To begin my story I will start with the now present year, 2019. This year I will be turning 43 and for the past 40 years I have been living here in Denmark. You may be thinking isn’t there some time missing between my birth and my life in Denmark? Stay with me and I will explain.
Let’s start with the basics. In 1979 I was adopted at the age of 3 from India. Ever since then I have been known as Casper to friends and family in my adoptive country. My adoption has always been known to me since for the most part I have stood out being brown compared to others in a predominantly white surrounding.
Growing up I always have been curious about my past and where I came from. Culturally though, I did not know much about my birth country for a long time. Time passed and I began to visit the library more frequently and would pick up books or anything that was remotely linked to India. I buried myself in books, which also eventually landed me at the university studying Indian Studies.
My achievement for getting into university is something that still surprises me till this day because I never loved school or studying and I was never one of those overachievers with grades to match it, but I guess I was pretty determined at that time. Even though it was a short lived experience, I did go on an Indian study tour back in 2005.
Fast forward, it would take me another 10 years before I returned to India.
During my second visit, I visited Coimbatore – my place of origin and a place that I had not been back to ever since my adoption. With my visit to Coimbatore, my urge to know about my first family also grew stronger and 4 years later, in January 2019, I returned to Coimbatore, again.
This time, I went there with “ACT”, a child rights organization based in the Netherlands who has helped many Adoptees especially from India to reconnect with their Indian family. Together with ACT and SCED, I visited my village, and this is what I know so far about my time before I was adopted. I was born in Linganur a small village in Coimbatore. My father apparently suffered from a paralytic attack and his wife (my mother) supposedly had left him for reasons unknown. Later I was handed over to Blue Mountain Children’s Home around 1978.
There are people of my village who say they do remember my father, but after 1986 he somehow disappeared, and no one really knows where he went or what happened to him. While he was living in Linganur, he would be staying together with my grandmother and they were working as coolies.
I returned from my trip to India without finding any of my relatives, however, I still have a glimpse of hope. Maybe it is naive on my part, but it is all I have.
If you by any chance have reached here, I want to thank you for listening to my story.
Source: https://adoptedfromindia.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/a-search-into-the-unknown/
