Adoption Stress: Jaishree Misra’s A Scandalous Secret

by Dr. Asha Susan Jacob
Associate Profesor,
Dept. of English, St. Thomas College,
Kozhencherry.

Paper presented at a UGC sponsored seminar on Literature and Psychology at Baselius College, Kottayam

The contemporary world of dysfunctional, single parent, patchwork or childless families has generated a proliferation of research in the related areas. Adoption has become a commonplace issue and has lost its derogatory status. As it involves complex factors relating to biological, sociological and psychological issues, it will remain a potential area of research. The methodological quality has increased with the quantum of questions to be answered. It posits constant threats to the mental landscape of all involved. Adoption stress refers to the complications confronted by all the parties involved in the process of adoption. Though not a recent phenomenon, the stress graph has varied dimensions across time and space.
Jaishree Misra, who planted herself firmly on the postcolonial fictional landscape with her debut Ancient Promises, projects the manifold dimensions of adoption in her recent rendition, A Scandalous Secret. Swiftly moving through the West and the East the novelist presents the arduous quest for roots, an emotionally entangled programme as it is the quest of an adopted daughter for her biological mother. The manipulation of the emotional realm of the three women of British, Indian and mixed heritage renders the novel a psycho-cultural implication. Alternating between the locales of London and Delhi, between Sonya and Neha, the novelist deftly unveils the ramifications of one single stupid act in the life of Neha Chaturvedi that turned her Oxford dream to a nightmare.
Researchers in the field of child psychology now realize that bonding is not a post-natal experience, but a continuum of physiological, psychological and spiritual events that begin in the utero and continue through the post natal bonding period. When this natural evolution is ruptured by a post-natal separation from the mother, the resultant sense of abandonment and loss will indelibly be imprinted on the unconscious minds of the children, resulting in what Verrier calls “the primal wound “(1). It is this primal wound that urges Sonya to undertake the trip to India “to an unknown past, by any measure, a curious concept. Find out about a whole new family” (19). The repetitive image of the spiraling tornado speaks of her inner turmoil of anxiety, trepidation and anticipation. The adopted child is torn between her affection and affiliation towards her adopted parents, and her mixed feelings towards the unknown biological parents.
Recent years have witnessed a change in attitude towards adoption. The accelerating number of issueless couples and an equally rising number of divorced or single men and women have rendered a different colouring to adoption. The stigma associated with it has vanished. Adoption Information Disclosure Acts of many western countries now allow adopted parents and birth parents to obtain each other’s personally identifying information. The adoptees have access to the available information in the Adoption Register. Though closed adoption is recommended in some countries, the British Adoption and Children Act of 2002 allows the adored child the right to information regarding his ancestry. A plethora of emotional problems emanate consequent on the revelation of the birth secret. While in some cases it equips the adopted child to encounter his/her future, in some others it may lead to emotional pitfalls if the search ends futile or if rejection is involved.
Encounter with Chelsea, another adopted child, spurs Sonya to undertake the quest for a past that “was her’s and no one else’s but, at the moment, all she had was a gaping hole in her head and in her heart” (22). The information she could glean during childhood from her parents regarding the other parent was “pitifully little”(22) as it told her only about an Indian mother and a white father. But she could never fathom the reasons for her abandonment. There were times when she wanted to scream in frustration for she wondered if her parents were deliberately covering up a really sordid or exciting story. But all the rattling in her head stopped at the age of 13 when her mind became preoccupied with a host of adolescent problems. But as she turned 18 she is legitimized to investigate her past, which is something inevitable. “She had to discover the circumstances of her birth and it was now almost as though forces stronger than her had taken over, compelling her to embark on this treacherous path”(23).
Verrier observes that severance from biological mother instills extensive trauma on the unconscious mind of the adoptee. Though his/her conscious mind may fail to register its repercussions, “it will stay in her subconscious as she lived it”(1). The fact that she/he is “chosen” by the parents will not mitigate the issue of abandonment by the first mother. The adoptee is expected to discard the past to celebrate her present and future. But the subconscious mind will trail dark clouds of the fact of abandonment by the natural mother. “To attempt to fill in the gaps she will create fantasies of acceptable scenarios of the circumstances of her conception, birth and relinquishment, that she can emotionally handle”(Verrier). With time the adoptee may outgrow the fantastical world, but a part of the mind will always wander.
It is this insatiate need to place the missing piece of her life or self that compels Sonya to hit Neha Chaturvedi with the words “I am the daughter you gave away for adoption in 1993”(9) in her test dose of a letter to the address collected from the agency. But the additional information she collects of her birth mother infuriates her as it goes against the fantastic, acceptable reasons for abandonment fabricated by her mind. A voiceless, suffering woman would have been an acceptable image of a deserter mother. But fact that she was a woman who had choices and an Oxford education spurs her “to set a few things right,” (9) though she herself is terrified of what is awaiting her in the alien land. The knowledge that she was not snatched away from a defenceless woman’s care by overzealous social workers was beyond her emotional endurance level. “That was the really galling bit: that the woman who was her natural mother had made such a cold and deliberate choice, never turning around once to look back at the baby she had abandoned in England”(58). It is the same anger that qualifies her first emotional outburst at the apparent opulence of “that woman.”
An adoptee will have to wade through issues of identity in the already turbulent period of adolescence. The difference in physical appearance will instill a feeling of misplacement. That there is no common thread connecting them will surface at times despite all attempts of assimilation. An adoptee may feel he is hatched and not born, lacking any moorings. Despite Sonya’s exotic charm of mixed race, people looked quizzically at “Sonya’s long dark tresses and tanned skin, so starkly different from her mother’s pale and rather washed out blonde looks”(56).Sonya sadly remembers how she had scrubbed her face raw one summer desperate to be less brown than she was so she could blend better with her pale-skinned cousins from Canada. Though she could tide over that phase with her counsellor, “it didn’t take much for some small thing to rear its head up like a little devil and remind her of how little she was like the parents who had adopted her. In the way she looked, the way she spoke, even the way she thought about things. Much as she adored her mum and dad, they really were chalk to her cheese”(12-13).
Traumatic adoption stress is neither confined to the adopted child nor to the adoption process per se. A peep into the life of Sonya’s parents validates the reality of adoption stress experienced by parents of adopted children: pre-adoption stress associated with the acquisition of the adoptive child and post-adoption stress related to its nurturing. Pre-adoption stress includes fertility problems, miscarriages, relationship conflicts, decision making etc. Sonya’s search for the biological mother reminds her adopted mother of the pre-adoption traumatic experiences she had gone through. It brings in a flood of memories of excruciating events that happened to her since the string of miscarriages she had gone through in her twenties. The biological mother and the trip to India hover over Laura’s head, threatening her status and the right over her child. The anguish of the imminent unknown affects the mother in such a way that she feels as though she has lost all locus stand I. “She would have done anything to turn the hands of the clock back to before that horrid day on which Sonya had come back from a party talking about wanting to look for her birth mother”(76). Once engaged in the adoption process the potential parents will have to undergo agonizing screening as potential adopters, the rude, insensitive and awkward questions, “each step in that tortuous process had felt like a gargantuan hurdle”(76). The pre-placement assessment hurdles were compensated by the gift on conditional basis as the infant was of mixed heritage. But the gift rejuvenated every dead cell in her, “reviving her spirits and reorganizing her whole life in that single moment”(77). The fact that “that adored child was embarking on a search for the woman who had so heartlessly abandoned her” despite all their efforts stretching themselves to provide every possible luxury for her was confusing and grilling Laura(78). She felt a sudden clutch of terror at what might lie ahead.
The adopted mother’s anguish over the possibility of losing her adored child is juxtaposed with the natural, glamorous, childless, flamboyantly rich mother’s emotional turmoil over the unexpected arrival of the most dreaded ghost from her past which she had so successfully suppressed under her socialite façade. Alternating between the world of Neha and Sonya, the narrative concentrates on the emotional upheavals of the two thereby re-establishing the broken umbilical cord. From the opening fabulous party where Neha feels like a trapped bird, flapping, darting dramatically inside of her head with the ghastly threatening words in the unexpected letter she received, the novelist has deftly revealed the cracks that appear on the hitherto spotless façade of the connoisseur of sophisticated lifestyle. The letter rakes up the smouldering embers of suppressed guilt and anguish over leaving a four day old infant in a foster home.
The letter unleashes a flood of memories which would rock the foundations of her luxuriantly pleasant life with her husband Sharat. The scandal of a secret child would rock their world and destroy Sharat’s political ambitions. It was too terrifying to think about the explosive power of the secret of 18 years. Public knowledge that she not only had a child before marrying Sharat, but had gone on to abandon it, would shatter their lives at many different levels. “Not merely because everyone would discover what a hypocrite she really was, but also because Sharat would no longer be able to present their marriage in the manner he loved; a gracious young couple who were pillars of the establishment”(27).
The tender age and cultural constraints had compelled Neha to relinquish the product of her one hour stay with her Oxford mentor, a foxy academic. But despite all the planning and secrecy the issue of her fall has traced the concealed tracks to confront her. Through flashback the novelist renders the traumatic stress experienced by the inexperienced girl leading her to leave the infant in an alien land without even breastfeeding it to avoid the development of a bonding. “I emerged from the toilet and my life was changed. I was a child no more because I now had a dark secret”(56). The labour pain was less compared to the emotional anguish and physical suffering that ensued of that bonding that had already developed. And the post-Oxford life is punctuated by torments of childlessness which she acknowledges as punishment for leaving her baby. The big terrible secret of the past resurrects for the old terrors were only buried alive. The meaninglessness of the present opens its big jaw at her once she is confronted with the past. The confrontation of the past, an unknown past for the daughter and a hidden past for the mother, though tumultuous, equips them to tackle their future.
The multifarious problems encountered by the triade—adoptive parents, adoptee, and birth parents –can never be understood unless one is able to gauge the psycho-socio-cultural temperament of the parties involved. It is Sonya’s similar experience in an alien soil at the same age of her mother’s Oxford mishap that makes a post-placement boding possible with her biological mother. The primal wound being healed, she is equipped to experience her Oxford entry without any emotional entanglement. Confrontation and reconciliation with the past enable Neha also to save her self and marriage. Misra has definitely directed attention to the pre-placement and post-placement issues to be realized and justified in evaluating the number of people queeing up before counseling clinics.

Works Cited
Misra, Jaishree. A Scandalous Secret. London: Harper Collins, 2011.
Verrier, N.N. The Primal Wound:Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore:Gateway Press. 1993.

Dr. Asha Susan Jacob
Associate Profesor,
Dept. of English, St. Thomas College,
Kozhencherry.

Paper presented at a UGC sponsored seminar on Literature and Psychology at Baselius College, Kottayam