed half the city, drinking in images of all kinds, I glimpse the imposing wrought-iron gate. To the right is the sign that has always been there, with the name that now seems like a frontier I had to cross to get from one place to another, from one country to another, from being an orphan to having a family. REGINA PACIS. The two taxis stop and we start to unload the equipment. The asphalt on the road has deteriorated and there are big puddles everywhere. We will spend the day filming here. My heart is beating. Anna goes up to say hello to Margaret Fernandes, the nun who is in charge of the convent, the girls’ orphanage, the home for destitute girls, and the school for poor girls. This order of nuns was founded by Vicenta María López Vicuña in Madrid in 1876. The first four Spanish nuns arrived in India in 1951.