Immediately this orphanage looked different. There was a garden with toys in it, a few flowers even. I’d had enough by this time, so I just cut to the chase and said to the director that I was a single woman from the UK, and would they allow me to adopt one of their children. Shockingly, they said yes.
This seemed like a good place. The couple of small rooms they showed me had around 20 or so babies, who looked well cared for. The babies themselves were clothed and not visibly malnourished. So the following day, I left happily for Kerala in southern India for a few days of rest. Apparently, there was nothing more I needed to do at the orphanage, so I should just go home and send the necessary paperwork.
While lying in the pool in Trivandrum, a small, pretty, slightly hippy, slightly yoga-ish coastal resort, I met Navin Poddar, an elegant 50-year-old businessman. Navin knows, and we have laughed about it many times since, that to begin with I took his offer to help with a pinch of cumin. As a single woman travelling in India, you get a lot of offers from men wanting to help, but you usually find they are after money or sex, or just want not to appear ignorant or unkind, so they say what you want to hear. I imagine I was incredibly rude to Navin, because I was so tired of struggling with India, especially as my body was collapsing with pneumonia. But Navin persisted, making it clear that he wanted nothing in return. He backed off, as he could see that I needed more time to trust him, and simply said that I should let him know when I was coming next and he would arrange to meet me at Mumbai Airport and help in any way he could. He wanted to do some good, he said, for he believed so strongly that there was a little girl just waiting for me to find her.
Back in the UK, I sent the orphanage the necessary paperwork from the authorities, along with copies of bank statements, a valuation of my house and tax returns – apparently they needed even more information than the UK social services. I went back to India one more time before February, to show the orphanage I was serious, but they knew that already. They knew from my desire to please them in all things, but also because they were well aware of my predicament. It was and still is today immensely hard for people, especially single English women, to find an orphanage that will work with them in India, despite there being thousands of children who need a loving family.
A few days into my trip, I was told that there were two babies I could choose from, and a couple of trembling hours later I was sitting in the plush, designed-to-impress-potential-adoptive-parents meeting room, nervously trying to work out what I should do next. How would I know? Would it be a lightning bolt, would I want to take both babies home, would I just think: I like the look of you, I’m sure I can grow to love you? To be honest, I did think I would have to grow to love my child; thought I would love consciously first before the deeper I-am-in-love-with-you, I-would-die-for-you stuff “proper” parents feel kicked in. I had my Parsi friend Adel run the video camera in case this was the moment I met my daughter. This is the tape I have just started showing Maya, using it as a backdrop for the stories I tell her as we lie in our ritual Friday-night bubble bath. The video records the very second I first held her in my arms and I say: “It’s you and me together in this life.”
The following day was the first time I undressed Maya. I was desperate to unravel her, release her from the confines of orphanage clothing that had been passed from baby to baby on whoever was being presented to prospective parents. Maya was an individual, my baby, and I wanted to stroke her and let her feel my touch. That first morning Maya and I spent together was the only time I had visited the rooms where the children lived. On the surface, and by orphanage standards, it was pretty clean. Indeed, it was deluxe in comparison with some orphanages in Russia and Romania. There was even the odd toy hanging from the cots. But as the days went by and my visits became less conspicuous to the carers, I realised that far too often the babies would cry and no one would comfort them. They would lie for hours in soiled pieces of cloth that didn’t soak up anything. There were some very disturbed babies who had started banging their heads against the cot as they grappled with lack of love and stimulation. Some were clearly suffering from scabies and were insect-bitten: others, like Maya, showed signs of malnutrition – sores that wouldn’t heal, limbs with no flesh, sunken eyes and shrivelled, dehydrated skin. Over the subsequent months, Maya didn’t blossom. She seemed to go from one chest infection to another, and at one point she was hospitalised with pneumonia. I’d noticed when I first met her that her legs were a little bowed and her chest was indented. My suspicion that she was suffering from rickets was confirmed by an external independent doctor (anyone adopting from an orphanage should push for an independent medical check-up). There were also other tell-tale signs of malnourishment. Her body was so weak that she couldn’t hold her head up or roll over. But I knew that whatever the doctors found, nothing would stop me from fighting to bring her home. My only fear was that the British immigration authorities might raise problems, as the health of any adopted child brought into the UK is closely monitored.
I don’t know much about what happened to Maya before she was brought to the orphanage, but I suspect that her birth mother was unable to feed her nutrient-rich milk, because Maya was tiny, just 2.8kg, when I met her at five months old. The video of the days that followed our first meeting make me wince, as the camera exposes her fragile little frame. Feeding in the orphanage involved giving the babies a milk concoction from a spoon. This wasn’t done in the carers’ arms, but instead the babies were pinned between the women’s legs, their hands clamped tight so that they couldn’t fight the spoon. This was nature at its most basic; nurture wasn’t a word that had much place in this orphanage.
I visited Maya as often as I could. Luckily, as a self-employed nutritionist and writer, I had some flexibility over the next six months. I would just sit for hours holding her, letting her smell me and see my smile. But being away from my daughter (for that, to me, was absolutely who Maya now was) was excruciating and life back home seemed empty without her, especially as I knew she was worryingly fragile. The more time that went by, the weaker she would become, and the more she would retreat into her loveless world.
Navin, whom we now call Baba, turned out to be Maya’s angel. This wonderful man visited her every couple of weeks, travelling for hours on end on uncomfortable buses, catching planes when she was very sick, just to hold her and tell her that her mum loved her. I stopped visiting altogether in June, because I wanted the next time we saw each other to be when I would bring Maya home. As the months apart mounted, I found myself so fearful of what was and wasn’t happening that I rang nearly every day to find out where our papers were, to check that Maya hadn’t been given to anyone else.
In November, almost a year after I first went to India, the torture came to an end. The most gorgeous start of our journey was about to begin. First there was the phone call saying I could come out and collect Maya. This was something I couldn’t do alone. It was too big, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to cope, even with Navin alongside me. I also wanted my mother to see and experience a little of India and to be able to talk to her granddaughter as she grew older about the day we collected her from the orphanage. It was important too for my mother to share the final stages of a journey that she, like my father, had feared would end in sadness. When the day finally arrived, I just wanted to walk into the orphanage, take her and run. I tried to refuse to let them carry out what I felt was an artificial handing-over ceremony. Some parents may feel marking their love for their new child with jasmine garlands and a bindi-marked on their forehead is an important part of the process, but I was feeling so scared at this point. Yes, I was wonderfully happy to have Maya in my arms, but nothing else around us was loving, cherishing… What if something went wrong? My mum talked sense into me and said that I would regret not having a record of the event for Maya, but I couldn’t let her be handed over to me by the orphanage staff. It seemed only natural that Navin should place her in my arms. Without him I don’t think we would have made it. I couldn’t have fought the bureaucracy alone.
As we drove away in a car adorned with jasmine garlands, my smiles at having Maya in my arms carried us up into the clouds. We were safe. Our first night was spent in the beautiful Turf Club, where I lay by Maya’s side, trying to soothe her frightened tears and raging diarrhoea and fever. Though the hotel doctor said that we shouldn’t travel, I made my first judgment call as a mother, as I had spoken to a doctor in London and we both felt we needed to get Maya home.
Up until the day we left India I hadn’t been able to cry. I couldn’t let myself. I had to be strong, but as I walked towards the airport gate, with Navin holding us tight, the enormity of what I was doing finally started to force the tears to flow. I was taking Maya from her homeland. However cruel life in India had been, she was still leaving everything she had ever known – the heat, the colours, the smells and the sounds – in the arms of a woman who kept saying “I love you” in her ear, held her tight, fed her, rubbed talc on her gorgeous chocolate-button tummy… but I was a stranger.
