Tender Roots

It is a recollection of previous readings and incidents in the lives of the people that I have not known but connect very well with them emotionally.

This is about this young girl of 20 years from Germany that inserted an advertisement in The Tribune; an English daily newspaper read widely in Chandigarh, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. The advertisement was an enquiry about an infant girl child that was left abandoned at the gate of a Mandir in a specific residential sector of Chandigarh.

The advertisement was medium sized and later changed to a little bigger in a couple of days when seemingly nobody had responded to it.

This young girl that had been adopted and taken to Germany by a well-to-do German couple from an Orphanage in Chandigarh wanted to seek her biological roots. In that endeavour she had come to India, visited the Orphanage, accessed their records to find the date on which the Police had handed over the girl infant to the Orphanage after it was found abandoned but well wrapped in a blanket at the Verandah close to the altar of the Mandir.

In her pursuit to have conclusive research, the young girl went to the Mandir that had become an expansive concrete structure with not one but multi altar presence of divinity over the years. The old Pujari that had found the child had been a witness in police records had died some years back and replaced by a young Pujari indifferent to her questions and search. The Secretary of Sanatan Dharam Sabha that managed the affairs of the Mandir was least bothered to attend to a girl with Indian looks and European accent. The only person that acknowledged the incident was an old ‘’Purbia Maali” that had been attending to the green surroundings with Tulsi, Peepal, Belpatra and a few Gainda flower beds. The Maali had vivid memory of the ‘find’ with “Bade Pandit jee” but knew nothing beyond the Police procedures and failed to guess who would have brought the child to the Mandir in that cold January night.

The failure to reach her roots still did not deter the young girl from carrying on with the advertisement. It stopped only after a column in the same sequence appeared in The Tribune by a Mother Superior of some Shimla based Convent for girls. It came as an advisory appeal by name to the German girl to be happy with the adoptive parents that had brought her up with much love & affection and also given her independence and hope to find the biological parents. She was advised to carry the same love and spirit for the adoptive parents and for the mankind as a whole. The Mother Superior let her know how difficult it would have been for her biological mother to leave the child at the Mandir and given the Indian scene; one cannot imagine in what circumstances and situation the child had been left. The concluding lines implored the young girl to look ahead in life with her adoptive parents and be as loving, caring and affectionate to all as her parents had been to her.

The wisdom from a wise spiritual soul must have pacified the agitated mind to stop further enquiry in the newspaper.