Detta är en berättelse av en av våra medlemmar, Helena Björk, som är adopterad. Berättelsen är fiction men skildrar Helenas tankar och känslor.

Adoption är en stor sak, framför allt när de adopterade barnen blir vuxna och det är lätt att ha tankar och funderingar som ingen annan riktigt förstår. Därför hoppas Helena att denna berättelsen skall kunna hjälpa någon annan med samma bakgrund som hon har.

Stort TACK! till Helena för att hon ville dela med sig av sina tankar och lät oss publicera denna fina berättelse!

Bombay Morning

By
Helena Björk

I walked down Chittaranjan Avenue, alone, aimlessly enjoying the moment of stillness. I watched the red sun slowly ascend over the black rooftops and life waking up to encounter a new day. I watched the streets fill with color, warmth and life. I watched how everything started over again and how death was conquered once more. Soon a symphony of honking horns, loud voices, and over-tuned engines would fill the streets. Soon busy, wealthy people with suits and briefcases would rush past me, heading to their air-conditioned offices. The less fortunate people were already out, rubbing their eyes and sitting on the street, as if they were waiting for something. Homeless people were taking care of urgent needs in the gutter. Here, in Bombay, India, wealth and poverty wasn’t as conveniently separable as in the west.

The contrasts were overwhelming. When my girlfriend Kathy and I first arrived, ten days ago, we were overwhelmed, shocked, and intimidated by the enormous amount of people in the streets. The street was an ocean of intermingled human limbs and bodies wrapped in dirty, but colorful rags. Wherever we turned, begging, dark eyes and wrinkled hands were held out in front of us.
“Jonathan, can you imagine living here, growing up in this mess?” asked Kathy, disgusted.
“I can’t even stand the thought of it,” I replied.

I was glad that most of them were so tiny; it seemed like an advantage that I was at least a head taller and forty pounds heavier than most of them because their behavior was so intrusive, so unusual to what we were used to. I felt claustrophobic and wanted to scream: “Don’t touch me, you filthy people!” The heat, the fragrance of curry, incense, and flowers blended with the stench of human waste came together in a sludge that felt impossible to inhale. The flair and the scents triggered something inside me, something I didn’t remember, but my body did. It was my past that had caught up with me. I had wandered these streets before.

I didn’t remember it, though. I had read about it in the adoption papers. The first five years of my life were summarized and neatly typed in a paragraph under the section “Social History.” So I must have remembered then and later repressed the memories. I was about five years old when I had accidentally gotten on a train, leaving my father and brother behind. The train was bound for Bombay and left the station shortly after I had climbed aboard. Hours later, when the train reached its end station, I had stepped off. And here I was again, twenty years later, standing in front of the railway stop on Chittaranjan Avenue, observing it and thinking that if I looked long enough I would remember. So, this was it. This was the place where my life had taken a dramatic twist, twenty years earlier. I was desperately searching for just a fragment of a memory; desperately calling for the little boy inside who had wandered around the streets for days, or maybe even weeks.

Eventually, I had ended up at the police station. The authorities had not been able to identify me since I only knew my first name, Rajeev, and had no idea of my age. They estimated my age to be five years and made up a birth-date. Due to the poor infrastructure at the time, no efforts were made to bring me back to my family. Besides, children were abandoned daily in Bombay and was nothing unusual. I was brought to Asha Sadan, an orphanage where I spent the following ten months until a couple from Minnesota adopted me.

I adjusted nicely to my new environment in the US; food, toys, and affection miraculously cured my starved soul. My parents worked hard to cover up the contradiction of my dark skin and black hair in our white neighborhood. We seldom talked about my ethnic heritance, but I knew that I was different from the rest of the kids. I was an outsider inside. Yet, I recall my childhood as very happy even though I felt a little lonely being an only child. Today, I consider myself American. I have a social security number, and an American passport. I am studying for a Masters degree in Philosophy. To make a long story short I am a very typical, American guy who have always been content with my life, except for the dark emptiness that overwhelmed me at times, an empty space that needed to be filled with answers. It wasn’t that I felt angry or rootless, but more curious and wanted to know more about those five ‘lost’ years in India. I had often wondered of how my life could have been different had I not gotten on that train that day. So I came back to Bombay to find the missing piece of the puzzle that was my life.

I hadn’t expected any sense of belonging in India. But on the other hand, I was not prepared to feel like a complete stranger either. It was confusing; I didn’t fit in. I was a foreigner walking on the streets of my native homeland. I had no social competence, no idea how to behave. I felt more lost here than I had ever done in America, like a whale in the desert: completely misplaced. In the streets of Bombay I blended in since I looked like them, but it was confusing how people expected me to behave like them too. I recalled the incident at a restaurant a few days earlier.
Kathy, also adopted, and the more adventurous of us, insisted that we got accustomed to the Indian traditions. That meant avoiding the westernized restaurants and instead eating in the same places as the natives. However, we found out that they do not eat like we do, with utensils; they eat with their hands. It was a bit awkward at first, but we got used to it even though the first time people stared and gesticulated at us.

“What’s the matter with these people, Kathy?”
“Never mind, I am hungry. Let’s just eat and get out of here.”
We finished eating and were leaving the restaurant when a hostile finger was pointed towards me.
“Disgusting! You!”
I was astonished by such rudeness.
“Me? Why?”
I was clueless, and no one bothered giving me an explanation. It was later that I learnt you’re only supposed to eat with your right hand; the left hand is used for other purposes since they do not have toilet paper in this part of the world. It made sense, yet I found it surprising since they don’t seem to care much about sanitation conditions otherwise. I am left-handed so of course it was natural for me to eat with this hand.

Is life just a big coincidence? I sat down on the dirty ground across the railway stop, just like many other Indians. An odd thing for me to do, but I needed to think. People stared at me and probably thought I was too well dressed to be wasting time on the street. I guess my clean khaki-shorts, t-shirt and sandals put me in a different category from the street people. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried again to recapture that moment, twenty years earlier, of being left alone on the streets, but it was deleted from my consciousness. How on earth had I survived? I looked at a man sitting three feet away from me, a disillusioned man, around thirty, with an empty bowl beside him. I felt compassionate and wondered what he was thinking. How to find energy to retrieve a new bowl of rice tomorrow? He sat only three feet away from me, so close and yet so distant. It hadn’t always been like that. That could have been me sitting there. Or Kathy.

I thought about Kathy and our recent visit to the orphanage where she had been cared for as an infant. I was surprised to suddenly see another side of the girl I thought I knew so well. A fragile and vulnerable side that was in contrast to the normally so composed and strong person I had gotten to know. But the endless lines of cribs, crying babies, and bottles hanging from the cribs were simply too much. The caretaker explained to us that they didn’t have enough people to feed all the babies, so the ones who weren’t able to grab the bottles themselves, died. It was hard to grasp, but it was harder to see Kathy break down in there. Afterwards, Kathy had revealed how sorry she felt for herself, as a baby. Sorry for the little infant, abandoned in a ditch to die. Sorry for having spent so much time in an orphanage before being chosen. It surprised me, as she had always sounded so disconnected from this incident. So objective, as if it been someone else. Who would she have been if she had stayed with her family?

Who would I have been if I had stayed with my family, if I had survived the hardships of the streets? Would I be a bellboy at the Hilton? Or would I be searching the dumpsters behind the restaurants? Or pulling rickshaws? Would I even be alive? Did I save my own life by getting on that train that day? I don’t know, and I never will know. But after ten days in Bombay, I wasn’t so sure anymore that growing up in the shielded, abundant material world had been the best thing. Had I stayed with my family, anchored in this culture, in this way of life, I would probably never have the perspective I had today, and be happily unaware of what could be achieved out there. I am sure that I would have faced enormous challenges here. But on the other hand, isn’t life a challenge in America as well, despite our material wealth? It’s just a different dimension.

I realized this as the sun blinded me. I don’t know for how long I had been sitting there, lost in thoughts, but my back was killing me. It was time to head back to the Guest House where Kathy still was sleeping, unaware of my early morning adventure. I took a last look on the railway stop and began to push through clusters of people engaged in a movie on the street. I smiled for the first time in a long time as I thought about “Bollywood” – India’s and the worlds biggest movie industry. I passed a small stand in the street selling chai. I could use a cup and gave the boy, probably not older than twelve years, a few rupees in exchange for a small porcelain cup filled with chai and walked away.
I felt ambiguous, sad and happy at the same time. Happy that I had the life I had and that I had been given the opportunity to do something with my life. Sad that I had been separated and taken away from the country, my family, and culture that I had been born in. Coming to Bombay wasn’t as easy as I had thought it would be. Above all, it didn’t provide me with all the answers, as I had been naïve to think. If anything, it made me more confused than before and trying to bridge two cultures was an impossible task at this point. A lifetime and a few moments wasn’t enough. The answer I was seeking wasn’t to be found in Bombay, nor in America. The answers were all inside me, Jonathan Rajeev Smith.
I finished the tea and placed the empty cup in the next dark, wrinkled hand that was held out in front of me. It had been a long journey, but at least it had taken me back to square one. I looked forward to come home.