Adopting Internationally

An Indian Adoption Story - Stolen Children

Part II: Anjali and Sutara Alone

Anjali and Sutara remember the day that they arrived at the Agency for Social Improvement (ASI) orphanage in the summer of 1995. When their mother said good-bye and left them, Anjali collapsed on the floor, crying and yelling for her return. That same day the hair that their mother had delighted in braiding and decorating, was shaved off close to their heads.

Anjali (left) and Sutara (right) on the day they were inadvertently relinquished to Agency for Social Improvement

Because of the deep emotional pain involved, Anjali and Sutara have never been willing to recount to anyone the milestones in the process by which they began to realize that they were no longer considered the children of their parents, but instead were orphans who were to be adopted out to strangers. Accordingly, this part of Anjali and Sutara's story contains only the parts of their experiences they have been willing to share.

Anjali and Sutara had always been made to feel very special by their parents. Now special to no one, they were lost among a throng of girls and ayahs (child care workers). Though the two girls had never been particularly close as sisters, Anjali, both to comfort herself and to help Sutara, stepped into the role of authoritative substitute mother to Sutara. Their little support system soon grew to include one more: a girl named Kavita, who arrived at ASI shortly after themselves and with whom they quickly became good friends. The three girls stuck together and tried to comfort each other.

As they watched Anjali and Sutara cry regularly for their mother, the ayahs were touched with pity for them. So it was that when Lakshmi attempted to visit her daughters in 1996 and was turned away without being allowed real contact with them, the ayahs secretly reported to Anjali and Sutara that their mother Lakshmi had been there to see them, but hadn't been allowed in.

Anjali and Sutara were quickly promised to a prospective adopter in Italy.

Before the adoption process could be completed, however, the first Hyderabad adoption scandal broke in 1996. At its center was the orphanage where Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita lived, Agency for Social Improvement. ASI was closed in 1996 amidst charges of baby buying and paperwork falsification, the orphanage director Hemen jailed, and the children of ASI disbursed to various other orphanages. With this scandal and shut-down, Anjali and Sutara's Italian adoption was cancelled.

Together, Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita were transferred to the Paul Solomon Memorial Home (PSMH) in Vandanoor, a village several hours from Hyderabad. This orphanage, which ran a school with boarding arrangements for impoverished families and also placed children, mostly infants and toddlers, for adoption, was run by Purva and her husband, Manu.

This orphanage too would eventually be implicated in the Hyderabad adoption scandals. The Paul Solomon Memorial Home would be investigated and shut down in the 2001 scandal. Manu would be arrested in both the 1999 and the 2001 scandals. And finally, Purva would, in 2001, come under suspicion for baby buying and paperwork falsification. Purva would even make national headlines in India, becoming a fugitive after neatly eluding the police who came to arrest her.

But at the time that Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita were transferred to the Paul Solomon Memorial Home in 1996, none of this had yet happened. PSMH was simply an obscure orphanage in a sleepy little backwater village hours from Hyderabad. It was a laid-back place on a large campus surrounded by gardens which the children who attended school there roamed freely. The only thing that distinguished PSMH from hundreds of other orphanages like it across India was that it placed infants and toddlers for international adoption.

Three of only a handful of older girls at PSMH and the only "adoptable" older girls at PSMH, Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita became like little sisters to the orphanage director's daughter Amanda (a very sweet and kind girl). As a result, they would be included in many family events. With this inside perspective the girls would hold no illusions as to Purva's character or motivations by the time they left in late1998.

At PSMH, Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita slept on a bed with the two older hostel (boarding school) girls in the nursery where the adoptable babies and toddlers were housed. Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita were not schooled; they were used as cheap labor to care for the babies. Anjali also washed out the babies' diapers. According to their own accounts, the three girls, when not fulfilling child care responsibilities at PSMH, were allowed to do as they pleased with little to no adult supervision.

While at PSMH, the three girls witnessed many traumatic things including the deaths of many babies, the body of someone who had committed suicide, an unattended birth by their bedside in which the baby died (the girls were terrified to awaken Purva), and finally, Manu beating his wife Purva and acting in a threatening manner toward Amanda and the girls themselves.

Sutara, according to Anjali, exhibited several unmistakable signs of extreme trauma while at PSMH; these signs would disappear immediately when the girl entered their adoptive home in 1998. Anjali often felt very sad and depressed, and would go off by herself for hours at a time to sit under a tree. Nothing the concerned ayahs said to her could cheer her up.

While at PSMH, Anjali and Sutara were so very, very unhappy about the turns their lives had taken and the situation in which they found themselves that they tried to commit suicide by drinking gasoline. It merely made them ill. Their lives, such as they were, went on.

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