Livia Lalita goes to Mumbai

As a toddler, Lalita is adopted by a Lucerne family. At the age of 39, she traveled to India for the first time. The report accompanies Livia Lalita Zgraggen's search for traces.

Author:

Christine Weber

An old man with white hair sits behind an old-fashioned reception desk. He lifts his head, his eyes behind the rimless glasses glimpse us. We say who we are and what we want. He looks a bit sullen, then shakes his head in the vague Indian way and picks up the phone. With a wave of his hand he signals to us to take a seat. We sit on a hard, cloth-covered wooden bench and wait.

It's quiet in the small room, the heat shimmers in front of the mosquito-screen windows. Somewhere a bird croaks, the hot air from the fan turns overhead. Along the wall are sacks of toys, boxes of washing powder, and other items; Presumably donations for the children here: It's 2 p.m., June 2018, and we are at St. Catherine's Home, an orphanage in a poor part of Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

The Indian sisters don't know anything. Or is it?

After a few minutes the curtain on the corridor billows and a nurse comes in. She wears a simple dress made of mustard-colored fabric and has her gray hair pinned up in a bun. My colleague Livia Lalita stands up. "Hello," she says, and takes the sister's outstretched hand, who introduces herself as Ananda. «I lived in this home for the first few months, then I was adopted to Switzerland, to Lucerne. Now I've come to know where I'm from, ”says Lalita.

Sister Ananda looks at her. Not unfriendly, but distant, and asks: When was that? 37 years ago! «That was a long time ago, that was a very long time ago. We don't know anything about that, ”she says, shaking her head sadly.

Lalita is persistent. She picks up Sister Ananda, doesn't let herself be fobbed off like she did back then with the letter she sent to Mumbai when she was 18 years old and inquired in scrappy letters: Who are my parents and what do you know about them? The answer came immediately in a friendly but non-binding letter: Dear Lalita, we don't know anything specific about your origins and your parents. But be assured: they loved you and wanted the best for you; safe care, a loving home. God is with you and we pray for you, dear Lalita, never forget that.

But other names appeared in the same letter. Dear Caroline. Dear Jasmina. Dear Regula. Lalita is apparently one of many who ask about her origins - a copy / paste case. But now she has made the long journey from the small town of Lucerne to Mumbai, looks Sister Ananda in the eye and does not believe that there are no more documents about her origins. She has long known that she has no chance of finding her birth parents and that was not the idea of ??her trip at all. But a tiny trace from her earliest childhood, a distant memory or fleeting recognition, that's what she wants to find.

“Who brought me here?” She asks urgently. As a baby, was I laid in the little hammock in front of the entrance gate that rocks over the dirty floor? Or did my mother give birth to me here and hold me in her arms before I was put in one of the cots? And above all: Is it my mother who gave me my name: Lalita !? "I don't know," says the sister.

Sometimes the babies are put in this hammock by the mothers or the police. (Image: chw)

Lalita insists on a second appointment and that the sister should check the archives until then to see whether there is still a note, a slip of paper or a document somewhere about the 18-month-old girl who was flying to Switzerland in the summer of 1981 was brought to the Zgraggen family: 47.5 centimeters tall, 2.9 kilos, probably born on December 9, 1979.

This is what it says on one of the few Indian documents that exist about the child and that are kept in a green folder by the Zgraggen family in Switzerland. This also contains the yellowed passport, which expired 28 years ago, in which the only photo from those first months is stuck: A little girl with large, dark eyes and a serious look. "Not serious, these eyes look sad", says Lalita, who became Livia after arriving in Switzerland.

Baby on board: Geneva Airport, summer 1981

What has only been allowed in exceptional cases for a few years has been the norm for decades: Thousands of toddlers have been adopted all over the world from all over India and also from St. Catherine's Home in Mumbai. To Italy and Germany, Australia, Sweden, Canada and everywhere where married couples wanted children and couldn't have their own.

Like Peter and Lotti Zgraggen in Switzerland. Just married, a nice apartment; with shared hobbies, a reliable circle of friends and full of confidence for the family future. The man in a good job, the woman part-time saleswoman - at least until a child comes. Then she wants to be a mother and a good one, who cares and is unconditionally there for her baby at all times. "I am happy to be able to devote all my time and attention to our child and do not intend to go back to work", Lotti Zgraggen states a few years later in the extensive documents that are requested in the event of an adoption.

"We hope that you will soon be able to embrace your little daughter Livia Lalita."

The Indian Sisters, 1981

Six years after the wedding, the couple are still childless: no baby comes. Zgraggens acquaintances in a similar situation adopted a child from Mumbai and had good experiences. Peter and Lotti Zgraggen also decide to adopt a child from there. "We would be very happy to be able to take in a small child from the St. Catherine's Home orphanage with us in Switzerland," they write in their first letter to the sisters, who have around 500 children in their care. Without exception, they all come from poor families, many were born out of wedlock, some are sick or disabled and, with a few exceptions, are girls.

Pink beds for the girls, blue beds for the boys: dormitory in St. Catherine's Home. (Image: chw)

After months of correspondence, filling out innumerable documents, answering huge numbers of questions from Indian and Swiss authorities, the couple received the green light: “Dear Zgraggen family, you will definitely be overjoyed to read this letter! The time has come: the Indian court has approved the adoption and we hope that you will soon be able to embrace your little daughter Livia Lalita, ”said the sisters from Mumbai in a letter that fluttered in Zgraggen's mailbox in the spring of 1981. Just a few weeks later, the time has come: on a summer evening, Lotti and Peter Zgraggen are standing at Geneva Airport, waiting for their long-awaited daughter Livia.

37 years later, the Zgraggen couple are sitting in their apartment on the third floor of a block in a quiet area of ??Lucerne. “It was a hot summer day when we picked up Livia at the airport,” they recall. Lotti Zgraggen gets up, takes a notebook out of the drawer and opens it. The pages are packed with entries that her husband wrote about that first time with Livia.

She turned the pages until she found the entry she was looking for and reads out: “Wednesday, August 26, 1981, arrival of Livia. (...) Our daughter is brought to us in a bus from the airfield. It is neatly labeled and presented to us with a bag full of clothes, gifts and ID. We immediately take it to our hearts - this cold, 'wasted Hämpflein' person. " The mother closes the booklet again and says it was an unbelievably good feeling to finally take the girl in her arms after months of preparation and be able to say: “Sali you! Now you are here and one of us! "

Livia was shy and reserved at first. But after just a few weeks she opened the button, was well received with her cheerful manner and enjoyed being the center of attention - and that was often the case: In the 1980s there were hardly any dark-skinned people in Lucerne, let alone children. “Of course it was exotic and people reacted very positively. Almost too positive! "Say the Zgraggens and tell how total strangers came to their table in the café, ran the girl's hair and said:" So tough, this child! Where does it come from?". From India. And that was more of a coincidence, say Zgraggens: adopting a child from Switzerland was almost impossible at the time - the waiting period after the wedding was too long, the subsequent waiting lists for other childless couples too long.

"The sisters have chosen a daughter for us and that's a good thing."

Peter Zgraggen

So they looked elsewhere and came into contact with the home in Mumbai through acquaintances. It was important to them to get good references about the orphanage from authorities and friends. “Stories like the one from Sri Lanka naturally make you think. We are glad that everything went very seriously with us, ”they say, referring to the sometimes abusive adoptions that also took place between Sri Lanka and Switzerland in the 1980s. Going to Mumbai yourself and getting an idea on site was never an option for the couple: Lotti is afraid of flying. And Peter wouldn't have wanted that at all: "The sisters have chosen a daughter for us and that's a good thing."

Livia Lalita Zgraggen walks through the garden of the St. Catherine's Home orphanage. (Image: chw)

Born in Moloch Mumbai

The heat at Mumbai Airport is like a damp terry towel that has not been wrung out. It's June 2018, the temperatures are climbing to 41 degrees, it feels like 47. Livia Zgraggen pushes a luggage trolley with several suitcases in front of her. She can hardly be seen in the crowd: She is wearing a hip-length Indian-style blouse, including colored leggings that end just above the ankles, and with her black hair and dark skin she looks like all the other Indian women who look with her the arrival hall. «Finally mainstream! Finally don't attract attention! Finally be one of many! "She says later, enjoying the fact that nobody looks at her diagonally and asks:" Where are you from? "

A question that she has been asked in Switzerland for decades, to which she is exposed to this day and sometimes passed out: On the street she is spoken to in Standard German or English, at the post office she has to prove her Swiss identity at the counter in front of everyone else , Administrations and authorities rate her as an asylum seeker or foreigner at first glance, new acquaintances or customers are amazed at her foreign appearance and say: But your name is Zgraggen, Livia Zgraggen ?!

For the locals it is clear: Lalita is Indian

In Mumbai it's the other way around, Livia is happy and amused: The rickshaw driver continues chatting happily in Hindi, even though she says she doesn't understand him; At the ticket counters at sights, she pays the admission price for locals without being asked, which is many times cheaper than for foreigners. She is not ripped off by the street vendors and not stared at by the men, but treated with respect or simply ignored.

The orphanage is in a poor neighborhood in the middle of Moloch Mumbai. (Image: chw)

At the hotel she is asked for her name and for the first time I hear her answer: Lalita. "It's easier that way, it's true for me in India," says Livia, who has just arrived from Kerala, where she attended a yoga seminar for four weeks before she now wants to go to Mumbai to look for traces of her earliest childhood. "Finally. But I wasn't ready beforehand, ”she says. Livia Zgraggen is 39 years old today, has a daughter herself, works as a freelance health specialist and is generally well organized in life. This is her first time in India, the country where she was born. "I want to close certain identity gaps that have preoccupied me since childhood," she said before leaving.

The relationship with her adoptive parents was not always easy, today Lalita has sporadic contact with them. Did you do something wrong? Livia weighs it down. «We might have exactly the same arguments and problems with each other if I had been their real daughter - who knows? I just don't know! », She says, looking back on her childhood and the subsequent adolescent crises.

In return, she always had a window open when there was an argument and she couldn't find her parents. «Your genes are not in me! You have nothing to do with me! I'm completely different! "She said to herself, looked in the mirror and didn't know who this other one was supposed to be. Where their own genes come from, what may have shaped their character and temperament, remained in the dark. Or maybe in India. The child Livia knew that it was from there. But that was it. "I can't remember my parents ever looking at a map of the world with me or showing me a picture book about India," she says, resenting the fact that no bridge was built for her to her country of origin.

A sign of gratitude from mothers who have placed children in the care of the sisters. (Image: chw)

The Zgraggen couple know nothing about this Moloch Mumbai, in which around 20 million people live and which groans and gurgles under one of the world's greatest population densities and, surprisingly, does not completely collapse. It is Livia Lalita, now a grown woman, walking through these chaotic streets, which are clogged with motor rickshaws and trucks, carts and motorcycles, people and cows. A juggernaut, over which a hell of a noise is brewing, which lies over the city with the unspeakable heat and smog and smothered it mercilessly.

Shabby huts made of scraps of wood, corrugated iron and plastic, built on top of one another, using every free millimeter so that the poor people have at least a roof over their heads, stand tightly together. In front of and in between rubbish and bobbing water, which in the heat and when it pours out of buckets during the monsoons becomes a sewer, the stench of which lingers in the streets.

As if that wasn't enough, the humidity ensures that your clothes stick to your back when it's already so hot in the morning that you can boil eggs on the roadside. Nonetheless, Lalita lets herself be spellbound by the hustle and bustle of the millions of women and men who scurry through the streets in their colored clothes and sell their goods at market stalls, carve wooden furniture in a workshop, offer coconuts to thirsty passers-by on a street corner or each other Wind calmly through the hellish traffic.

The sweet scent of jasmine blossoms rises in her nose, which can prevail like a small miracle in all the stench, and she tastes delicious the spicy dishes that are available in the small cookshops around the corner as well as in air-conditioned restaurants. For hours she curves through the streets in the motor rickshaws and can't get enough of the hustle and bustle and omnipresent hustle and bustle. And Lalita knows: She herself came from some corner of this Indian Moloch before she became Livia Zgraggen in Switzerland at the age of 18 months.

A sweet, big-eyed child who plays with neighbors' children and eats birthday cake, who is happy about snowflakes and who swims in the nearby lake in summer. Just like all children in Lucerne do and how the Zgraggens imagined and wished it. "Our daughter is happy and interested in everything that happens around the world," they write in one of the regular letters that they send to the sisters in Mumbai in the first few years. Only the dark skin color does not match the image of the lively Swiss girl. But the father has an answer when someone asks: We turned off the light during sex.

At the parlor table in Lucerne, summer 2018

In Lucerne, Peter Zgraggen takes a sip of coffee and frowns over his blue eyes. "We never had the impression that Livia had a problem with the color of her skin," he says. Of course she asked why she looked different from the other children here. “Then we said that she came from another country, from India. And that all people there are darker. She accepted it that way. Or? ”He asks, looking at his wife Lotti, and she nods.

"We haven't adopted a child to do a good work."

Peter Zgraggen

Otherwise this strange and exotic country was not an issue in the family. "What for?" Asks the father rhetorically. “We didn't adopt a child to do a 'good work' - but because we wanted a daughter. And she belonged to us from the moment she arrived in Switzerland. The country of origin therefore no longer played a role for us. Besides, she never asked about it, ”he says, a little defiantly.

Lotti Zgraggen sighs. In retrospect, she is not as firmly convinced as her husband that they have chosen the right concept and not built a bridge. Other people she knows sent their adopted children to dance in India, looked at books with them and introduced them to the culture and tradition of their country of origin. «Would that have been better? I don't know, »says the mother. Livia has long since grown up and has a daughter herself, the Zgraggens have been grandparents for 14 years. Today they perceive their relationship with their daughter as ambivalent and fragile, but basically as good - that was not always the case.

The adoptive parents Lotti and Peter Zgraggen in their living room in Lucerne. (Image: chw)

"Livia has not said 'Mommy' to me for a long time: since puberty she has only called me by my first name: Lotti," says her mother. This is indicative of their relationship, which became really difficult from the teenage years. In particular with her, the mother, there were a lot of arguments and arguments. “She rebelled against me and rebelled in every way,” says Lotti Zgraggen, the father nods and says: “She gave full throttle! Fortunately, I was able to recharge my batteries at work - otherwise I would hardly have endured it. "

What about the mother? She shrugs her shoulders. Livia, an exhausting teenager, as is the case with many kids and is somehow normal? Or was puberty even more difficult for the girl from Mumbai with black hair and dark skin than for a girl from Switzerland who at least knows that she is arguing with her birth parents? No - the Zgraggens don't believe adoption had anything to do with it. «Livia was and is incredibly impulsive. Such a temperament is difficult for all parents, whether physically or not, »says the father, pauses for a moment and then says: Probably another daughter would have had a different temperament, almost certainly a more phlegmatic one, and it might have been a different one Kind of been tedious too. Who knows? Just!

Origin and family: unknown

For the second time in Mumbai, the motor rickshaw goes across the city to St. Catherine's Home. Past huts and palaces, through noise and dust, sometimes wedged in and honking in slow traffic, then again at a breathtaking pace over bumpy streets until the journey ends in front of the gate with the colored iron bars in front of the home. Once again, Livia enters her name in the big book at reception. Name: Lalita Zgraggen; Arrival: 2:45 pm; Reason: Appointment with sister Ananda! This time we are registered and the sisters are prepared for another adult child to come and ask for answers about their origins.

And that they have to once again reach into their bag of tricks because they don't know anything themselves and yet it is expected that they can say something, have to say something. This is probably why the waiting time until Sister Ananda comes is short this time. And that's probably why this time she spreads her arms warmly for Lalita, welcomes her like a prodigal daughter and asks her into a room that is used as a conference room. There the two sit side by side on a plush sofa, surrounded by pink teddy bears and other toys. Every now and then the nurse puts her arm around Lalita while she speaks to her so quietly and confidentially that her whispers for outsiders perish in the noise of the fan.

Lalita listens carefully, sometimes she nods or smiles or asks something. Her eyes look satisfied, she seems relaxed and seems to feel comfortable and in good hands in the presence of this older woman, who now lovingly cares and provides information. After a long and intensive conversation, the sister invites you to tea and homemade pastries in the spartan common room, which is located on the upper floor of the spacious building.

Lalita Livia Zgraggen is sitting with the sisters in the common room with tea and biscuits. (Image: chw)

Other sisters join in, sit down at the table, ask curious questions and look forward to meeting Lalita. As an outsider, I am obviously not a desirable part of this tight-knit community: Sister Ananda does not look at me, lets the most insignificant questions bounce off unanswered and shows me a friendly but unfathomable shadowy face.

After a short time it seems as if Lalita belongs here with the sisters, as if she has always been one of them. "I'm always welcome here as if it were my home - that's what Sister Ananda said to me," Lalita says later.

«Did my mother give birth to me here and is it she who gave me my name - Lalita !?"

Lalita Zgraggen

"And what else did Sister Ananda say?" I want to know. «What was she saying on the plush sofa under the roaring fan far from my ears? And did she find what she was looking for in the archive: Are there photos or old documents? ”I insist.

Lalita casts me off impatiently like an annoying fly. No, nothing in writing has turned up yet, although the sister went to the archive as promised and looked it up. If that should change, the things will later be sent to Switzerland. "And anyway: After the nice visit, the warm welcome, the open conversation and the friendly encounters with the sisters, the matter is over for me," Lalita later opens at the hotel.

She doesn't want to do any more research, she has learned enough and can now get an idea of ??the place where she was kept in the first months of life - even if she can't remember anything, nothing seems familiar to her except for the smell for soap, which sticks in the sisters' clothes as well as in the corridors and rooms of the orphanage.

The most important thing for her, however, is that at this second meeting she got an answer to at least one of her questions: «Did my mother give birth to me here and is it she who gave me my name - Lalita! And Sister Ananda gave her the answer that is so important to her: "Yes, that's the way it is - your mother gave birth to you here on December 9, 1979, and it is she who gave you your name: Lalita."