The train came before the memories.
I don’t remember the sound of metal tearing through bones, or the split second when my mother’s body was taken pulled from mine. I don’t remember being hit by the train, but my body remembers. It remembers the pain of nerves ripped from my spine, the absence of muscles that would never grow back, the hips cracked open like fault lines. I was not someone with a name that mattered to the world. I was just a baby in Agra, one of thousands who might never be accounted for. 1980’s India was a country where lives vanish quickly, where people were lost in the blur of trains, rivers, streets, and poverty. Children disappear. Mothers disappear. I disappeared.
It was an unknown person who found me, a stranger who saw a broken, bleeding, half-dead baby by the tracks: a burden, a miracle, or simply a child who would not stop crying. But they carried me away from my mother’s dead body. My nerves ripped from the spine, the muscle pulled along the avulsion line. My future, already changed, was turned upside down again in that moment. The unknown person lifted me from death and brought me to a railway hospital for imidiate care.
When I reached the hospital there was no morphine, no anesthesia.
Morphine was controlled by the government then, locked behind paperwork and politics.
The medicine existed, just not for the poor, not for orphans with no caste, not for an infant like me.
There was a knife, a saw, and a belief that pain brought souls closer to God.
My leg was removed below the knee.
It didn’t bring me closer to God.
It brought me closer to silence.
After the hospital I was given to the Missionaries of Charity in Agra as an abandon child, then transferred to the Missionaries of Charity in New Delhi where more resources for care could be found. I don’t know who decided my fate, who wrote my name into their ledgers. Or perhaps not my name at all, but a placeholder that erased who I had originally been. From those convent walls, my path toward international adoption was set in motion, though no one asked me if I wanted it.
The Sisters changed my bandages, fed and clothed me, and became mothers to me for a time.
The red earth of India stained the hems of their saris as they moved through the ward.
The scent of iron and blood gave way to candle wax and prayer; the cries of the living blended with the chants of the Sisters pleading for our souls.
They cleaned wounds, whispered blessings, and rocked the living when there were not enough arms to go around.
They gave what comfort they could, their faith carrying us when medicine could not. i lived in the New Delhi Missioanries for 9 months while my tiny body healed enough for international travel.
By the time I was flown to America, I was no longer just an orphan, I was raw material.
A commodity.
A child body to be studied, tested, experimented on.
My mother was dead.
My country was gone.
My voice had been stolen.
I was alone in the world.
But one thing remained:
My will to survive, and a quiet voice telling me to live.