Adopted at 6, 51-year-old Swiss seeks birth parents in Kolkata

KOLKATA: A 51-year-old man, rescued from a life on the streets in Kolkata by a shelter and then adopted by a Swiss couple when he was just six, has planned a trip to the city of his birth to trace his biological family.
Samim Pantellini, who works in a warehouse in Basel, plans to visit during Durga Puja (in early October) to try and glean information abut the children’s shelter, from where he was adopted. But he knows his search wouldn’t be very easy.
 

All he knows is that the adoption centre was in Narkeldanga, and that the plot on which it once stood now houses the BC Roy Memorial Hospital for Children. Secondly, he does not have any files or records that could throw light on his birth or the circumstances of his early life. To make matters more complicated, he speaks only very little English, Bengali or Hindi. “I have been trying to trace my next of kin in Kolkata for a long time,” he told TOI from Switzerland. “Unfortunately, I do not know my surname, as I’m not able to remember anything from my early childhood, probably because of trauma endured from living on the streets. I can’t even remember any words from my native language Bengali.”
He remembers his parents telling him, though, that he was from the slums neighbouring the adoption facility.

“From that, I figured out that I must’ve been living around Narkeldanga, Kankurgachi, Phoolbagan, Ultadanga, Bagmari... probably living on the streets,” he said.
Pantellini has spread the word on social media. Subhajit Das, a local resident, saw one such post on Facebook and has offered his help. “Observing the migratory patterns of the area around the adoption centre, it is safe to assume that Samim may not have come from a Bengali-speaking family. There are a number of Urdu speakers and also those who migrated and settled in the nearby slums from neighbouring states. There have been repeated waves of railway workers, who settled around Phoolbagan from other states,” Das said.