Lost Child

Farah Ghuznavi

Farah Ghuznavi writes:

It started out like any other evening at home. When we sat down at the table, I was excited to see the red spinach and shrimp dish that had been served with dinner. Although I was nearly nine years old, I hadn’t yet got over the childish sense of pleasure to be had by mixing my rice with the spinach, and watching the rice magically transform to a bright shade of red.
”They should make some of this for Niva’s lunch tomorrow,” I said to my mother. “I bet she likes it when her rice starts turning red!”
The baby playing on the bed in my parents’ room looked up at the sound of her name, and gave me a big smile. The ayah was vigilantly watching her while my parents, my brother and I had dinner. Ever since she’d started walking, you had to keep an eye on the little monkey all the time. The speed with which she managed to get around was pretty impressive.
”Yes, you’re right. I’ll tell the cook to make sure it’s prepared for her meal tomorrow…” my mother said, a shade distractedly. Something in her tone made me look at her more closely – was something wrong? I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. In a voice that shook slightly, she said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. Niva is leaving next Saturday.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “What do you mean? Where is she going?” I asked stupidly, even though I knew already what the answer would be.
“You know where she’s going! She’s going to Switzerland,” came the response, just as I’d feared. My mother’s voice softened as she continued, perhaps realising the extent of my shock, “We always knew she was heading there, Farah. We’ve just been lucky to have her with us for a little while.”
”But you said….” My voice trailed away, as I realised that I couldn’t finish the sentence. Had anyone ever actually said that Niva would be staying? Perhaps not, but I’d been so sure that things would somehow work out. Niva had been living with us for nearly a year – how could they take her to Switzerland now?
“Her family are waiting for her, Farah. We have to let her go.” My mother’s voice was gentle, but firm.
I knew there was no arguing with that tone. Perhaps if I’d been older, I would have realised how tightly she was holding her own feelings in check, noticed the tremor in her hand as she helped herself to more rice. But I was in no position to consider anyone else’s feelings; I was reeling from the bombshell that had just been dropped.
Suddenly, the lump in my throat made it hard to swallow the brightly-coloured balls of spinach and rice that I had so carefully mixed together just a few short minutes ago. That, combined with the burning sensation of the tears I was holding back with some difficulty, ensured that there would be nothing more out of me that evening. But the questions lingered in my mind for a long time afterwards.
I wasn’t quite sure why I was so upset. After all, I’d known that Niva’s adoption process was underway. And unlike many of my peers, I had no particular fascination with babies. I had nothing against them; I just didn’t find them very interesting. My lukewarm attitude had taken a further nosedive a few months previously. If familiarity breeds contempt, then excess clearly led to overkill–at least as far as I was concerned.
Struggling into wakefulness on that occasion, I was still groggy. But even as I wrestled with the pillow clamped tightly around my ears, I knew it was a futile battle. I might just about have had a chance of drowning out the sound of one wailing baby, but when it came to multiples, the odds deteriorated drastically; and it was only a matter of time before the single cry that had disturbed me developed into a full throated chorus.
It was sometime in the early hours preceding dawn. The sky outside, framed against the windows of my bedroom, was a monotonous shade of pale grey, the pink tinge of sunrise yet to kiss it to life. But I knew that I wouldn’t get much more sleep that night. My only hope was that by lying quietly in my bed I might briefly doze off again before it was, inevitably, time to get up for school.
The two women sleeping in my room were already up, one of them cradling the main culprit, whose outraged cries faded away to a contented whimper once she was lifted and cradled against an experienced shoulder. But by then she had already succeeded in rousing two of the other babies–though by some miracle the remaining two appeared to have slept through the disturbance.
The second ayah stood there, between the adjoining cots where the two rudely-awakened babies lay. Having turned both of them to lie on their sides, she proceeded to pat them back to sleep with one hand clapping in a simultaneous rhythm on each of their backs. It worked like magic.
Too bad she couldn’t do the same for me, I thought bitterly. But it was clear that my needs came very far down on the priority list for the time being. After all, hardly would my mother have dumped not one, not two, but five babies in my room for a fortnight otherwise! And that too, in the week before my exams…What was she thinking of?
It wasn’t the first time that my bedroom had been invaded by infants; not by a long shot. My mother worked for an organisation with field operations based in North Bengal, which among other things ran a home for children who had been abandoned or orphaned. Some of these children–usually babies–were available for adoption by Swiss couples, subject to clearance by the governments of Switzerland and Bangladesh.
The paperwork invariably took a long time; the Swiss government was meticulous in running background checks and establishing that potential adoptive parents were able to provide a loving and financially secure home environment for any children they adopted. That process took upwards of a year. There were also a number of formalities to be completed on the Bangladesh side, once the Swiss authorities had confirmed that a particular couple were considered fit to adopt. The equivalent process on the Bangladesh side took around a year. As a result, in most cases, the adoption procedure in its entirety could take anything from two to three years.
Once all the formalities were completed, some of the babies concerned would stay at our house for up to a month, before heading off to their adoptive parents in Switzerland. During that time, additional health checks were carried out and they received more individual attention in terms of feeding and play than it was feasible for them to be given at the care institution, the aim being to get them ready for the travel and change of environment that lay ahead.
Sometimes, when occasional overcrowding became a problem in the halfway-house where the babies stayed in Dhaka, my mother would bring a few of them to stay with us until space was again available at the other facility. I’m not quite sure why, but despite the fact that we did have a guestroom, the babies were almost always placed in my room. They had individual cots, consisting of large oval bamboo baskets on stilts, well-equipped with egg-shaped mattresses and soft blankets. But I had never had five of those basket-beds in my room at one time before!
It had all started with a trio, though it was supposed to have begun with a pair: Rajani and Aleya. After being given the exciting news that we would be having two small visitors soon, the entire household waited eagerly for them to arrive. But strangely enough, they never did. I’m not quite sure what happened to Rajani and Aleya’s proposed visit to our home; perhaps the documentation got delayed (though they did ultimately make it to Switzerland), but at the time I wasn’t old enough to ask too many questions.
Besides, my attention was swiftly captured by the arrival of the triad of Rashi, Shabana and Shandhya. Of the three, Rashi was easily the most interesting to me. At one and a half years, she was walking and talking, and it didn’t hurt that she met the world with sparklingly intelligent brown eyes and a huge smile. Shandhya was a quintessentially round eyed, wobbly-necked, soft bundle of baby flesh. Despite her baldness, she was a sweet baby, but she was too young to be very entertaining to a 7-year-old. It was poor Shabana who got the rough end of the deal; she was a cranky, undersized infant, and difficult to pacify. As a result, she received far less positive attention than the other two, although her needs were well taken care of by the ayahs who had accompanied the three babies to our home.
Many babies had come and gone from our lives since then, and a few children too. Most of them left a mark on my memory and my heart, albeit to varying degrees. There was Shefali, with her bright, bright eyes that twinkled with intelligence and naughtiness, toddling around in her puffy white nappy; Rashi, with that wide, unforgettable smile; Khushi, with her dark eyes and aquiline nose, a handful to manage at the age of four, with a strong independent streak and an inordinately developed sense of self-respect; Moyna, an endearingly docile child with a sweet, shy smile; Najma, whose temper was as legendary as it was unpredictable; Chand Mia – the only boy that I could remember among all these children (providing a fairly definitive statement about son preference in Bangladesh) – memorable for his gap-toothed grin and obliging personality; Kuruni, so named because she was found abandoned as a five-year-old, a child with a club foot and a singularly gentle and loving nature.
At the time, I was struck by the fact that so many of these parents in Switzerland who were waiting for their children did not lay down conditions or show any tendency to discriminate against those who were “less than perfect,” like Kuruni. Her club foot was eventually cured through corrective surgery, but not all the children had problems that could be addressed so easily. Jobeda, for example, only had one eye, and although she was not a particularly pretty child, in later pictures taken with her Swiss mother and two Swiss brothers, she looked radiantly happy in the midst of her new family.
I couldn’t help feeling that the children were fortunate to be given to parents who were so eager to have them and so unconditional in the love that they were offering. Putting up with the intrusive background checks conducted by the Swiss government meant that the couples could have unexpected visitors dropping by at any time of day or night to see the conditions under which they lived, how they organised their homes and their lives, and even the frequency and form taken by their social lives, i.e. parties, etc. What a contrast to those who gave birth to biological children without facing any such strictures!
The families also had to prove that they were financially able to take on full responsibility for any children that they adopted – the Swiss state had no intention of taking on an additional welfare burden. As mentioned earlier, the adoption process itself could be an exhaustingly protracted affair. So it seemed clear to me that these parents must really want the children, which gave me hope that the little ones would indeed grow up in good homes.
Not everyone shared my view. Within a few years of Niva’s journey, international adoptions from Bangladesh would come to an end. It was the result of a combination of factors; one instance of mismanagement by a particular agency combined with years of pressure from among others, the Saudi and Iranian governments, who were strongly against such placements.
It culminated in a total ban on all adoptions from Bangladesh. Nor did the anti-adoption advocates mince their words. As the then Secretary of Social Welfare proudly stated, “It is better for these children to die in the gutters as Muslims than to be sent to Christian countries for adoption.” I would have felt a lot more impressed by his rhetoric if he had come forward to take a single child into his own home.
But that was not the case; and adoption not being a preferred option in most Bangladeshi families, many children–particularly those placed in state institutions–faced a bleak future. Neglect, ill-treatment and corporal punishment were rife in such places, and there were some cases of older children being injured, sometimes fatally, as a result of attempts to escape e.g. by jumping down from upper floors of buildings. As newspaper reports on events at the Panchagarh Shishu Paribar orphanage decades later indicated, things have not changed for the better in the interim.
In April 2010, a number of children living at the Panchagarh orphanage went on a rampage, damaging furniture, buildings and documents stored at the institution. They locked the main gate and ransacked supervisors’ rooms, setting fire to files, and bringing out a procession to protest their treatment by officials. Complaints included allegations of food being stale and frequent beatings over trivial matters. Police intervened to restore stability and heard some of the children’s grievances. According to the children interviewed, they were routinely victimised by staff members, with sick children being subjected to verbal and physical abuse, while medicine was withheld. Unfortunately, the situation in Panchagarh is unlikely to be exceptional.
After the laws were amended with the aim of ending international adoptions, the situation changed completely. In terms of religious personal laws as applicable in Bangladesh today, while Muslim Law does not allow adoption, under Hindu Law only men have the right to take a male child for adoption. Hindu women are not allowed to adopt. Christians can adopt. But there is at present no “adoption law” per se in Bangladesh–meaning that what is generally recognised under law as adoption (which requires severing all legal ties between the biological child and parent) is not possible under the current law. What is available is a law of guardianship or custody–which falls short of the full range of rights that come with adoption. This option is however available to prospective parents belonging to all religious communities.
Thus, as far as the State Law is concerned, adoption of children is not permitted but Bangladeshi citizens are permitted to apply for guardianship of children, effectively giving Bangladeshi prospective adoptive parents custody of children. The 1982 Guardianship and Wards Amendments Ordinance prohibits granting the guardianship of Bangladeshi children to non-Bangladeshi parents. These restrictions have limited the adoption of Bangladeshi children to only a handful each year, as opposed to a larger number of adoption processes in the years prior to this.
But these changes lay in the future at the time of Niva’s stay with us. For the time being, the journey of some Bangladeshi children to a new life in Switzerland continued, albeit at the pace dictated by two sets of bureaucracies. And among those children was Niva. She had been found alone–either lost or abandoned, no one could be quite sure which–at the age of around six months. She came to us a few months later, with the usual understanding that it would be for a short time only.
Things didn’t work out quite as planned. Niva’s adoption process turned out to be much longer than we had expected, mainly because of the possibility that she was a lost child, rather than one who had been abandoned. This meant that every possible effort had to be made to find her family before proceeding with any adoption.
The agency conducted detailed physical investigations around the area where she had been found, also making a series of public announcements and undertaking other measures aimed at locating her parents. In the end, nobody ever came forward to claim Niva, but by then she had been living with my family for nearly nine months, and had well and truly claimed all of us as her own.
In the beginning, as far as I was concerned, she was just another baby; cute certainly, as all babies are, with her light brown hair and serious dark eyes. But she didn’t smile as easily as some of the others. She had a strong will, and an implacable conviction as to her own rights–whether to love, attention, space or food–and that didn’t always go down well with her (slightly) elders.
She was not as pretty as some of her predecessors, nor as easy to manage as others, but there was something about this child; something indefinable, but impossible to ignore. And as much as I occasionally resented being usurped from my position as the youngest member of the family–relegated instead to the ignoble status of middle child–Niva grew on me.
Because my brother was eight years older, it was me that she followed around, insistently intruding on my games and making her presence felt when I had friends visiting. In fact, she was the quintessential pesky younger sibling, and I made a suitable fuss when my mother insisted that my friends and I include her in all of our activities. This insistence went to the extent of Mum refusing to finance a small picnic in the garden for me and four of the neighbours’ children, unless Niva was allowed to join us.
Of course she got her way. Niva, I mean, not my mother, who was only a tool in the power struggle that I was so decisively losing. Our carefully chosen feast items were shared with this little child, who made a funny face at the sourness of our tamarind savouries. She spat out the tamarind mixture –unmoved by our outrage at the waste of such a delicious treat. She wasn’t too excited by the pastry triangles stuffed with a spicy potato filling either, or the Mimi chocolate that bore an uncanny resemblance to laxative in both taste and texture, preferring instead the sweet biscuits and “tiktikir dim” or lizard eggs we offered her, tiny balls of brightly coloured confectionery.
As the initial period of her stay lengthened into months, she gradually, inevitably, became absorbed into the family unit. The process took place with surprising swiftness, because she was an unusually intelligent and lovable child (not withstanding my very particular reservations in this regard).
There were moments of pure joy, like the time when we witnessed her first steps. There was a tiny wooden side-table in my parents’ room, with a surface area the size of a coffee table book; this we used to turn upside down so that Niva could “walk” by holding on to the legs of the table as she propelled it forward. I will never forget the day when she suddenly let go of the table and stood on her own two feet, albeit in a distinctly wobbly manner. It was only for a few seconds, before she landed squarely on her small bottom, but my brother and I – the only ones home at the time – were beside ourselves with excitement.
And sometimes, the nicest thing about having a small child around was the way that it made you recognise certain everyday miracles. My brother, at that time a teenager, was a typically music-obsessed adolescent. One day, when he was lying on the floor with his earphones on, Niva began using his prone body as an amusement park. Eventually, he got up and decided to see how she would react to the music. I still have a clear picture in my head of the wide-eyed look of utter wonderment on her face as she listened to the sound coming through the headphones, the huge white earpieces dwarfing her small head.
But of course – eventually – the approval process was completed, and it was time for her to go. By that time, she had well and truly entrenched herself in every aspect of our family lives. It was unimaginable to think of her leaving, and inevitable that she would someday do so. I didn’t find out until many years later how close my parents had come to cancelling Niva’s trip to Switzerland and adopting her themselves. But it would not have been fair; the Rueggs had been waiting for their baby for a very long time. In the end my parents gave up the idea, and Niva was lost to us.
My mother travelled with Niva on the journey to Switzerland, since each group of five children was accompanied by one adult. She later described that trip as one of the worst experiences of her life, and not because she had to single-handedly manage three toddlers, a baby and a young child by herself. The baby was Shandhya, and the little girl was Kuruni. In fact, having Kuruni along would turn out to be the single blessing of the trip.
After they had reached Switzerland, and the children were due to be taken into care by the Swiss authorities, my mother warned Kuruni that she would need to take special care of Niva. “She’ll cry when I leave, you see.” My mother said that she would always remember how Kuruni smiled sweetly at her and gathered all four of the little ones around her, promising that she would look after them. And she did; the nurses at the institution later told my mother what a huge help Kuruni had been in assisting the children to adjust to their new surroundings.
They were all a little wide-eyed and apprehensive in this new environment, but it was only Niva who began crying as the time for my mother’s departure drew closer. Perhaps she sensed trouble. Nothing anyone did could calm her down, and as Mum told me later, she broke down in tears herself as she left with Niva’s desperate screams ringing in her ears.
The next few days were hell for my mother, unable to go back into the facility to visit the children, and all too aware of the distress Niva must be going through. She once told me that it was the hardest thing she had ever done to walk out of that room, leaving the children with the nurses. She never again travelled to Switzerland with any of the adopted children, though her work regularly took her there in subsequent years.
A few days after her traumatic arrival, my mother received a phone call from Niva’s mother, with her father translating their conversation from German to English. Mrs Ruegg assured my mother that Niva was now calm, and no longer crying, but that she seemed unable to sleep. Through the woman’s husband, my mother explained to Mrs Ruegg that she had to put the baby to sleep through a time-honoured Bangali technique, patting her gently and rhythmically on her back with one hand. She stayed on the line while the Rueggs experimented with her instructions. And within a couple of minutes, the exhausted Niva succumbed swiftly to the long-overdue invitation of the Sandman.
There was no question that Niva’s departure left a vacuum in our lives, one that was difficult to talk about. In the initial period after the adoption, my mother looked up Niva’s family each time she went on a work trip to Switzerland. They lived in a small village outside Zurich, and from the regular photographs we received over the first few years, it seemed clear that she was a happy and well-adjusted child. That thought was an enormous consolation for us, still sore from the loss of her.
There was one picture in particular that captured my imagination: Niva at the age of about five or six sitting with four of her friends on a large boulder in what appeared to be a lush, green meadow. Although Niva clearly stood out as the only dark-skinned child in the group, the body language seemed to indicate that the baby with a strong streak of bossiness had grown into a child who was definitely the leader of the gang!
In fact, Niva’s status as the only internationally adopted child in her village brought her a lot of positive attention – to the extent that her brother Sammy, who was the biological child of her adoptive parents, began to suffer from a sense of neglect in comparison; not in relation to their parents, but from all the attention showered on her by the other villagers. But there remained certain poignant aspects to this. For one thing, in addition to being the only adoptee, Niva was for many years the only brown person living in their village, with the commensurate amount of curiosity this generated.
On one occasion, my mother and her Swiss friend, Ellen Richard, had gone to visit Niva and her family. Niva – who was at the time six or seven years old – suddenly pointed out to her mother that while Mrs Ruegg and Ellen were the same colour, Niva and my mother were also the same colour. She was clearly excited by that realisation, and the awareness that there were others who looked like her, even if they didn’t live in her village.
After that initial period, it would be many years before Niva again re-entered our lives in any substantial way. Yet although we didn’t often talk about her, she somehow remained a presence in my family. Not least because of the enormous, poster-sized image of her that always hung on the back of my parents’ bedroom door. It has remained there for more than a quarter of a century, surviving the moves between four different houses. That picture was one of a series taken when Niva was a baby, and she featured in an advertising campaign for Savlon cream – an early sign of the charisma that would, a few decades later, take her into a media career.
In the years immediately after she left for Switzerland, we received, in addition to the occasional photographs, a huge box of biscuits for Christmas every year. My mother took pains to explain to me how special the biscuits were; handmade and very expensive. It was perhaps the Rueggs’ way of thanking us for helping to bring their daughter into their lives.
Those biscuits were unlike anything I had eaten before or since. Rectangular and chewy, made with nuts and dried fruit, they resembled small pieces of Ryvita. But like the spinach and rice balls at that meal many years before, they were hard for me to swallow. So no matter how unusual anyone else may have thought they were, I didn’t like them; and after a few years, I even gave up pretending to.
I would much rather have had Niva instead.

Farah Ghuznavi is a development professional who has worked for organisations that include the Grameen Bank, Christian Aid UK and the United Nations. She also writes short stories and creative non-fiction, and is a columnist with the Star Magazine, affiliated with the Daily Star newspaper in Bangladesh.