ADOPTED WOMAN FROM LUCERNE SEARCHES FOR CLUES IN INDIA Livia Lalita goes to Mumbai

As a toddler, Lalita is adopted by a Lucerne family. At the age of 39, she is traveling to India for the first time. The report follows Livia Lalita Zgraggen's search for clues.

An old man with white hair sits behind an old-fashioned reception desk. He raises his head, his eyes glance at us behind his rimless glasses. We say who we are and what we want. He looks a bit grumpy, then wiggles his head in that vague Indian way and picks up the phone. With a wave of his hand he motions for us to take a seat. We sit down on a hard, fabric-covered wooden bench and wait.

It's quiet in the small room, the heat shimmers outside the windows with fly screens. A bird caws somewhere, the hot air from the fan turns above us. Along the wall are bags of toys, boxes of washing powder and other things; probably donations for the children here: It is 2 p.m., June 2018, and we are at St. Catherine's Home, an orphanage in a poor district of Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

The Indian sisters know nothing. Or is it?

After a few minutes the curtain on the corridor billows and a nurse comes in. She wears a simple dress made of mustard-colored fabric and has her gray hair pulled up in a bun. My colleague Livia Lalita stands up. “Hello,” she says and takes the outstretched hand of the sister, who introduces herself as Ananda. “I lived in this home for the first few months, then I was adopted to Switzerland, to Lucerne. Now I have come to know where I come from," says Lalita.

Sister Ananda looks at her. Not unfriendly, but distant, and asks: When was that? 37 years ago! “That was a long time ago, that was a very long time ago. We don't know anything about that," she says, shaking her head worriedly.

Lalita is stubborn. She takes Sister Ananda to task and doesn't allow herself to be fobbed off, as she did with the letter she sent to Mumbai when she was 18 and asked in scraggly writing: Who are my parents and what do you know about them? The answer came straight away in a friendly but non-binding letter: Dear Lalita, we don't know anything concrete about your origins or your parents. But rest assured: they loved you and wanted the best for you; a safe care, a loving home. God is with you and we pray for you, dear Lalita, never forget that.

But other names appeared in the same letter. Dear Caroline. Dear Jasmina. Dear Regula. Lalita is apparently one of many who are asking about her origins - a case of copy/paste. But now she has made the long journey from the small town of Lucerne to Mumbai, looks into Sister Ananda's eyes and doesn't believe that there are no more documents about her origins. She has long been aware that she has no chance of finding her birth parents and that was not the idea behind her trip. But she wants to find a tiny trace from her earliest childhood, a distant memory or fleeting recognition.

“Who brought me here?” she asks urgently. Was I, as a baby, placed in the little hammock outside the front gate, swinging over the dirty floor? Or did my mother give birth to me here and hold me in her arms before I was put into one of the cribs? And most importantly: Is it my mother who gave me my name: Lalita!? “I don’t know,” says the sister.

Sometimes the babies are placed in this hammock by the mothers or the police. (Image: chw )

Lalita insists on a second appointment and that the sister should look in the archives until then to see whether there is still a note, a piece of paper or a document somewhere about the 18-month-old girl who was taken by plane to Switzerland in the summer of 1981 was brought to the Zgraggen family: 47.5 centimeters tall, weighing 2.9 kilos, probably born on December 9, 1979.

This is what it says on one of the few Indian documents that exist about the child and which are kept in a green folder in Switzerland by the Zgraggen family. There is also the yellowed passport that expired 28 years ago, which contains the only photo that exists from those first months: a little girl with big, dark eyes and a serious look. “These eyes don’t look serious, they look sad,” says Lalita, who became Livia after her arrival in Switzerland.

Baby on board: Geneva Airport, summer 1981

What has only been allowed in exceptional cases for a few years has been common practice for decades: thousands of small children were adopted all over the world from all over India and also from St. Catherine's Home in Mumbai. To Italy and Germany, to Australia, Sweden, Canada and everywhere where couples wanted children and couldn't have their own.

Like Peter and Lotti Zgraggen in Switzerland. Newly married, nice apartment; with shared hobbies, a reliable circle of friends and full of confidence for the family future. The man has a good job, the woman is a part-time salesperson – at least until she has a child. Then she wants to be a mother, and a good one, who cares and is there for her baby unconditionally and at all times. “I am happy to be able to devote all my time and attention to our child and have no intention of working again,” said Lotti Zgraggen a few years later in the extensive documents that are requested in the event of an adoption.

“We hope that you will be able to hug your little daughter Livia Lalita soon.”

The Indian Sisters, 1981

Six years after their wedding, the couple is still childless: no baby is coming. Friends of Zgraggens in a similar situation adopted a child from Mumbai and had good experiences. Peter and Lotti Zgraggen also decide to adopt a child from there. “We would be very happy to be able to take in a small child from the St. Catherine's Home orphanage with us in Switzerland,” they write in a first letter to the sisters, in whose care around 500 children live. Without exception, all of them come from poor families, many were born out of wedlock, some are sick or disabled and, with a few exceptions, they are girls.

Pink beds for the girls, blue ones for the boys: dormitory in St. Catherine's Home. (Image: chw )

After months of exchanging letters, filling out countless documents, answering tons of questions from Indian and Swiss authorities, the couple gets the green light: “Dear Zgraggen family, you will definitely be overjoyed to read this letter! The time has come: the Indian court has approved the adoption and we hope that you will soon be able to hug your little daughter Livia Lalita," the sisters from Mumbai said in the letter that landed in Zgraggen's mailbox in the spring of 1981. Just a few weeks later, the time has come: on a summer evening, Lotti and Peter Zgraggen are standing at Geneva airport waiting for their long-awaited daughter Livia.

37 years later, the Zgraggen couple are sitting in their apartment on the third floor of a block in a quiet part of Lucerne. "It was a hot summer day when we picked Livia up at the airport," they remember. Lotti Zgraggen stands up, takes a notebook out of the drawer and opens it. The pages are filled with entries that her husband wrote about this first time with Livia.

She turns the pages until she finds the entry she is looking for and reads out: “Wednesday, August 26, 1981, arrival of Livia. (...) Our daughter is brought to us from the airport in a bus. It is presented to us neatly labeled, with a bag full of clothes, gifts and ID cards. We immediately take her to our hearts - this cold, 'smooth little man'." The mother closes the booklet again and says it was an incredibly good feeling to finally be able to take the girl in her arms after months of preparation and say: “Sali you! Now you are here and belong to us!"

Livia was initially shy and reserved. But after just a few weeks she opened the button, was well received with her cheerful nature and enjoyed being the center of attention - and that was often the case: in the 80s there were hardly any dark-skinned people in Lucerne, let alone children. “Of course it was exotic and people reacted very positively. Almost too positive!" say the Zgraggens and tell how complete strangers came to their table in the café, ran their hands through the girl's hair and said: "So harsh, this child! Where does it come from?". From India. And that was more of a coincidence, say Zgraggens: adopting a child from Switzerland was almost impossible back then - the waiting period after the wedding was too long, and the subsequent waiting lists of other childless couples were too long.

“The sisters have chosen a daughter for us and that’s a good thing.”

Peter Zgraggen

So they looked elsewhere and came into contact with the home in Mumbai through friends. It was important to them to get good references about the orphanage from authorities and friends. «Stories like the one from Sri Lanka obviously give you something to think about. We're glad that everything went very seriously for us," they say, alluding to the sometimes abusive adoptions that also took place between Sri Lanka and Switzerland in the 1980s. Going to Mumbai themselves and seeing things for themselves was never an option for the couple: Lotti is afraid of flying. And Peter wouldn't have wanted that at all: "The sisters have chosen a daughter for us and that's a good thing."

Livia Lalita Zgraggen walks through the garden of the St. Catherine's Home orphanage. (Image: chw )

Born in the juggernaut of Mumbai

The heat at Mumbai airport hits you like a damp terry towel that hasn't been wrung out. It's June 2018, the temperatures are climbing to 41 degrees, it feels like it's 47. Livia Zgraggen is pushing a luggage cart with several suitcases in front of her. She's hard to make out in the crowd of people arriving: she's wearing a hip-length Indian-style blouse, underneath colored leggings that end just above the ankles, and with her black hair and dark skin, she looks like all the other Indian women who are with her in the arrivals hall. «Finally mainstream! Finally don't stand out! Finally be one of many!” she says later and enjoys the fact that no one looks at her askance and asks: “Where are you from?”

A question that she has been asked for decades in Switzerland, to which she is still exposed and sometimes helpless: on the street she is spoken to in standard German or English, at the post office she has to prove her Swiss identity in front of everyone at the counter , administrations and authorities judge her at first glance as an asylum seeker or foreigner, new acquaintances or customers are amazed at her foreign appearance and say: But your name is Zgraggen, Livia Zgraggen?!

It's clear to the locals: Lalita is Indian

In Mumbai it's the other way around, which pleases and amuses Livia: the rickshaw driver happily chatters on in Hindi, even though she says she doesn't understand him; At the ticket counters at tourist attractions, without asking, she pays the entrance fee for locals, which is many times cheaper than for foreigners. When it comes to street vendors, she isn't ripped off and the men don't stare at her, but rather they treat her with respect or simply ignore her.

The orphanage is located in a poor neighborhood in the middle of the Mumbai juggernaut. (Image: chw )

At the hotel she is asked her name and for the first time I hear her answer: Lalita. “It's easier that way, it's true for me in India,” says Livia, who has just arrived from Kerala, where she attended a yoga seminar for four weeks before she now wants to go in search of traces of her early childhood in Mumbai. "Finally. But I wasn’t ready before,” she says. Livia Zgraggen is now 39 years old, has a daughter of her own, works as a freelance health professional and is generally well settled in life. Now she is in India, the country where she was born, for the first time. “I want to close certain gaps in my identity that have bothered me since I was a child,” she said before she left.

The relationship with her adoptive parents was not always easy; today Lalita has sporadic contact with them. Did they do something wrong? Livia dismisses it. “We might have had exactly the same arguments and problems with each other if I had been her real daughter – who knows? “I just don’t know!” she says, looking back on her childhood and the subsequent pubertal crises.

In return, she always had a window open when there was an argument and it was impossible for her to find her parents. «Your genes are not in me! You have nothing to do with me! I'm a completely different person!" she then said to herself, looked in the mirror and didn't know who this other person was supposed to be. Where her own genes came from, what perhaps shaped her character and temperament, remained a mystery. Or maybe in India. The child Livia knew that she came from there. But that was it. “I can’t remember my parents ever looking at a world map with me or showing me a picture book about India,” she says, resenting the fact that no bridge was built for her to her country of origin.

Signs of thanks from mothers who gave their children into the care of the sisters. (Image: chw )

The Zgraggen couple knows nothing about this juggernaut Mumbai, in which around 20 million people live and which groans and rattles under one of the world's highest population densities and, surprisingly, does not completely collapse. It is Livia Lalita, now a grown woman, walking through these chaotic streets, clogged with motor rickshaws and trucks, carts and motorcycles, people and cows. A juggernaut over which a hellish noise is brewing, which covers the city with the unspeakable heat and smog and mercilessly suffocates it beneath itself.

There are densely packed shabby shacks made of leftover wood, corrugated iron and plastic, built on top of each other and inside each other, using every available millimeter so that the poor people at least have a roof over their heads. In front of and in between, garbage and simmering water, which in the heat and when it pours out of buckets during the monsoon, becomes a sewer whose stench lingers in the streets.

As if that wasn't enough, the humidity ensures that your clothes stick to your back when it's already so hot in the morning that you can cook eggs on the side of the road. Lalita nevertheless allows herself to be captivated by the hustle and bustle of the millions of women and men who scurry through the streets in their colorful clothes and sell their goods at market stalls, carve wooden furniture in a workshop, offer coconuts to thirsty passers-by on a street corner or themselves Weave calmly through the hellish traffic.

The sweet scent of jasmine flowers fills her nose, which seems like a small miracle to overcome all the stench, and she enjoys the spicy dishes that are available in the small food stalls around the corner as well as in air-conditioned restaurants. She spends hours driving through the streets in motor rickshaws and can't get enough of the lively hustle and bustle and omnipresent hustle and bustle. And Lalita knows that she herself comes from some corner of this Indian juggernaut, before she became Livia Zgraggen in Switzerland when she was 18 months old.

A sweet, big-eyed child who plays with neighborhood children and eats birthday cake, who is happy about snowflakes and who swims in the nearby lake in summer. Just like all the children in Lucerne do and like the Zgraggens imagined and wanted. “Our daughter is happy and interested in everything that is happening around her,” they write in one of the regular letters that they sent to the sisters in Mumbai in the early years. Only the dark skin color doesn't fit the image of the bright Swiss girl. But the father has an answer when someone asks: We turn off the lights during sex.

At the parlor table in Lucerne, summer 2018

In Lucerne, Peter Zgraggen takes a sip of coffee and furrows his brows over his blue eyes. “We never had the impression that Livia had a problem with her skin color,” he says. Of course she asked why she looked different than the other children here. “Then we said that she comes from another country, India. And that everyone there is darker. She accepted and accepted that. Or?" he asks, looking at his wife Lotti and she nods.

“We did not adopt a child to do a good work.”

Peter Zgraggen

Otherwise, this foreign and exotic country was not an issue in the family. “What for?” asks the father rhetorically. “We didn’t adopt a child to do a ‘good work’ – but because we wanted a daughter. And she belonged to us in Switzerland from the moment she arrived. The country of origin therefore no longer played a role for us. “Besides, she never even asked about it!” he says a bit defiantly.

Lotti Zgraggen sighs. Looking back, she is not as convinced as her husband that they chose the right concept and did not build a bridge. Other people she knows sent their adopted children to Indian dances, looked at books with them and introduced them to the culture and traditions of their country of origin. «Would that have been better? I don't know," says the mother. Livia has long since grown up and has a daughter of her own; the Zgraggens have been grandparents for 14 years. Today they find their relationship with their daughter to be ambivalent and fragile, but fundamentally good - that wasn't always the case.

The adoptive parents Lotti and Peter Zgraggen in the living room in Lucerne. (Image: chw )

“Livia hasn’t called me ‘mommy’ for a long time: since puberty, she only calls me by her first name: Lotti,” says her mother. This is indicative of their relationship, which became really difficult from the time they were teenagers. There were a lot of arguments and arguments, especially with her, the mother. “She rebelled against me and rebelled in every way,” says Lotti Zgraggen, her father nods and says: “She gave it full throttle! Luckily I was able to recharge my batteries through my work - otherwise I would hardly have endured it."

And the mother? She shrugs her shoulders. Livia, a stressful teenager, as is the case with many kids and is somehow normal? Or was puberty even more difficult for the girl from Mumbai with black hair and dark skin than for a girl from Switzerland who at least knows that she is arguing with her biological parents? No - the Zgraggens don't believe the adoption had anything to do with it. «Livia was and is incredibly impulsive. "Such a temperament is difficult for all parents, regardless of whether they are biological or not," says the father, pauses for a moment and then says: Another daughter would probably have had a different temperament, almost certainly a more phlegmatic one and possibly that would have been due to someone else Kind of also been difficult. Who knows? Even!

Origin and family: unknown

For the second time in Mumbai we take the motor rickshaw across the city to St. Catherine's Home. Past huts and palaces, through noise and dust, sometimes wedged and honking in stalled traffic, then again at breathtaking speed over bumpy roads until the journey ends in front of the gate with the colored iron bars in front of the home. Livia signs her name again in the big book at reception. Name: Lalita Zgraggen; Arrival: 2:45 p.m.; Reason: appointment with Sister Ananda! This time we are registered and the sisters are prepared for another adult child to come and demand answers about their origins.

And that they have to reach into their bag of tricks once again because they don't know anything themselves and yet they are expected to be able to say something, to have to say something. That's probably why the waiting time is short this time until Sister Ananda comes. And that's probably why this time she warmly spreads her arms out for Lalita, welcomes her like a prodigal daughter and invites her into a room that is used as a meeting room. There the two sit close together on a plush sofa, surrounded by pink teddy bears and other toys. Every now and then the sister puts her arm around Lalita while she speaks to her so quietly and confidentially that her whispers are lost to the noise of the fan to outsiders.

Lalita listens carefully, sometimes nodding or smiling or asking something. Her eyes look content, she seems relaxed and seems to feel comfortable and at ease in the presence of this older woman who now lovingly cares and provides information. After a long and intensive conversation, the sister invites you to tea and homemade pastries in the spartan common room, which is located on the upper floor of the spacious building.

Lalita Livia Zgraggen sits with the sisters in the common room with tea and pastries. (Image: chw )

Other sisters join in, sit at the table, ask curious questions and are happy to meet Lalita. As an outsider, I am obviously not a welcome part of this tight-knit community: Sister Ananda doesn't even look at me, lets the most trivial questions go unanswered and shows me a friendly but inscrutable shadowy face.

After a short time it seems as if Lalita belongs here with the sisters, as if she had always belonged there. “I’m always welcome here as if it were my home – that’s what Sister Ananda said to me,” Lalita says later.

“Did my mother give birth to me here and is she the one who gave me my name – Lalita!?”

Lalita Zgraggen

“And what else did Sister Ananda say?” I want to know. «What was she saying on the plush sofa under the roaring fan far from my ears? And did she find what she was looking for in the archive: Are there any photos or old documents?" I insist.

Lalita brushes me off impatiently like an annoying fly. No, nothing in writing had turned up yet, although the sister had gone to the archives as promised and had a look. If that changes, the things will be sent to Switzerland later. “And anyway: after the lovely visit, the warm welcome, the open conversation and the friendly encounters with the sisters, the matter is over for me,” Lalita opens later in the hotel.

She doesn't want to do any more research, she has learned enough and can now get an idea of ​​the place where she was kept in the first months of her life - even if she can't remember anything and nothing seems familiar to her except for the smell for soap that clings to the sisters' clothes as well as to the corridors and rooms of the orphanage.

The most important thing for her, however, is that at this second meeting she got an answer to at least one of her questions: “Did my mother give birth to me here and is she the one who gave me my name – Lalita!?” And Sister Ananda gave her the answer that is so important to her: "Yes, that's right - your mother gave birth to you here on December 9, 1979 and she is the one who gave you your name: Lalita."