From India with Love, page 12
Finally we had made it to Fakirana, and I have never felt such sheer, utter relief as I did when we entered those gates. The guard sat in a small hut at the entrance; it was dark and foggy, and the driveway and entrance of the brightly painted main building were lit up. I remember the light as being warm, even though most of India’s internal lighting that I saw was of the white fluoro, energy-saving kind.
Fakirana is a complex made up of a series of buildings, with the main four outlining an internal square grassy courtyard. A covered walkway ten metres or so long connected the main building where the sisters lived with a parallel structure that served as guest rooms.
Ramesh parked on the edge of the grassy courtyard. A slim nun strode forward, looking slightly concerned, perhaps because we were by now an hour later than expected, but obviously happy to see us. She introduced herself as Sister Lissil and welcomed us in. She was pleased we’d arrived safely and chatted with Ramesh about the journey. I had wondered to Graham in the car where Ramesh would stay, but Sister Lissil provided the answer even before we could put the question to her, offering him a room and getting it all organised right away. Just minutes later she was showing Graham and me to our room.
Now I understood why I couldn’t find a hotel. They didn’t exist in the ways a westerner would expect. I guessed for Ramesh that he would have been able to find himself a room somewhere if he’d had to but there was no way we would have even known where to start. During our email exchanges I had asked Sister Lissil for a recommendation and she had instead invited us to stay at Fakirana. As I now saw, the former orphanage looked like a luxury hotel compared to what was outside the gates. Even so, from the outside, the buildings reminded me of spooky old mental asylums in American movies.
Inside, steel beds sat high off the floor with frames for the mosquito nets. The bathroom was big and basic with a shower with a cold tap only, a small ceramic sink and a toilet. But right now it felt like paradise. We hadn’t broken for a toilet stop the entire journey; I decided I’d rather leave to my imagination the sort of ‘toilet’ one might find on the journey to Bettiah. There are things India has taught me to never again take for granted, and toilets are one of them. I now have much more appreciation for the significance of 19 November, which the United Nations has designated World Toilet Day, to focus on the consequences faced by those (especially women and children) who don’t have access to a clean sanitation facility. The UN says 2.5 billion people do not have access to hygienic amenities including toilets. Years later I travelled to the United Nations for the first time to report on Australia’s role as temporary President of the Security Council (an important body which rules on international conflicts and disputes.) A giant toilet was outside for World Toilet Day. I instantly thought of Bihar as I stood waiting in the boardroom of the General Secretary Ban Ki-moon’s office. Forget the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, memories of straw-thatched outhouses came to mind instead. Returning to where I came from would prove to be unforgettable, even though I only spent two days at Fakirana—my first true home. Those first moments in our room were incredibly emotional.
I looked around. A wooden cupboard sat against one concrete wall of our room, and against another was a tiny table with a vase of flowers and a place card wishing us a ‘hearty welcome’. I smiled through welling tears. Happiness glowed from that piece of paper in what initially felt like the unhappiest of settings. Feeling overwhelmed, I sat down on the bed. The mattress was so thin I could feel the steel springs through the foam padding.
I suddenly felt overcome with grief—for everything I’d seen on the journey here; for the mother I’d never known. I felt sickened by the possibility that she might be somewhere close by, potentially suffering or living a merciless life, while I knew at the end of this I would be jetting back to the everyday luxuries of life in Australia—where I’d never had cause before to feel grateful for a clean toilet. I had imagined what Bihari life might be like but the reality outdid any portrait I might have visualised. The picture of what I had narrowly missed out on was now clearer but horrifying. I see-sawed between feeling gratitude and guilt. Gratitude that this wasn’t my life but then guilt for all the suffering poverty caused for others. For Sister Lissil’s sake I fought my desire to curl up on the bed and sob. She was expecting us to wash and appear for dinner, and that’s what we did.
Thank goodness for the sisters and their positive energy. Within minutes we were talking, smiling and joking. The accommodation might have looked cold and institutional at first glance but these women had a warm magnetism and were unexpectedly hilarious. It felt good, indeed humbling, to be in the presence of such strong, dynamic women. The rest of the evening shone, the fog couldn’t have felt further away. The night ended in many shared laughs, especially when Ramesh arrived back from his meal in town lively and animated. The change from a serious, quiet lad into this bubbly gent didn’t escape Lissil’s sharp eyes. ‘I think you have taken the drink,’ she said mischievously, pretending to knock back an invisible bottle.
Ramesh held both hands up in front of his chest, palms facing outwards. ‘Nahi, Sister,’ he said over and over, an enormous grin on his face. It was a lovely moment. Even though I understood barely a word he spoke, it was easy to detect the respectful way he addressed her. We gently teased Ramesh a little more and my stomach hurt from laughing. Lissil translated our thanks to him for his careful and safe driving and then sent us all to bed before the generators shut down for the night just after nine o’clock.
The next morning when we awoke and peered out the door, we saw Ramesh sitting in the fog just outside. He jumped up and darted across to us, holding out his phone. Eventually we understood that we needed to call Vikas back. He had called to check in and make sure we were okay and that Ramesh had driven safely. We assured Vikas on both fronts. I wanted to tell Ramesh to relax, chill out, wind down, sleep in, but I didn’t have the words. I constantly found myself feeling guilty at the eager and ultra-hospitable service Indians provided. Western guilt.
Right in front of our room, in one half of the grassy courtyard, was an empty sandpit, dotted with a few steel rocking toys, a metal seesaw and some half-sunken tyres, next to a huge jackfruit tree. For some reason I instantly pictured Damian in the play area, even though he was just nine months old when he was adopted and if this sandpit had even existed then he could have done little more than sit upright in it. To me that banged-up outdoor play setting spoke powerfully of all the children who had been here, in this orphanage. It had a haunting aspect to it. There was a depth of feeling in the air. I felt it the moment I first glimpsed that little playground through the fog, and it didn’t go away until we were back on the road to Patna.
We had a delicious breakfast and I asked if the sisters had kept any records from my time here. Lissil smiled and nodded knowingly; she had clearly been expecting my question. After breakfast, she assured us, we’d have a look at the record book.
The Fakirana book was just like Delhi’s version. A piece of Damian and me was recorded here too—a page for me, a page for my brother. I felt the same delight I’d experienced in Delhi, poring over the book that contained the scant details of our time in Fakirana. But it felt even more significant, tangible and meaningful here in Bettiah, knowing that these walls had heard our first baby gurgles and cries.
Just as I had in Delhi, I took a pen and updated our contact details. On both pages, I updated the columns headed ‘Progress’ with the entry ‘very good progress’. It was a lovely experience to be able to provide a bookend to our beginnings. I also felt a sense of gratitude that this trip wasn’t a quest for missing information, prompted by a need to fill in the details about myself that I had never known. If it had been, I would have been sorely disappointed. There was no more information here than I already knew. But it was enough for me to just see the book, to know that I’d been here. No longer was India something that I could hold apart from who I was.
We talked about all the countries to which children from Fakirana had been adopted. As well as Australia there was the United States, France, Switzerland, and many others. Hesitantly, I said, ‘You know, I don’t really feel Indian . . .’ I faltered to a halt, wondering if this was my worst faux pas yet. ‘Of course you don’t,’ one of the sisters replied straight away. ‘You are Australian.’
And that was the true start of the permanent, monumental change in my relationship with India. I felt a lightness, a sense of freedom to truly accept this place as part of my story but not my sole identity. All at once I felt as though a rusted or stuck gear I had been trying over and over to move had just clicked into place. It was as simple as that.
We sat on the verandah that ran along the front of the main building and talked about the nuns’ experiences, with the current generation welcoming ‘home’ the children who’d been nurtured and adopted out by the previous generations. It struck me how rich a history this place had. Just as I’d felt when visiting old castles in the United Kingdom, I now wished these walls could talk. I wished they could tell me the stories of the nuns, the children, and of the parents and other family members who brought them here, hoping they’d be given new and rich lives with loving families either in India or abroad. In the very early years of the orphanage, the nuns had raised the children to live with them, but they soon realised that no matter how much they loved them, the children needed families of their own.
There were only two sisters from the old days whose names I knew and so could ask about, and I already knew that Sister Hermann-Josef from Delhi had died long ago. When we were growing up Mum would always speak very lovingly of her and tell us how much she wished we could meet her but that she’d already died. The nuns told me that Sister Gratia, the nun from Fakirana who had corresponded with Mum, was very old and living down south. I also learned that there was only about a fifteen-year window in which the sisters had operated the orphanage—either side of that and Damian and I would have missed out.
While it was a shock to them at first, the sisters said they have now become used to the orphanage’s children coming ‘home’ as adults. It had never occurred to them that we would, but people have come back from all around the world. Some speak French, others English; few understand Hindi. Some of course will never return, for many different reasons. The ones that do have mostly been happy in their lives, but one of the nuns, in her eighties, took me aside later in the morning and, squeezing my hand, told me about some who’d come back deeply troubled. Some were alcoholics or drug addicts. For them adoption had not been a happy experience. ‘Are you happy?’ she asked me.
‘Completely,’ I replied. I didn’t need to feign my conviction. But I did feel doubly blessed, first to have been adopted, and to be happily so. What an indiscriminate lottery I had won.
In the morning sunlight, Fakirana looked very different and cheery with its pastel coloured green, blue and pink exteriors. What had been an orphanage was now a training centre for young nuns, a school for deaf children from all over the state, a place for local young girls to learn to read and write, and a home for the elderly, disabled, mentally ill and destitute. The residents lived in the wing adjacent to the row of rooms where we were staying. Their beds were hammock-like slings and the rooms looked out onto the grassed areas. Some of the disabled residents could barely communicate. The sisters cared for them, as they explained, to give these people some dignity in what was often their final days or months. Where would they be if not for Fakirana? My impressions from seeing Bettiah the night before left me sick with anguish at the thought that they would otherwise be lying in some alleyway waiting to die.
The lessons from my Catholic upbringing about what it meant to be a Christian were transformed into real, practical meaning at Fakirana. It was literally the place where the poor’s feet were washed and those that society had left behind were taken in and embraced. The place pulsated with purpose.
The young deaf children who would normally have been there were on holiday, but we were taken into a room full of local girls learning the basics of reading and writing. Some looked as young as ten, others sixteen or seventeen. The nuns introduced Graham and me to the class, explaining that I’d been there as a baby, and translated the girls’ questions. They knew very little about Australia—just the existence of kangaroos. They wanted to know what I did and how old I was. They sang and danced as we clapped and laughed and mimed silly jokes.
What did their future hold? I wondered. At most, these girls would learn how to count and read some basic passages of text. Even in 2012, none were likely to leave their hometowns or receive any further education. They would marry, have children, and raise their families. At their age I already knew that I would be a journalist and that I wanted to travel and above all learn as much as I could about the world around me: its politics, its people, its natural history, its languages, its cultures. For me the world was always an infinite encyclopaedia and I wanted to devote my life to understanding as much of it as I could first-hand. That thirst had been within me for years, since I was at least as young as these girls, who lit up the classroom with their gorgeous and warm innocent smiles. I wanted to give them everything I’d had, all the hopes and educational opportunities that Australia had given me. It was an impossible dream. I left their classroom smiling, but with tears in my eyes.
Graham and I trekked around the grounds, which stretched over several acres. It was an almost self-sustaining community. The sisters sold their surplus fruits and vegetables, and the only food they ate that wasn’t produced on site was the meat they bought in town. They sowed wheat, which was harvested and ground into flour for naan. Old fruit trees that in season bore mangoes and jackfruit towered overhead. We saw fields of potato, pea and tomato crops. The nuns also kept cows for fresh milk, pigs, and horses in stables. They employed a full-time farmhand to tend to it all, and extra workers were brought in from the town for gardening and harvesting at busy times.
Particularly striking was a vivid yellow field of flowers. I wondered if the crop was canola, which I’d seen when I was growing up in Bathurst and which also has a bright yellow flower. But it turned out they were mustard plants. The nuns told us it was common for babies to be kept warm simply by rubbing a little mustard onto their skin. Aha! I thought; now I knew what had suddenly kicked in to allow me to eat whole chillies with ease. These funny little connections had such an impact on me. I had never minded not looking like Mum and Dad or being able to join in when Dominic, Gabriela and Joseph discussed which cousin they resembled. But I did appreciate the snippets of understanding I gained about my personal history in India. It turned out to matter after all.
Tucked right down the back at the furthest point of the property was a cemetery where tiny babies who didn’t make it to adoption were buried. No, I wasn’t doubly blessed; make it triply blessed, I thought, turning away, choked with sadness.
The highlight of the entire visit was seeing the building where we babies had been kept when the orphanage was running. The fourth of the buildings surrounding the internal courtyard, it now held just a few traces of the little lives that had once passed through it. There were two main rooms where we would have been cared for as babies; one of them was now a chapel for the nuns. Walking into the building, with the knowledge that I had been there, cried there, been looked after within these four walls so far away from everything I knew, was a hallowed experience. It was a similar feeling to that I’ve had walking into grand cathedrals—St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Notre-Dame, St Vitus—except that this was far more precious. I found I adopted the same reverent tone as I had in those religious monuments. In fact, where I might have tried to snap a sneaky photo on my iPhone in the Abbey, say, the image of that room remains in my memory only. It was too sacred to photograph.
As I looked around in the complete silence, it was easy to try to listen out for a distant echo of the babies’ cries and imagine the nuns rushing between rooms. My overriding thought, standing in that room, was that I knew I had been there before, I could feel it. The feeling was overpowering and tremendous.
When the centre had stopped operating as an orphanage, the nuns gave away their baby things to those in need—all but one relic, a white swinging cot kept on the balcony. At seeing it, my cheeks almost burst with my smile of delight; I knew without doubt that I had been put in there. Other returnees who were there as babies have apparently felt the same way. The sisters laughingly told us that one lady tried to jump right back in, never mind that she was thirty years old!
In the afternoon we asked Ramesh to drive us into town. The sisters wanted to pick up some goods at the local store and offered to take me to the marketplace in case I wanted to buy some local souvenirs. Ramesh fussed over the sisters. He chatted with them and asked about my Indian looks and why Graham and I had wanted to come to Bettiah.
The city looked far less frightening by day but still wretchedly poor. With the nuns in their dusty pink saris as our guides, we were welcomed with smiles. It was obvious that they were well regarded in society, which is no surprise given how prominent religion is in India. The nuns took us to their regular stalls and were welcomed with warm, familiar greetings. There were none of the touts who had plagued our every step in Delhi. I bought some shawls, thicker, itchier and woollier than the ones I’d found in Delhi. I made sure I bought one for Mum and one for Melissa—I knew they would want their own piece of Bettiah.
After shopping we stopped by a high-walled centre near the local hospital and met some more Holy Cross sisters, who nursed at the local hospital. They asked about my life in Australia and whether I’d wear the shawls that I’d bought in India. Yes, I think so, I told them, smiling. And I meant it. I was a long way from the girl who had shuddered at any mention of India.
