It was easier to be helpless in Calcutta than in Reykjavík, Hasim Ægir Khan says. He was born in India but adopted to Iceland at 11 years of age, and then abandoned a year later. He drifted between foster homes in Iceland after his new Icelandic family decided to cancel the adoption, and even ended up renting a room in central Reykjavík with tramps while he finished high school.
Hasim’s story is alarming. When he was six, his new step-grandmother put him alone on a train without explanation in Old Delhi, where they lived. He ended up scared and alone in Calcutta, where he lived as a street child—eventually ending up in an orphanage, suffering awful conditions and terrible abuse.
When he was 11, he was thrown a lifeline of hope: he was being adopted by a family in the village of Þorlákshöfn, southwest Iceland.
He lived with his new family for one year, until they cancelled the adoption. He was the only child in Iceland who had been adopted and then returned to the system.
“I had really looked forward to it: I was getting a family and whatnot, but then after just a year I was rejected, and that was quite hard. I felt like I was back on the streets in India again,” he says. “I never had a permanent home and different people were around trying to help me and I was always looking for a place to stop and stay with one family,” he adds.