Adopted from India and homeless within a year

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.

Journalist Þóra Kristín Ásgeirsdóttir has now written Hasim’s story. He confirms it was very challenging going over details of his childhood for the book research. Even though he is no longer angry today, the memories are still very raw, and he will never fully recover. He says it was in some ways easier to be homeless in Calcutta than helpless in Reykjavík: in Calcutta, at least he was not alone. There were other children in the same position as him in Calcutta.

Hasim’s adoptive parents in Iceland had wanted to adopt a much younger child but came under great pressure from the orphanage managers, who had already made up their mind that Hasim was next. Adoptive parents nearly always make one or more extended visit to their prospective new child in India, but Hasim’s did not.

The head of Icelandic Adoptions says Hasim’s sad case is unique and highly unlikely to happen again, as there are now better laws and better support for families in place. “To go through all of that process only to end up on the street again is of course a real tragedy,” he says.

Hasim lived in Iceland from 1993 until five years ago, when he moved to Norway. He now has a wife and children of his own—including an Icelandic son, aged 18, who lives in Akureyri.

Þóra Kristín says that his story is still relevant because millions of children in the world remain in the situation of being alone and reliant on the kindness of strangers for help. “And we have ourselves seen often in the media that children are being taken, ripped from their surroundings here [in Iceland] where they have been in school for years or months, and with one pen stroke the decision is made to throw them into over-full refugee camps. Hasim’s story teaches us that children don’t cope with that well. They will become angry individuals,” she says.

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