PUNE: A shared thread binds Sulakshana, Paul, Ratna and countless adoptees separated from their origins early in life: a quiet sense of difference, an unnameable absence, and an enduring quest to find their mothers.
Sulakshana was among the several inter-country adoptees who had filed applications with Central Adoption Resource Agency in 2025–26, seeking to trace their biological parents in different parts of India. Paul visited India in 1995 and Ratna in 2018 on their own. By the end of this year or early 2027, Sulakshana plans to visit India in search of her mother and her story.
TOI traced the trio and their stories that begin in fragments, shaped by circumstances and culminate in silence.
‘Your mother is India’
In the winter of 1999, after four daughters, hunger weighed heavier than affection in Sulakshana’s family in Nagpur, Maharashtra. At just five days old, she was left at an orphanage — her first severance from her roots. Two years later, she was adopted by a French family and taken continents away, growing up in a home that gave her comfort, but not answers.
Now 26 and training as a legal assistant, Sulakshana is preparing to uncover the story of Mira, the mother she never knew.
For Paul, now 62, the decision to give him up was made even before he was born in 1964. His mother, a nurse from Agra, had fallen in love across caste lines — a union unacceptable in her family. After his birth, he was taken to a Delhi orphanage and soon adopted by a French family working in Kashmir. He grew up in the French Alps, built a life in Europe, and raised a family of his own. But the absence lingered. Holding his newborn son at 30 stirred a turning point. “I had never known someone who was connected to me by birth,” he tells TOI.
Paul’s search brought him back to India in 1995, to a narrow lane in Lucknow guided only by sparse documents. There, he found traces — an uncle, a story, and a warning. Reaching out to his mother, he was told, could upend her new life. He returned to Europe without answers, carrying instead a quiet reconciliation. Today, he visits India often, speaking some Hindi, nurturing friendships, and holding on to a simple truth someone once told him: “Your mother is India.”
‘Why are you so brown?”
Ratna’s memories are even more fragile. Born in Calcutta in 1979, her earliest recollections are fleeting — a white building, a staircase, a sense of being moved. At 14 months old, she was placed in a children’s home and later adopted by a family in Constance, Germany. Her childhood was largely happy, but marked by a sharp awareness of difference. In her village, she was the only one who looked like her. “People would come to see me… ask, ‘Why are you so brown? It’s a strange feeling,” she tells TOI over the phone from Switzerland.
In her late 20s, the questions grew louder. Ratna returned to India in 2018, chasing fragments — hospital names, orphanage records — only to find that time had erased most traces. The orphanage had shut down decades earlier, its records lost. Her documents offer only a stark note: “Baby girl… abandoned… possibly illegitimate.” Her search remains unresolved, suspended between what little is known, and all that is missing.
Across these journeys, life abroad offered stability, sometimes joy — but never complete belonging. Many adoptees speak of living between identities, accepted yet apart, loved yet searching. Moments of difference — comments on skin tone, unanswered questions in schoolyards, the silence around origins — shaped their growing years.
‘Where do I come from?’
For Sulakshana, that search intensified recently. After a difficult period in 2023, she began reconnecting with her roots — through films, music, food and conversations with other adoptees online and social media groups. What began as curiosity soon revealed inconsistencies. Her birth certificate records her name as ‘Sulochana’, while orphanage documents call her Sulakshana.
With help from Indian authorities, she recently obtained long-withheld files. Those led her to a breakthrough — and more questions. A phone call with a man, believed to be her father, revealed a different story: an unwed mother, cast out of her village, battling distress, later dying of tuberculosis. Mira, from the Gond community, had passed away a decade ago.
“I believe my mother, consciously or not, helped me have a better life,” Sulakshana shares with TOI. There is no resentment — only a quiet need to understand.
Because for adoptees like her, Paul and Ratna, the search is not always about finding someone. Often, it is about making peace with absence, piecing together identity from fragments, and answering a simple, enduring question: Where do I come from?
