Mumbai: When Dilip Venfaassen emerged from an airfreshened – Northwest plane
into the body odour of Mumbai, he felt choked — not by the fishy, fetid fumes
but by their instant familiarity. “I have no memories of Bombay,” says the
27-yearold, who was a nappy-clad bundle when he left his Matunga orphanage for a
new home in Holland. “But that smell, it felt a little bit like home.”
Venfaassen is one of the thousands of Indians who, as babies, were adopted by
families in distant countries like Denmark and Canada. Of these, 7000 scrawny
Prashants and Aradhanas made their way to Holland, where they gradually
metamorphosed into sturdy Pauls and Sandras. But beneath the veneer of everyday
reality—the melody of ‘Slaap kindje slaap”, the aroma of apple pancakes and the
bite of Amsterdam winters — they retained the shadowy memories of other songs,
other smells.
“I left India when I was nine months old,” says Anand Kaper, 27, whose childhood
interaction with India was through news snippets about drought and floods. “But
when I stepped off the plane in Delhi for the first time in ’95, I was overcome
with deja vu.”
Anxious to retrieve the few available fragments of a shredded and sealed past,
seven Indian adoptees from Holland visited the city last week. Some tried to
trace their biological mothers, others made wrenching pilgrimages to the
orphanages where they uttered their first ‘yayaya’, and most stocked up on
Bollywood blockbusters and pashmina shawls.
“Many of us feel our lives are jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing. Coming here
helps find some pieces,” says Kaper, who is the only member of the group to have
visited India earlier. Adds Mark Degraaff, 23, whose Hindu girlfriend and
fondness for Hindi films triggered his curiosity about India, “I wanted to come
here because, although my character is Dutch, my heart is Indian as well.”
Indeed, many Indian adoptees experience the sense of being a “nowhere man living
in a nowhere land’’. In the predominantly white classrooms of Warmenhuizen and
pubs of Delft, their brown faces are the subject of inevita-ble curiosity. While
in India, where they look like any Cuffe Parade collegian, they share neither
language nor love of Tendulkar.
“People often ask me whom I look like, and I feel terrible that I have no
answer,” says 18-year-old Sandra Aradhana Vermy, who hates the inevitable
questions about why she looks so different from her parents. Adds Degraaff in
his deliberate, studied English, “With my Dutch friends I feel Indian, with my
Hindu friends I feel white. It’s hard.”
Concurs Kaper, “The identity crisis of adolescence is always more complex with
adopted children who don’t have the same genes as their parents. As for us, we
don’t even have the same skin colour. This makes questions like ‘Who am I?” more
troubling.’’
The trip to India has helped resolve a few questions, or at least put them into
perspective. “When I see men my age sleeping on the street, I feel it could so
easily have been me. Why was I chosen to go to Holland when others were not?”,
wonders Kaper. Adds Venfaassen angrily, “They say life can be a bitch. And I saw
that at the children’s home yesterday.”
Nevertheless, Kaper and Venfaassen are unwilling to let sleeping records lie.
Although Indian law protects the identity of the birth mother, Kaper ploughed
through the files of the hospital where he was born and actually found a name
and address. “I don’t know if I will contact her,” he muses. “I have to work out
the consequences both for myself and for her.”
And what of the consequences for the Dutch woman who adopted him 27 years ago?
Don’t adoptive parents fear they will lose the children for whom they pureed
carrots, relearnt the sticky rules of algebra and built a new life? “Our parents
were a bit afraid that we would stay on in India and they wanted to come with
us,” says Paul Prashant Vermy, 21, who is Sandra’s adoptive brother. “But they
finally decided that this was our journey, not theirs.”
“My mother is very supportive. But then,” says Venfaassen, adding with a smile
which proves that at least one mamma in distant Ghoojeveen has no reason to
worry, “I have the best mother in the world.”
