This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
I'm talking with my birthmother.
She's almost exactly as tall as I am, and she and I share the same shape of eye and mouth.
She laughs with the same bubbling giggle as I do.
She opens her mouth to share another amusing story from her childhood . . .
"Ma'am, what beverage would you like tonight?"
The flight attendant interrupts my day dreams. I'm only three hours into my 17-hour flight to Mumbai, and I can't stop thinking about what I would do if I found my birthmother.
What would I say to her? Would she be happy to see me? What would she say to me?
And then the voice inside my head starts telling me that it doesn't matter if I meet my birthmother. I can't expect to hop on a plane, travel halfway around the world and magically meet the woman who gave birth to me nearly 25 years ago.
There's the part of me that desperately wants to see if my birthmother and I really do share faces. I want to know what part of my personality comes from her (or her mother or her father) and what part my parents shaped.
I want to ask her why she gave me up. I want to know if she thinks of me. I want to know what life would have been like had I stayed.
I also don't want an answer to those questions. No matter what she said, would it be a good enough reason to justify her abandoning me? If she does think of me, do I want to know someone is out there, pining away for a daughter she'll never know? And do I really want to know how my life would have been so incredibly different had I been raised in India, as opposed to Utah?
Those thoughts torture me throughout the plane ride, making my heart beat faster and harder than during any 5K I've run.
I meet my aunt Karen in Mumbai, and it's nice to see a familiar face, a face of someone I love. Her face is reminiscent of her sister, my mother, who's back home in Utah. My aunt keeps my head clear and my goals focused: I'm here to find a piece of myself that has been missing since I can remember. The piece of me that tells me the story of my first six weeks of life, the piece that tells me the story of my face.
We board a train to the state of Goa, to the city of Panaji, where I was born.
I stare out the small, rain-drenched window, looking at the lush, green ravines of seemingly never-ending jungle. I picture what my birthtown must look like.
In my mind, it's a city of tropical beaches, Hindu temples and children running around - the children who were doomed to the streets instead of being adopted.
Instead, what I see as I get off the train shocks me: Panaji is a Catholic tourist town. Western-style churches line the streets, all the buildings have a Portuguese flair and signs advertising hotel, restaurant and beachfront specials fill the streets.
This is not the India I was anticipating. Where is the bustle and poverty and beauty of Delhi? Where is the never-ending stream of autorickshaws? Where is the smell of freshly slaughtered chickens or freshly caught crabs? What is this sanitized version of India I never knew existed?
I swallow hard, and try to fight back the disappointment. I've always had a hard time telling people I'm from India, as I don't share its culture, but now I feel like I've truly been deceiving people. This city isn't India. It's the generic resort town that could be found anywhere in the world.
That piece of me that I've been missing for so long feels farther away from me than ever before. That piece of me now feels like a lie.
I try to shake off that feeling, and start the hunt for my orphanage.
As I walk through the streets, I gaze more intently at the strangers passing me than I normally would. Are those my eyes? Are those my cheekbones? What about that nose? It looks a lot like mine. But am I just trying too hard?
I know it's foolish, but I secretly hope someone will point at me and shout: "You look just like my cousin or sister or aunt."
It doesn't happen. Instead, I get into an autorickshaw with my aunt, and start the short drive to the area I'm from.
I have the Panaji neighborhood name of Caranzalem, but the address I have isn't quite complete. I spend hours in an autorickshaw, looking. The driver keeps getting out, asking people if we are getting close. As time passes, the frustration builds. Even the sound of the tide crashing into shore does nothing to soothe me. Suddenly, I realize how hot and sticky I feel, and I tell the driver to take us back to the hotel.
After further research, I find out the orphanage doesn't exist anymore. It closed years ago.
I lose it.
I lock myself in the bathroom and the tears start falling. I've traveled halfway across the world to find a place that no longer exists.
That voice inside my head starts piping up: What did you expect? You're being naive. And why do you care so much? A year ago, you hadn't even given a moment's thought to your orphanage, and now you're sobbing that it's gone.
But it's more than the loss of a place; it's a loss of myself. The shuttering of that orphanage closed off any hope of finding someone who might have remembered me or my birthfamily.
The loud honking of trucks and cars in the road screams through the bathroom window, bringing me back to reality. Though I'm devastated, the tears stop and I join my aunt for dinner.
At breakfast the next morning, a headline in the newspaper makes my aunt hand the pages over to me. Apparently, all of the birth certificates in the area had recently been moved to this city.
Getting a copy of that had never occurred to me, but now it seems like the most obvious action.
I still have that voice in my head, doubting if I'll find anything, but I wend my way through the streets of Panaji, passing shopping malls, medical clinics and dodging the various vehicles seemingly trying to run me down in the street.
I walk up the stairs of a dingy building, often catching whiffs of the ammonia-laden smell I can identify but don't want to think about. On the third floor, I write down my birthname, Natasha Barboza, and my birthdate, Sept. 19, 1982, and hand it to a woman sitting in front of a computer. She types for about five minutes, looks up, and tells me she has the record. It will take about an hour to obtain.
The next hour passes in a whirl of rainclouds, cacophony and overly buttery food.
When I finally go back, they can't find who has the copy. That's when my aunt calls to me from across the room, holding a small rectangle of paper. There it is, my birthmother's name: Maria Barboza.
It feels like the whole world goes quiet. I no longer hear the people in the hallway bickering in Hindi. The smell of ink and paper fades. I have it. I have proof that I really did exist in this city at some point.
It's that piece of paper that I take out of my money belt throughout the rest of my trip, just to look at it.
It has its own significance, but it's also just one of a dozen other souvenirs I'm bringing home with me from India. I came looking for my birthmother and ended up with a piece of paper. Had someone asked me if that would have been enough before I left for India, I would have said, "No."
Now it is enough.
I'm happy knowing where I came from, but I realize I'm happy too with the life I've led since my first six weeks. I have a family who loves me unconditionally; I have dear friends and a career I'm thrilled with.
The pieces of my life I've always known about are enough to make me whole.
Even though none of the faces I gazed into on the streets of Goa had my eyes, my nose or my lips, I realize I finally found the face I was looking for: my own.
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* SHEENA MCFARLAND can be contacted at smcfarland@sltrib.com or 801-257-8619. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.