"My world between parents I know and those I don't"

Dreams and milestones hardly matter when one’s identity and roots are blurred. And Lise Meenaxshi is one of many in a quest for their roots. The 45-year-old India-born woman is a social worker helping young adults in Denmark. She was adopted by a Danish couple, Niels Henning Rasmussen and his wife Ella, in 1982 when she was five years old. The Rasmussens adopted two children from India – Meenaxshi and David – through the Danish adoption agency DIA.Meenaxshi says she was showered with love and care by her adoptive family. But, despite that, she knew she needed to find her biological parents, if only to discover herself. Her journey began in 2012 when she began to collect information about her adoption from the Danish government. “I wanted to make sense of my world, where in one version, I have known parents, in the other, unknown parents,” says Meenaxshi.It took her years to acquire a some details about her adoption from the Danish government. But once she got the documents, Meenaxshi was hopeful she would be able to find her roots. medium98114006In the meantime, there was a pleasant surprise for her family in 2016 when her adoptive brother David found his biological brother Martin, who happened to live in Denmark as well. Seeing David’s emotional reconnection with his sibling, Meenaxshi was even more determined to find her biological parents. Meenaxshi says she managed to piece together some details. Based on the information she got from the Danish government, she found out that for a while she had stayed at the Madras Christian Children’s Home, an orphanage in Pallavaram, Chennai, headed at the time by Pastor George. Her next stop was India. “It’s strange but I keep remembering the trees in front of the institution. When we got there, I knew the way to Pastor George’s office inside the institution. It was as if I had been there before. But I couldn’t remember anything else inside the institution,” she says.When she got there, however, Meenaxshi received some disappointing news. The orphanage was closed permanently. “The staff said they had discarded all the documents after Pastor George got ill.” Conflicting versionsMeenaxshi says she has three different versions of her adoption. One from her adoptive parents with the Danish documents as proof, the second from a petition filed in the Delhi high court and the third from what she learned about her childhood in India that she recalled through hypnosis. Meenaxshi isn’t sure which of these is the real one. The differing stories make her question the legitimacy of her adoption. medium98114199The first – according to documents provided by the Danish government which were sent to them from India, Meenaxshi was born on April 27, 1977, in Madras to Vanaja and Paneer Selvam. It is stated that she was with her mother for 40 months after which she was sent to the children’s home on August 12, 1980. Meenaxshi, David and Martin – David’s biological brother – lived together at the home.After looking through the correspondence between F Lund Nielson, who was a representative of the adoption centre in Denmark, and Pastor George, Meenaxshi discovered that her adoption was delayed multiple times for legal reasons in connection with the veracity of the documents and to ensure it was not a case of abduction. Questions of the legality of such intercountry adoptions were even raised before the Madras high court. The court expressed that it was skeptical about the origins of these children – if there were indeed destitute abandoned children or orphans, or whether they had been kidnapped.In Meenaxshi’s case, what suggested that all was not above board was that there weren’t any documents with signatures of acknowledgement from her birth parents regarding her adoption or admission into the Madras Christian Children’s Home. With the entire process taking time, Meenaxshi discovered that she was then shifted to the Holy Cross Social Service Centre, an orphanage in New Delhi. She stayed here for about three months, while a plea for her adoption was filed in the Delhi high court by a guardian from the Delhi institution.In the petition filed in court, it was stated that Meenaxshi was born to ‘unknown’ parents and brought to the Madras institution by an unknown person on May 4, 1977, when she was a week old. The legal petition which approved Meenaxshi’s adoption did not match the documents provided to the Danish government from India. A legal notice about the adoption was published in a local newspaper in Delhi in case the birth parents wanted to get back custody of the child. Meenaxshi says she wonders why the notice was published in a local newspaper in New Delhi when she was originally from Chennai. medium98114505Flashes of recollectionWith all the information not adding up, Meenaxshi decided to try hypnosis in the hope that it would help her remember her childhood. She says she pictured living with her birth parents and grandparents as a three-year-old. “I had flashes of a large house with a lawn, fountain and two huge gates. I cannot remember faces, but I keep getting visions of being snatched by two men on a scooter from in front of my house. I remember they put me in a van. Then I remember meeting my uncle and aunt, who drove me to the children’s home. In my memory, I can see them taking money in exchange for me,” she says.Meenaxshi says though her birth father’s name was recorded as Paneer Selvam, she thinks it was Prasanna Janaki. “I also remember my childhood home being in a place called Kappur and people calling me Pooja or Poonya.” medium98114761Armed with three versions of her identity, Meenaxshi is more determined than ever to find her birth parents before it’s too late. The contradictory versions have made her uncertain about the legality of the adoption and the possibility of it being a kidnapping.“I am now speaking to the lawyer who finalised my adoption papers hoping to get more information on this matter,” she says.She is being helped by child rights activist Arun Dohle and Anjali Pawar, an advocate and a consultant at the Adoptee Rights Council, a Pune-based organisation that helps adoptees trace their roots. “There are many cases where adoptees are searching for their birth parents. Nothing will change if we do not know how these children are entering the system,” says Pawar.“In the 1980s, there were several reports about the business of ‘exporting children’. These children have grown up and want to find their birth parents,” says Dohle, who was adopted by a German family from an Indian orphanage. Dohle also found his biological mother after a 17-year legal battle.Meenaxshi says, “My parents [if they are alive] won’t live forever and I’ve to go now before it’s too late.”