The Red Market (11 page)

The police commissioner was satisfied with the identification, but told the father to forget his boy. Subash was better off in America. “The police treated me like I was nobody, but how can I be happy that my son was stolen from me?” asks Nageshwar Rao. “I don’t want my son to live his life thinking that we abandoned him.”

At least he knows what likely became of his child. Some three hundred MSS adoptions (foreign and domestic) have yet to be investigated; police probes at the local level seem to progress only in response to media attention. The overall MSS inquiry has moved at glacial speed as it has been batted from city to state to federal police jurisdictions, narrowing in scope with each handoff. It’s now with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, which is under court order to pursue just three MSS-related cases in which stolen slum children allegedly went to adoptive families—in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. The latter is Subash’s case.

Shankar, the agent in charge, concedes that his agency’s investigation only scratches the surface of the problem. In reality a family who can’t afford a lawyer to usher its child-kidnapping claim through the courts process will likely see the case go nowhere. “At this point, all we see are ten-year-old cases,” says the burly, gray-haired cop. He says that other orphanages have arisen to replace MSS. “But I have no power to investigate,” he adds. “My hands are tied.”

It wasn’t too difficult, though, to obtain the American family’s address from the records of Chennai’s High Court—it’s listed on the legal document that makes the adoption official. When I tell Nageshwar Rao that I’ll be traveling to the United States to make contact with the family, he touches my shoulder and eyes me intently. He was greatly relieved when the police told him his son was adopted, not trafficked into the sex trade or sold to organ brokers as he’d heard. Now he just wants some role in Subash’s life. With the few words of English at his disposal, he struggles to convey his hopes. Gesturing into the air, toward America, he says, “Family.” He then points back at himself. “Friends,” he says.

TWO DAYS AND EIGHT
thousand miles later, on a front stoop in the Midwest, I’m finding communication equally difficult. Clutching the evidence folder, I introduce myself, grasping for the right words. The boy has come back from behind the house to stand next to me; his sister is listening just inside the door. The teenager has Nageshwar Rao’s same round face and fuzzy hair. I tell the mom we have to talk, but not in front of the kids. We agree to meet elsewhere after her husband gets home.

An hour later, in an empty park two blocks away, I lean against my rental car, checking my watch every other minute. Finally the father pulls up. He doesn’t get out, but rolls down the window to talk. He seems unsurprised at what I have to say. “I saw something about this in the news a few years ago. I knew that it was a possibility,” he says. “I’ve never been able to tell my son about it. It would be too traumatic.” He flashes a nervous smile, and I hand him the folder. It includes the letter assuring that Subash’s parents don’t aim to reclaim the boy, but hope his new family will engage in friendly communication so that the Indian parents can still be part of his life. I ask the father to look the materials over, and we arrange to meet again the next day.

The American family didn’t go through MSS directly. Like most, they used an agency. When I first wrote about Subash’s case in
Mother Jones,
my editors and I agreed that we would withhold his name and other details in order to extend extra protections to the identity of the Midwestern family. At the time of publication I was only aware of one case involving the agency and gave it the benefit of the doubt that the suspicious adoption may have been random. After all, the American agency could have been easily duped by the orphanage that was sending it children.

A week after going to press the situation changed when I learned about a 1991 case involving Banu, an impoverished mother of three whose husband had died in an industrial accident. At the time, she was unable to care for her children, and lacking other options she accepted an offer from a school that said it would board and educate her children for free.

Seven years later, Banu, returned to the orphanage and asked the director K. Raghupati for her children back. Raghupati refused. He told her that she had relinquished custody and that he’d sent her kids to adoptive families in the United States. In Wisconsin, a local adoption agent named Ramani Jayakumar had worked with an agency called Pauquette Adoption Services to facilitate the children’s transfer to America.

Banu filed a case in the Chennai High Court, and in 2005, the police arrested Raghupati on an assortment of charges related to adoption fraud. The adoption records were opened so that Banu could reconnect with her children, and in 2006, activists in America and India were able to introduce her to her now grown children.

Pauquette Adoption Services has arranged 1,441 international adoptions since 1982, including, according to court records, Subash’s.

JUST INSIDE THE ENTRANCE
to Pauquette’s offices—a stately brick building opposite an elementary school—are bulletin boards overflowing with worn photos, kids it has placed from all around the world. I find the co-owner sitting behind the front desk. Lynn Toole, one of the owners, is not happy to make my acquaintance.

She concedes that she has followed the adoption scandals in the Indian press, but maintains that the Indian government signed off on every case her agency brokered. She’ll cooperate with an investigation if need be, but won’t discuss the case with me. When I ask her why she never contacted the family to warn them they may have adopted a kidnapped child, she refuses to comment. She hangs up when I make a follow-up phone call a week later. However, their website indicates that the agency continues to facilitate Indian adoptions, charging at least $12,000 to $15,000 for its services.

Pauquette has never been under investigation for anything involving international adoptions, says Therese Durkin, attorney for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families that regulates Pauquette, nor was the department aware of any irregularities. Even when complaints do surface, the state has little investigative power. “All we have is the paperwork,” Durkin says. “And we can only look at the face validity of the documentation.” While adoptions from India require extensive recordkeeping, there’s no way to know if a document is forged, she adds; communication between Indian and American authorities on this issue is practically nil.

In short, there’s no way to know for sure where some of these children come from. During her ten-year tenure at a US agency now known as Families Thru International Adoption, Beth Peterson worked closely with some of the largest and most respected Indian orphanages, helping arrange American homes for more than 150 children. In the process, she came to believe that many orphanages have become de facto businesses that engage in criminal activity. That’s unlikely to change so long as the financial incentive remains, says Peterson, who currently runs iChild, a support website for families adopting from India.

Prior to 2002, for instance, Peterson had sent upward of $150,000 to an Indian orphanage called Preet Mandir. The conditions were terrible—three babies died there while awaiting clearance for adoption by Peterson’s clients. And when orphanage director, J. Bhasin, began illegally demanding thousands of dollars above and beyond the usual donation, and would not relinquish the children without the payments, Peterson severed the relationship. She later filed a complaint about Preet Mandir and its director with the Indian government.

Four years later, reporters from the Indian TV news network CNN-IBN approached Preet Mandir posing as adoptive parents, and Bhasin told them they could buy two children for $24,000. The resulting story led to revocation of the orphanage’s adoption license, but the Indian government has since reinstated it on a probationary basis. “The profit motive exists on both sides,” Peterson says. “One American agency I worked with just wanted to know that I could get them a certain number of babies a year, and wasn’t concerned with where they came from.”

In general, so long as the documents appear to be in order, US adoption agencies tend not to look much further. Children’s Home Society & Family Services, one of America’s largest agencies, arranged some six hundred international adoptions in 2007. David Pilgrim, vice president of adoption services, says he’s confident that none of the children came from unethical sources. “We thoroughly vet all of the orphanages that we deal with, both in the past and in the present,” he says.

However, Children’s Home Society had worked with Preet Mandir up until the scandal broke. Asked whether any of these adoptions concerned him, Pilgrim pauses. “Our lawyers looked over the papers and didn’t see any cause to worry,” he says.

ONE DAY AFTER
my first encounter with the American couple, we’re sitting together at a weathered picnic table in the cold park. A police cruiser slows down and the officer eyes us briefly before resuming down the street. Tears stream down the mother’s cheeks. I can’t tell whether she’s furious or heartbroken. Maybe both. “To him, India does not exist,” she says.

The couple tells me that the boy—whom they have given a new name—is their third adoption from India. Although this was the first time that they went through Pauquette, the process wasn’t much different; they paid $15,000 in fees, and flew to India to see the orphanage and meet the owners of MSS. “We had the adoption bug,” the husband explains. “Regulations change so much. We looked at Korea and South America, but India was the most open”—as in least difficult.

I’ve told the couple all I know about the Indian police’s case—the alleged kidnapper’s confessions, the child’s age and timing of admission to the orphanage, the allegedly forged surrender deed, the father’s photo identification, the legal document relinquishing Ashraf to their household. But they still aren’t convinced. “We need to know more to believe it,” the husband says. DNA evidence may be the only way to know for sure. But what do you tell the kid getting the blood test? And if it’s negative, how can the family in India be sure the samples were properly collected?

An interim step would be for the two families to get in touch. But the American parents haven’t decided where they stand. “We need to talk with our lawyer,” the husband says with a frown. “We have to consider our son’s best interest. What would it do to him if he found out?”

There’s no road map for what comes next. As Nageshwar Rao discovered, there is little political will to pursue stolen children. With the passage of years, the ethical boundaries grow fuzzier still—although it’s worth pondering whether any moral statute of limitations would be applied in the case of an American child kidnapped and raised in an Indian slum.

The Hague convention isn’t much help. It neither lays out whether kidnapped children must be returned to their birth parents nor considers the impact of such a reunion on a child with no memory of those parents. René Hoksbergen, who studies adoption as a senior psychology professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, says the boy should hear the story—eventually. “The kidnapping issue could be told in different ways, but not now; the child is too young for this,” Hoksbergen told me via e-mail. In the meantime, he says, the American parents should reach out to the Indian parents and send them news and photographs to help ease their grief. So long as all agree that it’s the same child.

And that’s where things get even messier. Back in Chennai, two months after our meeting in the park, I haven’t heard a peep from the American couple. They ignore my follow-up e-mails, and Sivagama and her husband are distraught. “You met them, you tell me they are good people, and you saw our son, so why will they not speak to us?” Nageshwar Rao implores. “We know he is in a good home. It’s not realistic for us to ask for him back, but let us at least know him.”

He urges me to send the Americans another e-mail, this one describing several birthmarks and a small scar that weren’t mentioned in the folder that I gave them. In the morning, I find a reply in my inbox. The adoptive father responds that his son has none of the marks Nageshwar Rao described. “At this point we are going to do nothing else,” he concludes. “Please convey our condolences to the family. We do understand what they must be going through and what a blow this will be to them.”

When I share this information with Deputy Superintendent Shankar, the cop is skeptical. “They could be lying, or maybe the birthmarks have disappeared,” he muses. “We have no doubt that we have made a match; everything points in the direction of [the American family].”

Besides, he says, the matter may soon be settled once and for all—an Interpol request his agency made this past August seeking blood and hair samples from the boy has finally reached the US Attorney General’s office. From there, it could get routed to the FBI for follow-up.

Even that is no guarantee. Should the couple decide to fight an FBI request, a good lawyer could likely tie up the matter until the child reaches adulthood—at which point any decisions in the matter would fall to the young man.

A YEAR AFTER THE
initial investigation into Subash’s identity the case has barely moved forward. The Indian police remain perpetually on the verge of filing another charge sheet, and yet never quite get there. The family in America remains silent. News of them has slowed to a trickle; only one anonymous comment on the
Mother Jones
website gives any inkling of what they are thinking. A commenter who claims to be close to the American family wrote:

It was the parents’ decision not to disrupt the now stable life this child is experiencing based on the incomplete information from the family in India. When the child is older, the adoptive parents plan on telling him about the situation. If he wishes to pursue it, I know they will support him in his decision. All decisions of this family have been made, not for personal gratification, but out of genuine love for the mental well-being of their son. They are the closest to the situation. They know this child the best. Give them the freedom to make loving choices for their son based on all the information.