Daughter of the Ganges

by Asha Miro

  When I can, I get away by myself and go straight to the big hall where I slept as a child. The same fans are still on the ceiling. I remember staring at them while they turned, which would help me to sleep.

  Everything is the same, except that Mother Adelina is no longer here. The crows in the branches of the trees cry out the same way they did when I was little. Seeing them, I can’t help thinking of the time when one of them attacked me while I was living here. There are a lot of flowers of every color. It is monsoon season and between the abundance of rain and the constant heat, the garden is in full bloom.

  I climb the steps to the main entrance and ask for Margaret. I ask in an English that I am hoping to improve soon. In the entrance hall, with all the dark wooden furniture and the ceiling fans, I am immediately taken back to my childhood, to all the times I crossed that space running barefoot. It hasn’t changed at all. It smells the same. It smells clean.

  My meeting with Margaret begins to dislodge a few of the details of my story. Margaret is from Goa, the old Portuguese colony in India, and apart from Portuguese and English she speaks Spanish very well. She was at Regina Pacis when I lived here. A few months ago I sent her a copy of my book in Spanish and she read it straightaway. She has been hoping to discuss it because she claims that it is full of mistakes. I feel a mixture of shame and anger. Mistakes? Yes, and as far as she is concerned, some of them are quite serious.

  I came prepared to experience some powerful emotions, but I wasn’t prepared to hear that there were things in my book that were not correct. The first thing Margaret tells me is that Regina Pacis never had rich girls and poor girls, as I had thought. Margaret tells me that all the interned girls—the ones who were not orphans, who I remembered having received visits from their parents—were from families with no resources and that some of these girls received visits from a parent only once a year. She also strongly insists that there were no differences between what the orphan girls ate and what the interned girls ate. Also, when I was small, the food that I used to go and collect from the kitchens of the hotels along with Mother Adelina was to supplement everybody’s food. I listen to what she has to say so as not to contradict her, but my memory is very clear. Isn’t the matter of whether you sleep in a bed or sleep on the floor on top of a towel enough indication of difference?

  But if that were the only thing, I would not have minded. She goes on to tell me that my father did not abandon me but handed me to the nuns to ensure that I would have a better future than the one he could offer. To abandon someone is too strong a concept and Indians would never do that to their children. Rather, they hand them to someone who can look after them when they are not capable of doing so themselves. I try to think about the difference between abandoning children and handing them over, and I find it difficult. Margaret says that my father, Radhu Ghoderao, loved me a lot, so much so that he came to Mumbai to see me before I was adopted by my parents in Barcelona, but I did not recognize him. “Who is this man?” Mother Adelina asked me. “The postman!” I apparently answered. The scene took place at one of the tables in the room we are sitting in now.

  But why didn’t they tell me all this before? I feel like laughing and crying at the same time.

  Margaret was not here the first time I came back to India. Then, I spoke only to Mother Adelina, who knew about my origins, but refused to give me the information I asked her for. Each time, she told me that it was better not to stir up the past, that I had to look forward, that the past could only do me harm, and that I had the best possible life I could ever have wished for. It was no use insisting that I wanted to know more about my story. Mother Adelina believed it was better for me not to know any more of my story, and I accepted that.

  Now, some years later, I find it difficult to understand how Mother Adelina managed to conceal such an incredible anecdote. I can’t deny the anger that I feel. A father—my father—who traveled all the way to the city to see his daughter for the last time before she set off for a distant country to be adopted by a family, is an image from my story that is completely unknown to me and has a huge impact. I can’t imagine how that man must have felt, poor, tired, a widower, traveling all the way to the big city to say farewell to me and to see me one last time.

  Why should a child who has lived in a convent or an orphanage have to lose her story? Does her past have to be wiped out completely? It is difficult for me to accept that some people think that everything should be erased.

  Margaret is prepared to help me and goes on to tell me everything she knows. Radhu, my father, wore a white turban, or pheta, like many men who work on the land. And the postman who appeared from time to time at Regina Pacis also wore one and that was probably why I confused them. I imagine him traveling from Nasik to Mumbai, walking into this room on a morning just like today, with the fans turning and the same smell of old wood, knowing that he would see his daughter for the last time, supposing that she would probably not recognize him. My eyes are brimming with tears.

  In her cold, forceful manner, Margaret tells me that when my father gave me to the nuns in Nasik, I had a sister a little older than I, a girl who in those days was about five, or perhaps a little younger. Margaret wasn’t there but thinks that she recalls Nirmala and Mother Adelina explaining how that little girl had been present at the time of the handover and that they had seen her a couple of times afterward. I feel a chill go through me. A girl who accompanies her father to leave her little sister in a strange place because they don’t have the resources to take care of her themselves is an even sadder and more striking image.

  What was that girl thinking? And where is she now? If she is still alive, would she remember me? Each new phrase of Margaret’s diminishes me, makes me feel smaller and more insignificant.

  The surprises do not end here. Now it turns out that we did not come from Nasik, the sacred city on the banks of the river Godavari, a place of pilgrimage that has become, to me too, an important point of reference, but rather from another, smaller village. Margaret doesn’t even know its name. It is all too much for me. Too many things to take in. The ceiling fans turn, but the heat, which has never bothered me before, now seems to take effect. For a few moments I think I might faint and fall flat on the floor.

  What about Nirmala? She is the one who told me about my story in Nasik. Why didn’t she tell me everything? Why did she tell me that I had been born in Nasik? And where did she get the idea that my father, Radhu, had tried to abandon me in the street, hoping that someone would pick me up, before bringing me to the convent on his third attempt? Where did that story come from? Whom was I to believe?

  Now I want to know everything exactly as it was. I recover from the shock with a glass of cold water. I sense that there are a lot of new things to discover and for the first time someone is trying to tell me the truth. I want to know exactly what happened from the time I was born until the moment my father entrusted me to the nuns. I want to know exactly where I was born and what happened to that little girl who was my sister. I want to know why they separated us. I want to know if I have other siblings and what their lives have been like. I want to find it out now, while I am here, but if it can’t be done then I will come back to India as many times as it takes. I realize that it is now more important than ever to try to reconstruct my past and that of my biological family. I don’t know why, but I need to do it.

  I ask Margaret to help me find out all this information. I don’t hesitate for a second. In a few days we will be in Nasik and there I shall meet Nirmala. This time I shall tell her that I want absolutely all the details of my story. Margaret apologizes, saying that I am not the only child who has been adopted from the orphanage and that a lot of years have gone by and it is not easy to retain the details of every story perfectly. Nobody bothered to write down my story or that of any of the other girls, nobody took the time to note all the dates, names, and facts with precision. The passing of time erases everything if nothing has been registered in any way.

 
I am afraid. I am afraid that I am not going to like what I find. For several years now I have believed that I had made sense of my story, everything was in its proper place, and I felt at ease with the past. I told my story to a lot of people and even wrote it down. Now I feel as though I am on the edge of a precipice, about to jump out into the void.

  I think about my parents, Josep and Electa, and the care with which they have always guarded all the documents of my adoption. And of the diary that my mother kept precisely so that when I was grown up I might find the answers to all the questions I might have. At least everything that I experienced from the age of almost seven, when I arrived in Barcelona, was written down by my mother and filmed and photographed by my father, and now I am more grateful to them than ever.

  Margaret accompanies me on my visit around the Regina Pacis grounds, as I feel like seeing it all one more time. They are about to pull down one of the buildings, the oldest and nicest of all of them, built in a colonial style, with carved wooden windows and railings and lovely columns. It is falling to pieces, everything is propped up, and they don’t have the resources to restore it. It’s a real shame. The demolition work will start in a few days’ time and several nuns are busy carrying out boxes full of papers and books as they empty the rooms.

  We have to film a scene on the spiral staircase. I climb the rickety wooden stairs once more, barefoot, just as I did when I was small. Halfway up I have to make an effort not to start crying. Each step still creaks, just as I remember. For me, this staircase will always be the symbol of the beginning of my second life. All of us who have been adopted have a scene like this saved in our memory that reminds us of the very beginning of everything. At the top of the staircase I sit down on a step in front of the chapel, exactly as I did the first time I waited for Mother Adelina to finish her prayers so that I could ask her to find some parents for me.

  I visit two rooms where they are having class. The girls sit barefoot on the floor, with their exercise books on their knees. Their shoes are lined up in a row outside. The youngest girls sing some songs for me. The majority of them are orphans; some were brought here by their parents, just as I was, girls with parents who live in some corner of India but are incapable of feeding them properly, and even less capable of giving them an education. Girls whose families live in the streets. I can’t help feeling moved by this. I am one of them, I was there once. Perhaps I too sang a song for a visitor one day, while I was sitting there in class barefoot—on one of the few days when I was not playing truant—and I would have observed the guest with the same dark and profound gaze with which these girls are now watching me. There is something familiar about it, the knowingness of someone who has already seen a lot. It is not the innocent, infantile gaze of a child, but one that freezes your blood and makes you think.

  I play a piece on the old Regina Pacis piano for the nuns. Tremulous, emotional, but I manage to get through it. It is my way of thanking them for their time. The piano is one of the symbols of my life in Barcelona, the legacy of my adoptive parents that has turned me into a music teacher for the last thirteen years.

  We wrap up the day’s filming with tea and biscuits together in the small hall where the wooden spiral staircase begins. And the parting is not painful at all. I know that I shall be back again, and I have really begun to feel that I belong to this place.

  15.

  SEEING MUMBAI WITH NEW EYES

  I wander from one side of Mumbai to the other, observing everything in a different fashion from the first time I came back. I am no longer searching for something of myself among the glances of the people here, nor do I examine the women looking for one who might resemble my mother. I feel much calmer, and what I see, even though it is still hard to witness the misery, the injustice, the abysmal differences between people, I absorb much more serenely. The only note of unease I feel is when I think of everything that Margaret told me, and all that I have to reconstruct in the story of my life. Instead of my mother, I am now looking for my sister in the women I see in the streets. Do we look alike? How has her life been? Might she too have ended up being adopted by a family far from India? Or a family here in Mumbai? I would really like to meet her again, and I look for her everywhere.

  We have filmed some sequences in the neighborhood of Bandra and in other parts of the city. It is late Sunday afternoon and we are returning, tired after a long day of shooting. The immense piles of rubbish covered with crows, dogs, and the occasional scurrying rat can be seen on the same stretch of street, only a few meters away from children’s clothes shops, shoemakers, dental clinics, top-notch film producers’ offices, and vegetarian restaurants where we can eat really well. I walk along the streets of the city dressed in Indian clothing, with lively colors and big earrings. I know that even though I might appear very Indian, people can tell from some way off that I am not from here. This time, however, I am taking it much more lightly and have not been as affected by this. My gestures, the way I walk, and above all the way I act, are completely Western. I know this now and do not try to pretend otherwise. It is the way we look at things, ultimately, that differentiates us from people living on the other side of the world. For the first time, I maintain the pleasing sensation of walking through the streets of Mumbai without feeling any anxiety. I am no longer afraid of this city.

  Andheri is a popular quarter of Mumbai, forty kilometers from Colaba. The two-hour ride by taxi from the hotel provides a constant spectacle of life in its rawest form: movement, action, people on the move, at work. Most of the roads were built many years ago and the asphalt has some very big holes in it, while others are covered with earth or filled with pools of rain water. Motorcycles are the most predominant vehicles, along with bicycles and auto-rickshaws, which are forbidden in other neighborhoods closer to the center. There are rickshaws piled high with all manner of things, cardboard boxes that protrude from all sides …. There are a few handcarts pulled by men on foot. It is very hot, the pollution is very dense, and the horns are honking desperately, constantly. A huge poster announces the latest arrival from Hollywood, Matrix Reloaded, which sits alongside a large, hand-painted advertisement for Indian soap. I notice it because there are a dozen men adding the finishing touches, working with their pots of paint and brushes atop one of those scaffolds that seem to break every safety regulation in the book—they’re made of bamboo canes and wooden boards tied together with rope.

  In Andheri I looked up the Patil family, who put me up during my first stay here in 1995. We filmed several scenes in their home, remembering and reconstructing the intimate and intense moments we shared there. The mother and father, Naresh and Kamal, haven’t changed a bit. Naresh is still driving a taxi and working all the hours he can to give his three daughters the best possible life. Kamal, elegant as always in her sari, continues to busy herself with the logistics of the household, ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Every meal requires many hours of preparation, as well as the time it takes to go by foot to buy the ingredients or, if Naresh takes a few hours off, to take the taxi a little farther away. Her vegetables with rice and her lentil soup—the famous dhal—are unbeatable.

  Nanda, the eldest girl, is now twenty-five and works as a receptionist in a hotel by the sea, though she is qualified in both psychology and sociology from the University of Mumbai and speaks very good English. She is looking for a better job but hasn’t found one yet. She dresses in a Western manner. She doesn’t like saris because they get in the way. She wears the salwar kameez only when she is in the house and occasionally in the street. She is in no hurry to find a partner and start a family, even though she knows this is her parents’ dream. She tells me that she has discussed the subject countless times with her parents and they have decided to let her choose whom she wants. She says that times have changed and nowadays you can’t force children to marry someone the parents want, even though it remains a very common practice. Nadina is now twenty and graduated from university a few months ago. Every week she buys a paper c
alled Employment News to look for a job, but she hasn’t found anything yet. She would like to work in an office. The one who has changed the most is Ibuthi: the little girl I knew has turned into a teenager. She still walks to school every day and still dreams of being a dancer.

  It is impressive to see how all five of them manage to live in harmony in such a small space, with little electric light, two sofas in the room that serves as the parents’ bedroom at night and a living/dining room during the day, one room for the three girls, the kitchen—where there is a little temple dedicated to Ganesh and Sai Baba—and a tiny bathroom without much to offer.

  The three girls and I eat together on the floor of the main room. The television is on because the most important series is airing. It has been running in India for more than six years without interruption. We eat with our hands. My problems with eating rice with my hands have gone. When I first arrived in Barcelona I didn’t know how to use a knife and fork and my mother found it fascinating to see how skillful I was at eating with my fingers.