'Was my adopted son trafficked too?'

KOLKATA: The last one week has left US-based nurse Danae Hischke feeling “sick in the stomach”. That was after news of Bengal’s baby-trafficking racket reached her in the US. Thirty years back, Hischke had adopted a boy – Jordan Arun - from this city. Four years ago, Jordan had succumbed to brain cancer. The wounds of bereavement will never heal but now the pain of confusion over whether or not Jordan was trafficked to her has only devastated her further.
What’s worse is the news of the trafficking reached Hischke on November 26 – the same day 30 years back when Jordan had arrived in the US. Back then, she didn’t know that two months later she would be pregnant with her first biological child. Over the years, she loved Jordan in the same “infinite way” she loved her biological sons. Speaking from her Wisconsin residence in the US, Hischke said that many might wonder why Bengal’s baby-trafficking is bothering her since Jordan is no longer alive. “But fact is, it still does,” she said.
 

Hischke and her husband had initiated Jordan’s adoption in the States. “Our agency did all of the paperwork and communication with the Indian government and International Mission of Hope (IMH). Our payment (5000 USD) was said to be the cost of caring for the baby while he was in the orphanage. We were told that his mother was probably very poor and unmarried and wanted a better life for her child,” she recounted.
Today, she feels “naïve”, “cheated” and “betrayed” after learning that two people arrested in baby-trafficking case were previously employed at IMH. According to Hischke, many adoptive parents in the US had travelled to IMH and found nothing suspicious there. But her doubts only increased after she read the TOI report of Michelle’s Harrison’s account of how the DNA test of her adopted daughter from IMH who was born at Shree Krishna Nursing Home didn’t match with that of the so-called biological parents.

In the past one week, Hischke started digging up old records. “I definitely feel very bad for Jordan’s mom/parents. I have thought of her many times through the years, always on his birthday. I had thought about how hard it must have been for her to give him up. Now I just think that possibly she thought he died or that he was stolen from her. I feel like we both lost him. Her grief is like mine,” she said.
When Jordan arrived in the US, he was malnourished. Two years later, he was diagnosed with autism. From the US, paying 5000 USD seemed reasonable for his cost of caring in the Indian orphanage. “But now I feel that perhaps very little of what we sent was utilised for his upkeep because then he wouldn’t have been malnourished. We actually had to take a loan and pay for 10 years to have Jordan in our lives,” she said.

Rummaging through her old files, Hishcke found an interesting certificate. “It had a set format where the name of the baby had to be filled. The format is such that all babies given this certificate required to be an ‘abandoned child’ born to ‘young and unmarried woman’. Back then, we weren’t told the name of Jordan’s mother. But today, in another paper on him, I found a name written in the section saying b/o Arati Mondal. The age segment dubiously mentions 1/365. Was it referring to Jordan being one day old? If that’s true, why is ‘F’ written in the gender segment? While there is no space to mention religion, the letter ‘H’ is written in the space for caste.”

Today, everything seems “diabolical”. “For the first two years, we even had to send professional photos of Jordan every three months as proof that we were not abusing or trafficking him. All this seem so absurd now! I hate the people who were and are involved.”