CHANDIGARH, July 10: More than 28 years after being dumped in the street as a newborn baby, an Indian woman is suing her biological parents for one million rupees (about 23,000 dollars) for abandoning her.
A separate criminal action Dimple Menezes plans to bring could send her mother Harbhajan Kaur and father Sukhdev Singh, a Sikh priest, to prison for up to seven years, lawyer S.P. Chopr said.
The case, the first of its kind in India, is set down for hearing on July 20 in the High Court of Chandigarh, capital of Punjab state, where Ms Menezes was abandoned outside a hospital in the dusty town of Taran Tarn soon after she and her twin sister were born on May 7, 1977.
“It was hot like a furnace that day when I finished work at the St Mary’s Hospital and stepped out to find this child wailing, surrounded by hungry, stray dogs,” said Sulochana Christbell Karanjia, foster mother of Ms Menezes.
Karanjia, 65, who was medical superintendent of the Catholic-run hospital, took custody of the baby after she could not find the woman who had given birth to twins but left for home with only one of them.
“How can I forgive? It was their duty to care for me; instead I was abandoned. Do you know what it is like to grow up without a father’s hug? A kiss, just one kiss from a mother? They should have strangled me when I was born,” Ms Menezes said, her voice cracking with emotion during a telephone interview.
Ms Menezes, now a computer science graduate, says as a child fellow students, neighbours and even teachers questioned her legitimacy and taunted her because she was baptised into the Christian faith by foster mother Karanjia, who has a daughter of her own.
Karanjia said Ms Menezes’ biological mother returned to Taran Tarn from her eastern home town of Gorakhpur to reclaim the child when she was 12.
“Her mother kept pestering us. Kaur even took Dimple away for a few days but my daughter returned,” said Karanjia, a gynaecologist.
Ms Menezes said she harboured too much bitterness towards her mother to want to stay with her.
“She threw me away. She did not feed me. Did she hold me? And then after 12 years she came to me. How can there be any love?” she said, speaking from Taran Tarn, where she works at an information technology services centre.
She also did not get on with her siblings, especially her twin sister who was ‘quite opposite in nature to me’.
Ms Kaur reappeared on the scene in 2003 when Karanjia found a Christian groom for Ms Dimple, Chandigarh-based financial consultant Jude Eric Menezes. Ms Kaur opposed the Christian marriage and wanted Ms Dimple to marry into a Sikh family.
“My mother dumped me because she did not want to pay dowry for me and then she came to hurt me again when I wanted to marry the man of my choice,” Ms Menezes said.
She ignored her mother and wed her husband on May 9, 2003.
Ms Menezes’ 31-year-old husband says he wants to start afresh with his wife.
“I now have a job in Kuwait and the moment I am settled there I will take Dimple and we will start a new life. I want to end this pain ... all this anger and move on in life,” he said while packing to leave Chandigarh.—AFP
