GEMS IN THE GARBAGE
By Arun Gandhi
Between 1975 and 1983 my late wife, Sunanda, and I rescued and rehabilitated 123 abandoned new-born babies found on garbage dumps around Mumbai, an Indian megalopolis. Tragically, this is an on-going phenomenon and even today babies are found abandoned on the streets by unwed mothers or her relatives. Why they choose to abandon these babies on garbage heaps is a conundrum I have not been able to resolve. Perhaps, they think the result of an illegitimate relationship is not just an embarrassment but garbage that must be disposed off.
Whatever, this is the story of one, scrawny, little baby girl out of the 123, who was later named Sonali, was days old, malnourished, wrapped in a piece of white cotton cloth and left besides a garbage dump in Byculla, a suburb of Mumbai. After rescuing so many finding Sonali no longer shocked me. I called the police and together we took her to the Government Remand Home nearby where the doctor was skeptical about her chances of survival. But, Sonali was a fighter. Within weeks she recovered and reached her normal baby weight.
While Sonali was recouping at the Remand Home, we received through a friend a request for a baby from a couple who live in Paris, France. We were a bit skeptical for several reasons: first, the couple was unable to communicate because they knew not a word of English; second, we had decided to keep in touch with the families. However, because of the mutual friend we relented and decided to send Sonali to France after all the legal formalities were done and the Mumbai High Court approved the adoption.
Just as we had suspected, we lost contact with them and Sonali. There were no letters, no photographs. Years passed and in 1987 we came to the United States and decided to settle here closing yet another chapter in our myriad life.
Sunanda and I soon established the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, now located at the University of Rochester, New York. In February of 2007 Sunanda passed away and in January, 2008 I resigned from the Institute to lead a quieter life.
Often in the loneliness of widowed existence I muse over the highlights of our 50 years of wedded life and, of course, the lives of these rescued babies are always on the top of the list. They are now in their early and late 20s, and some write to me to say they named their first-born after Sunanda or me. In this pensive mood I sometimes wondered about the little girl that went to France. Was she happy? What would she be doing?
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