|
Literary Review
Memoir
In search of the self
MITA GHOSE
|
Straddling two worlds can be an adventure and a trial.
|
The Other Face of the Moon: Finding my Indian Family, by Asha Miró, Jaico, p.243, Rs 295.
Originally written in Spanish for those “who at some point in their lives ask themselves where they come from and what happened for them to end up…far away from where they were born”, The Other Face of the Moon, a memoir in two parts by Asha Miró, presents a story of adoption that is stranger than fiction.
Born into a poor farming family in a remote village in Maharashtra, Usha Ghoderao, as the author was then known, was renamed Asha and given up for adoption in infancy. The little girl spent the first seven years of her life in orphanages in Nasik and Mumbai, yearning for parents, until a childless couple from Barcelona, Josep and Electa Miró, adopted her. Although Asha eagerly embraced her foster parents’ surname, language and culture as her own, she would come to know something about her origins from them. At the age of 27, she returned to India to explore her roots and found that she didn’t “completely belong anywhere”. “Daughter of the Ganges”, the first of the two narratives that constitute this book, was based on her experiences during that trip and became a best-seller in Europe.
The author’s voyage of self-discovery remained incomplete, however, until she returned to her birthplace eight years later. “Finding your biological family is not like going on an ordinary trip,” Miró observes with a new maturity in the latter half of her memoir, written after her second visit to India, “it is a journey into yourself…” Given the chasm that lay between her dual worlds, traversing the interiors of her country of origin and her soul was both an adventure and a trial, unleashing complex feelings within her that were often difficult to resolve. Confronted, for example, by conflicting versions of her history, the most devastating involving the controversial piece of information that her biological father had tried to abandon her thrice, a distraught Miró wondered at one point, “Whom should I believe?” She also began to understand why Mother Adelina, who had run the orphanage in Mumbai that served as the author’s home for four years, had discouraged her from delving too deep into her past.
Staying the course
Miró, however, was determined to “stay the course”. The reward for her perseverance was an emotional reunion with Sakubai, her much older stepsister who had breastfed her, along with her own son, when Asha’s young mother died in childbirth. She would also discover her own sister, the other Asha, now a mother of four, living in Kolpewadi, a small village far removed from her own world “by seas and deserts, beliefs and languages, cultures and experiences”.
While her story is a remarkable one, Miró is not among those writers for whom it is easy “to find the words”. Editorial lapses (there are several references to “Gujurat”, Mumbai’s “Gate of India” and the “Elephant Caves”) don’t help either. Moreover, the author’s culture-shock-prompted responses when she first lands in Mumbai as an adult are disappointingly predictable. What sustains the memoir’s opening half is the intensity of Electa Miró’s voice, emerging in the quoted excerpts from the diary she started maintaining for her adopted daughter a week before she came to live with them in Barcelona.
Maturing outlook
The book’s closing section reveals a more evolved narrator whose insights are considerably sharper, lending the scenes she describes a certain emotive power. Miró recognises the end of the road when she realises that despite her joy at meeting the long-lost sister, “the other face of the moon” she hadn’t even known existed, adapting to the Indian way of life would be too steep a climb for a “completely Western” person like her. While finding her Indian family had helped her “fill in the missing pieces of my reality” and attain the “inner peace” she had been craving all along, she admits with characteristic honesty that they are “my people without actually being my people” and happiness lies in returning “home” to her other family with a “dual sense of belonging”. Although Miró, in her maturity, adopts the voice of reason, the message that finally comes through is as disturbingly complex as the ties of human bondage.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
