Adopting cultures

I noticed them almost immediately. I was poolside at the Park Hotel on my last day in Calcutta when they arrived.

He was a thin middle-aged man, pudgy around the middle. She was his fat middle-aged wife. Both blonde with soft white skin.

Their fear, expectation and shock almost tangible.

In his arms was an Indian baby no more than a year old. A child to call their own. A brand new addition to their family. After years of waiting, hoping, praying and fighting for the right to be parents, now, so all of a sudden really, they were.

The baby was so innocently unaware of the magnitude of the moment. If he knew he wouldn’t be looking at me with big, round curious eyes, but at his new parents with a look that said “I’m here, you’re doing great, this is right”.

Because their family back home would expect it, she was videotaping their first swim. He couldn’t smile, couldn’t be playful; the weight of the moment heavy in his arms.

I felt anxious for them. I wanted to run over and say “it’s okay, be natural, you’re doing great, this is right”. But this is just the beginning of the next struggle for them.

That boy will now have a life so different to other unwanted children in India. He will receive an excellent education, speak two or three languages, have all the opportunity in the world. He will also struggle – being an Indian boy, a minority in his class, always wondering about/ aching for Indian life, a yearning that will probably go unfulfilled until his adult life because, I wonder, how often he will return here, with his new parents who may only remember these first hard, awkward days in a city so removed from home, unsure how to bring him back here to reconnect with something they aren’t part of, never will be? And for him, a stranger in his own city – never really fitting in or feeling ‘at home’ anywhere.

The scene in front of me ignites a melancholy and a personal debate about inter-country adoption.

But at the end of the day, when all is said and done, with the struggle so many millions of children around the world in mind, it’s impossible not to believe that, for this little boy, this is right.