Tag: lost girls
Somewhere halfway around the world, we are turning 26.
This was written last week on a particularly emotional and difficult evening. Every year as my birthday gets closer and closer, a heaviness comes over me—a heaviness that only adoptees seem to understand.
Aai, I went through my wedding photos today. I looked for you in every single one. I searched my face for features that might have resembled yours. Some moments I feel my heart can’t handle the agony of knowing you will never see me in my bridal saree. Other moments I am comforted because I felt your presence all around me every moment that day. I felt like a true indian bride and I longed to see what you looked like on your wedding day. Maybe we looked the same. I ache for you.
So many milestones you’ve missed, and I have missed many of yours. There will always be one we share. 26 years ago I was still a part of you. You were my first home. We only had a week left to be together. I so wish I knew your thoughts during those last few weeks and days. I can only hope you were not alone.
We are turning 26, and each year that passes adds more and more distance between us but I will never give up on trying to find you. You are forever in my heart, my aai. Please don’t forget me.
pranali
Knobby Knees and Monkey Toes
I finally finished, “A Long Way Home: A Memoir” by Saroo Brierley. I began reading it several months ago, but decided to take a break considering how heavy it was for me to read.
I only had a few chapters left to read, and once I started reading again I wondered why I ever stopped. I couldn’t put it down! Then I got to the pictures at the end of the book, and was mesmerized in particular by this photo:
I went from face to face to face, analyzing every inch of their faces.
It isn’t hard to recognize that Saroo looks EXACTLY like the others in his family.
This is what I’ve longed for my entire life. Somewhere in the world, there are others who look like me. Saroo found his family, the ones who have his facial features and maybe even his mannerisms. Obviously there are cultural differences, but genes are genes.
Growing up I would watch as friends were getting married and having children and trying to decide which family traits the child carried. Maybe it had the family nose, or the family eyes, or the family dimples. These are normal for me to hear about, but when I think of family traits when it comes to myself, it is such a foreign concept. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Somewhere, my family lives and has my eyes and my nose and maybe even my knobby knees and monkey toes. When I someday have my own children and meet my biological family for the first time, I’ll be able to see what traits I received and pass on to them. I can’t wait for that.
Disappearing Daughters
If you’ve read my story, you know that I was abandoned as an infant.
If you think this is a rare occurrence, you are sorely mistaken.
In recent years, the war on the girl child in India took off as the ultrasound made its way to my home country. Every 12 seconds, a baby girl is killed. That means 7,200 girls are killed a day in India because of their sex. That is only counting the thousands that are killed…not including the millions who are abandoned.
Gita Aravamudan has been a warrior for our girls and had brought this issue to the forefront as she has written for and worked with Hindustan Times, India Today, and Indian Express. Just today, she wrote an article that was published on First Post. Here is the link to the article:
The Lost and Found Girls of Usilampatti
In 1994, she was in Tamil Nadu in the small village of Usilampatti as she was investigating the issue of female infanticide. For the first time, an arrest had been made but the community had rallied around the accused woman. In this village it was normal to murder the second daughters and third daughters and so on, as more than one girl was seen as an impossible social and financial burden to bear. The more people Gita talked, the more she found out about this horrific phenomenon. One woman she spoke to was the midwife who delivered all of the babies in the community. She spoke about the horror that a girl child brought to families and she was asked to dispose of countless female infants. Many of them she was able to sneak away and give up for adoptions, but there were also families who asked for proof of her disposal and she was forced to murder them and give the tiny bodies back as proof.
Little did Gita know, these girls were not lost forever. Not far away, in the town of Tiruchi, these lost girls were found by social workers who stumbled upon Mose Ministries, run by a man called Pastor Gideon Jacob. These 89 girls knew nothing of their past, and only knew Pastor Gideon as their saving grace. Their parents did not even know of their existence.
“The girls grew up cooking and caring for themselves with no adult mentors. They were visited sometimes by the pastor and his friends. They were often severely punished for minor misdemeanours and sent away to “hostels” for disciplining. There they were severely beaten and forced to go without bathing or eating for days. Many of them worked on the pastor’s farm as labourers as a form of punishment. Others were sent with illegally obtained passports on trips to Germany to collect money for the home. They were made to sing and perform street plays and distribute pamphlets on the streets of Germany. Many were compulsorily taught theology and some were being groomed to become evangelists. There was no evidence of sexual abuse, but they were emotionally and physically traumatised and were in the thrall of the Stockholm syndrome which meant they did not want to leave the home or move away from Pastor Gideon Jacob.”
Another one of Gita’s thoughts hit me hard: “The girls never had the life their parents had imagined for them. How many of the girls who were given away or taken illegally from their parents actually ended up having a good life?”
I struggled with so many mixed feelings reading this. What kind of a life had their parents imagined for them? Many of them wanted their daughters dead. I was one of the “lucky” ones. It is so easy for me to wallow in self pity over the fact that I not only lost my birth family but also my culture. But I know there are other lost daughters like me who lost their entire identity and instead lived a life less than human. That could’ve easily been me had I not been rescued and given a new life. Now the girls had the choice of either going back to their families who gave them away, or living on their own. Many of them chose to stick together, as this was the life they’d always known.
How many more of us must be lost in order for India to realize she’s killing and abandoning her own daughters?
India's Lost Daughter 