A Long Way Home

When I was growing up in Hobart, I had a map of India on my bedroom wall. My mum-my adoptive mother-had put it there to help me feel at home when I arrived from that country at the age of six to live with them in 1987. She had to teach me what the map represented-I was completely uneducated. I didn’t even know what a map was, let alone the shape of India.

Mum had decorated the house with Indian objects-there were some Hindu statues, brass ornaments and bells, and lots of little elephant figurines. I didn’t know then that these weren’t normal objects to have in an Australian house. She had also put some Indian printed fabric in my room, across the dresser, and a carved wooded puppet in a brightly colored outfit. All these things seemed sort of familiar, even if I hadn’t seen anything exactly like them before. Another adoptive parent might have made the decision that I was young enough to start my life in Australia with clean slate and could be brought up without much reference to where I’d come from. But my skin color would always have given away my origins, and anyway, she and my father chose to adopt a child from India for a reason, as I will go into later.

The map’s hundreds of place-names swam before me throughout my childhood. Long before I could read them, I knew that the immense V of the Indian subcontinent was a place teeming with cities and towns, with deserts and mountains, rivers and forests-the Ganges, the Himalayas, tigers, gods!-and it came to fascinate me. I would stare up at the map, lost in the thought that somewhere among all those names was the place I had come from, the place of my birth. I knew it was called “Ginestlay,” but whether that was the name of a city, or a town, or a village, or maybe even a street-and where to start looking for it on that map-I had no idea.