I’m cleaning the basement, dismantling the piles that have been collecting dust since we moved into this house almost three years ago. When I tire of wading through a container of old toys, broken crayons and stray Lego pieces, I wander over to a box of photos.
The basement is full of boxes, filled with detritus, each one demanding that decisions be made. Donate, toss or keep? Does this item “spark joy?” But nearly every object I touch, no matter how dirty or worn, evokes a memory and leaves me wavering. I reach into the stack of photos and catch my breath when I pull out a snapshot of Haseena, taken a decade ago, when I was trying to become her mother.
She stands on the threshold of St. Theresa’s Tender Loving Care Home, a 3-year-old dressed in a donated red turtleneck and matching red-and-white skirt, with the purple sneakers I bought for her at Shoppers Stop in Hyderabad strapped on her feet. It’s a hot day, and she’s clutching a bottle of water. The morning sun is bright, giving the photo an overexposed quality. Some ayah, one of the orphanage caregivers, has rolled her sleeves up above the elbow. Haseena’s dark hair, cut pixie style, appears damp and freshly combed, hinting that I must have just arrived for my daily visit. She looks straight into the camera, her brown eyes wide, a swath of bushes and a line of coconut palms in the background. She’s not smiling. I probably didn’t give her time to pose.
The photograph is unremarkable, really. It’s the 2×2-inch piece of white paper taped over the photo’s right corner that makes me gasp. The image of a bird in flight, holding an envelope in its beak, floats in the center of the vellum square. I spent hours dipping a rubber stamp in ink and pressing the image of that bird over and over again as John and I were making our wedding invitations, long before we dreamed of adopting a child.
I’d forgotten about attaching the bird to Haseena’s picture, a bit of superstition meant to bind the three of us together. Indian activists tried to stop international adoptions from the region, an anti-Western outcry that flared just as our case went to court. At the time, I imagined that bird flying our hoped-for daughter all the way from India to California, much like the robin that carried Thumbelina to safety on his back in a book I’d loved as a child.