Daughter of the Ganges by Asha Miro

Author:Asha Miro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2004-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.