Secret Daughter

Kavita heads to the telegraph office, where she sends 700 rupees by wire each week to her sister Rupa, to help pay for her ailing her mother after she had a stroke the past fall. Kavita has done this every week for the last three months. On her way home from the telegraph office, Kavita passes by the Shanti Orphanage and thinks about Asha as she passes by. She thinks about how Asha must be a grown young woman by now, and she ponders if giving Asha up for adoption was the right decision: “Was it better? Better for me to have given her just life and nothing else a mother should give her child?” (258). 

Asha takes the train to the Shanti Orphanage. Asha heads inside and meets with the director of the orphanage, telling him that she has come there today to seek out information regarding her birth parents. The director tells her that they have hundreds of children that pass through the orphanage each year, and their records tend to be spotty. The director does a cursory search on his old office computer to look up Asha’s records, but does not find anything.