Our almost daughter

Sometimes, happiness is a choice we make

I’m cleaning the basement, dismantling the piles that have been collecting dust since we moved into this house almost three years ago. When I tire of wading through a container of old toys, broken crayons and stray Lego pieces, I wander over to a box of photos.

The basement is full of boxes, filled with detritus, each one demanding that decisions be made. Donate, toss or keep? Does this item “spark joy?” But nearly every object I touch, no matter how dirty or worn, evokes a memory and leaves me wavering. I reach into the stack of photos, and catch my breath when I pull out a snapshot of Haseena, taken a decade ago, when I was trying to become her mother.

She stands on the threshold of St. Theresa’s Tender Loving Care Home, a three-year-old dressed in a donated red turtleneck and matching red-and-white skirt, with the purple sneakers I bought for her at Shoppers Stop in Hyderabad strapped on her feet. It’s a hot day, and she’s clutching a bottle of water. The morning sun is bright, giving the photo an overexposed quality. She looks straight into the camera, her brown eyes wide, a swath of bushes and a line of coconut palms in the background. She’s not smiling. I probably didn’t give her time to pose. The photograph is unremarkable, really. It’s the two-by-two-inch piece of white paper taped over the photo’s right corner that makes me gasp. The image of a bird in flight, holding an envelope in its beak, floats in the centre of the vellum square. I spent hours dipping a rubber stamp in ink and pressing the image of that bird over and over again as John and I were making our wedding invitations, long before we dreamed of adopting a child.

I’d forgotten about attaching the bird to Haseena’s picture, a bit of superstition meant to bind the three of us together. Indian activists tried to stop international adoptions from the region, an antiwestern outcry that flared just as our case went to court.

In feng shui, birds carry good news. I clipped the image of the bird to Haseena’s picture on the advice of a feng shui master that we’d hired to help us change our luck, a decision that seems silly now, but made perfect sense in a season of despair.

Everything related to Haseena’s adoption began to crumble, until finally, after three years of waiting and longing, three years of paperwork and prayers and feng shui magic, after flights to India and visits to the orphanage, after hugs and kisses and hours of stacking blocks together, we were forced to let her go. International adoptions from Hyderabad were suspended. Authorities placed Haseena, grown from a baby to a preschooler then, with an Indian family.

We told ourselves Haseena would be OK without us. Maybe she’d be even better off, if her new family proved kind and true. Whether we would ever feel OK again remained an open question for a long time.

Eventually, John and I became parents. We moved away from the house with the bad feng shui, the one we’d unwittingly bought with Haseena in mind, and found another large enough for the three children who did become ours through adoption. Time passed. A new job demanded another move 1,400 kilometres north.

Today, our lives are full with work and school and soccer and cupcakes. Most of the time I’m happy, but when I start unpacking these boxes, some that have remained sealed year after year and move after move, I’m reminded that happiness isn’t always about luck. Sometimes happiness is a choice we make. Here in these boxes, I find pieces of everything I want to forget and preserve, everything broken and beloved, all of it waiting for me to reconcile and arrange in some kind of order. I take Haseena’s photograph, and the image of the winged bird that once bound me to her, and put it aside for safekeeping, knowing that this bird will never tire of flying, and she will never, ever land.