If you like laws and sausage, you should never watch either being made.
Otto von Bismarck

Chapter 1:  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.

Chapter 2:  Anjali and Sutara Referred

Anjali and Sutara's first encounters with white people were were at their orphanages.  These pale people arrived with candy and trinkets and left with babies or toddlers. 

One day a white person came to PSMH who was especially interested in the three girls.   The girls were told she would help them get adopted.   Kavita was soon promised to an adoptive family in the West.

Anjali and Sutara appeared on an internet photolisting (without photos) in early 1998 as "waiting children" in need of a "forever home."   They were listed, not as the 12 and 15 year olds that they were, but as 9 and 11 year olds.   

An Indian woman from Hyderabad came to ask Anjali and Sutara questions about themselves and their first family.   Some weeks later, Purva called Anjali, Sutara, and Kavita in and presented them with several gifts; among the things for Anjali and Sutara was a book of photographs.  The photographs, the girls were told, were of their new family far away in America.  The three girls were instructed to look into the video camera of the man who had brought the gifts, and to repeat exactly the English words Purva told them.  "Thank you, mommy and daddy."  "I will come soon, mommy and daddy."  "I love you mommy and daddy."    The three girls dutifully repeated what they were told, though they had no idea what the words they said meant.

Kavita was the first to leave for her new adoptive home.  She had become like a sister to Anjali and Sutara.  The three girls had a tearful good-bye, expecting that they would never see each other again.  Kavita left in early August of 1998 with Purva, and a baby to be delivered to America.  Purva was in the process of resettling her daughters and herself in America.  Her daughter, Amanda, whom the girls had often relied on for friendship and comfort when she was home from boarding school, had already left for America herself.  Another person that the girls assumed they'd never see again.  Anjali and Sutara felt sad and very much alone.

Sometime soon after that and for the several months until they were to go to America, Anjali and Sutara spent most of their time away from PSMH.   They would stay alternately at Purva's Hyderabad residence, at Purva's brother's family's home, and at Purva's best friends' family's house.  From one day to the next they didn't know where they would live. 

            

Anjali (left) and Sutara (right) in 1998 on their Indian passports.

Sometime during this time the girls were prepared for their trip to Madras (or Chennai).  Because they were older children, the American Embassy required that the girls be interviewed before they would issue them their orphan visas to travel to America.  The girls' oral answers had to match their paperwork.  Their father was being presented as dead.  Their mother as having voluntarily relinquished them.   This presented a great problem as neither thing, as far as the girls knew, was true.

The girls knew the story of how they had come to be at ASI.  Their mother had not voluntarily relinquished them. Their father was still very much alive.   He had argued with their mother the evening before they were taken to ASI.   The girls knew that had their father known about their pending adoption, he would have vehemently opposed it. 

These were children very much wanted by their parents.  In fact, though it would remain unknown to the girls for six more years, during that very same year of 1998, their mother Lakshmi would return to ASI, now reopened and back in the adoption business again, asking to be given her daughters back.

The neat solution to the paperwork matching memories problem was to give Anjali and Sutara false memories to match their paperwork. Their father, the girls were instructed to tell the officials, was dead;  they were to say that he had died sometime ago and that they themselves remembered his death, his funeral pyre, and how they had wept and cried at his funeral.   About their relinquishment the girls were to say that their mom had struggled to keep the family together after their father's death but decided in the end, that she couldn't manage it.  Thus their mom had relinquished them for adoption. 

It wasn't enough that the girls had been taken from their parents illegally, now they had to conspire with those on whom they depended for their care, their food, their shelter, and their future life in telling lies to support that illegal scheme.   It was the crowning event of the girls' pre-adoption traumas.  In the weeks before their trip to Madras (Chennai) the girls were thoroughly rehearsed in their false memories.

When the time came to perform, knowing that the orphanage personnel who had accompanied them to Chennai waited expectedly outside to make sure that the girls said what they were told to say, the girls pulled off their thoroughly rehearsed deceptions with real tears.  How could any child in that position have done any differently? 

To keep the deception from being discovered, the girls were instructed never to tell anyone a story any different than the story they had been given.  Not even their new adoptive parents.  No one.  The two girls took these instructions seriously and never intended to violate them.

A few days before they were to leave for America, Purva's best friend took Anjali and Sutara shopping for travel clothes and shoes.

For the previous several months Purva and Manu had been in the process of a nasty separation and divorce.  As both were still  involved in Anjali and Sutara's case, the girls often found themselves caught in the middle between the two warring parties.  One of the things Purva and Manu fought over was who would escort Anjali and Sutara, and thus have a free round trip to America.  Each had his/her reasons for wanting a trip to America. The American placement agency chose Manu. 

Although they didn't know it, the choice couldn't have been a worse one.   Already frightened after seeing him beat Purva, and after months of listening to Purva talk disparagingly of him, Anjali and Sutara were terrified of Manu.. When the girls arrived at the airport and were handed over to Manu, they began crying and had to be reassured and pushed to go with him.  They did not sit with Manu on the airplanes.  They followed behind him through the airports: afraid to be with him and afraid to be separated from him.  So traumatized by what was happening to them, the two girls ate nothing and drank only one cup of water during the more than twenty-four hours of their travel time.

It is difficult to imagine that two children could have been more wrongly in the position of being adopted, more ill-prepared for international adoption, or more traumatized upon arrival than Anjali and Sutara when they got off that plane in America on November 18, 1998 to meet their new family.