Aanya came home on March 13, 2009.Prajakta and I were nervous when we first went to meet her in Latur on January 27, 2009.
The Voluntary Coordination Agency (VCA) in Mumbai had sent our adoption file to Latur, a mid-size town in Maharashtra best known for three things -- the terrible earthquake in September 1993; as the home town of the state's former chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh; and for consistently producing toppers in the state SSC examination.
While travelling on the Latur Express, on the night of January 26, we had several unspoken questions on our minds: Who would be our daughter? Will she accept us? Will she smile at us? Will we fall in love with her first sight? Will our lives change?
Prajakta and I decided to adopt eight years after we got married. It was not an easy decision. Prajakta wanted to become a biological mother for quite some time, but it was not to be, despite the intervention of some of the best doctors in Mumbai.
But by the time we decided to adopt, we were looking forward to have our daughter home.
There is a strange power in children to melt even the last niggling doubt in your mind.
To be honest, we had no "preferences". The Indian adoption system asks you to specify what "kind" of child you want: what should be the complexion? what age would you prefer? A daughter or a son?
We always wanted a daughter. The only thing we had asked for, informally, was that the child should not have an HIV-positive mother. We were just short of being mental wrecks due to our inability to have a child (the doctors called it "unexplained infertility"), and the thought losing an adopted child to HIV was far too much for our feeble minds to bear.
The only other condition was that our daughter should be less than 9 months old. We were also scared of rejection.
It took us exactly 10 months to get a call to meet Aanya. She was called Akshata at her Latur home, a ramshackle single-storeyed building that houses the Bal Vikas Mahila Mandal Shishu Sadan.
Akshata itself is a nice name (it is the name given to the holy rice during religious rituals in the Hindu faith), but we wanted a name would have universal resonance. In the end, we decided on Aanya, which has both Sanskrit as well as Germanic roots.
At Latur station, our heartbeats were racing. Alka Mhatre - a doughty 72-year-old woman who has been assisting adoptive parents for the last 30 years - had told us that we had the right to reject the child shown to us.
It was a perverse thought, but she said the Indian adoption system allows parents up to three rejections before their registration is put under review.
In any case, it did not matter to us. We had decided that we would adopt the first child regardless of how she looked, what her complexion was, her eyes, her nose, whatever. We didn't care. We just wanted a daughter.
Honestly, we needed Aanya more than she us.
The first 30 minutes at Shishu Sadan (Children's Home) were spent in inane discussions and another 30 minutes waiting for another family to complete their legal formalities.
Just after noon, in a move that on hindsight seemed pretty dramatic, Mrs Mhatre wrapped Akshata in a warm blanket and faced away from us while we were walking down the corridor.
Only when we reached close did she twirl around and show us Aanya. We had no idea that we were to become parents of the world's most beautiful human being. And the world's most beautiful human being had the world's most beautiful smile.
Aanya had accepted us. She was grinning so hard she drooled, and we fell in love with her at first sight and our lives, we knew that very instant, had changed forever.
