The End of the Beginning

All that's left to do is everything else.

Finally, improbably, we made it home. After 36 days away, it was indescribably¹ sweet to step into our house. We’re painfully aware of the journey ahead of us, but being able to walk in the door yesterday like the official culmination of the work we’ve put in to build our family. Now, we focus on acclimating, cultivating, growing, and loving. Each has been increasingly difficult to do as patience wore thin being away for so long. The older girls hung in there as long as they could but you could tell they had run out of ways to draw upon unfamiliar territory to soothe themselves or to find the kind of fulfillment they easily find here at home. To be clear: the kindness and hospitality we experienced from both strangers who became family and actual family alike made us feel at home wherever we were. But Dorothy (or more technically, Glinda) had it right: there’s no place like home.

A Definitive Ranking of Homes

1. Wherever Nishi, Akila, Ayana, and Anika are

2. “Sweet Home Chicago” by The Blues Brothers

3. Homeslice Pizza

4. “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins

5. “Take Me Home Tonight” by Eddie Money

6. “Home” by Philip Phillips, as performed by Vocal Chaos

7. Home Depot

8. The One Where the Heart Is

9. Homey D Clown

……

590. “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd

591. H.H. Holmes

Amma’s Corner, Part One. Dispatch from the last day in Delhi:

Til the very end. I’m not sure why I expected things to go any different in Delhi. By all accounts, the process and paperwork required to leave the country was fairly straightforward, with a well-established timeline and defined procedures. We even had the added advantage of a known contact within one of the agencies to get behind the scenes updates. Those things were no match for our destiny of the most stressful end to this process possible:

• On Monday, the entire family went to complete the required medical appointment that ensures Anika was healthy enough to leave the country. Part of the protocol is having to take a passport-style picture of her, which was news to her. About 45 minutes of various attempts later, the staff (who were honestly quite understanding and accommodating) resorted to following Nishi around like papparazzi clicking away until they finally got a workable shot. We left with the appropriate documents and the assurance that those would be uploaded for the US embassy to review to issue her visa.

• Riding the high of accomplishment, I decided to drop the family off back at Nishi’s cousin’s apartment where we were staying for lunch and decided to head off to the travel agency we needed to use to upload documents for an ‘exit permit’ that allows me and Nishi to leave the country with an adopted child. Before doing that, I needed to book and check into the cheapest hotel I could find so I could get a ‘Form C’ letter indicating I was staying there for at least one night. The Form C was one of the required documents for the exit permit, and because we were staying with family, there wasn’t a formal Form C we could get that way. There was technically a workaround but I was told it might be easier to just get it from a hotel. I may have gone a little too cheap with the reservation. The place was an utter dump and the guy at the front desk was unhelpful and rude. After a shakedown for some additional money, we finally got the form we needed.

• I entered the trip fairly organized with my documents, but between the passport nonsense in Madurai and time/packing, things got a little loose so I didn’t have as good a handle on things as I would have liked. So when one of the adoption support guides we’d hired separately asked me for a document that I knew I had as of the medical appointment that morning, I figured it’d be right in the folder where I had last seen it. 15 minutes of feverish searching, panicking, and swearing out loud later, the person at the travel agency looks up and asked what I was looking for. When I replied, she very matter of factly said, “Oh, we don’t need that”. Lovely. We all had a nice laugh and then they asked for Nishi’s Form C. Nobody had told me we needed something for the both of us…so that meant having to delay uploading the documents until the following day, using the workaround we probably could have gone with in the first place.

• Tuesday was our visit to the US Embassy! How nice it was to be back on US grounds! We were definitely prepared for this one. We knew that no bags or mobile devices were allowed, so rather than subjecting ourselves to the long line to have to check those items in like at a Bulls game, we kept everything in the car and arranged to find our driver through our adoption support guide. As Nishi and I go through the line and get to the front, the security guard immediately points to the Apple Watch we both forgot Nishi was wearing and reminds us we can’t take that in. They were quite reasonable about it and let Nishi take it off and walk through so we didn’t lose our place in line while I would go stand in that line we were trying to avoid to check in the watch. It took just long enough for me to almost get to the front of that line before I saw Nishi walking back toward me asking for Anika’s passport. You know, the document we fought tooth and nail to get for 2 weeks longer than we should have needed to get? The thing that I shouldn’t have allowed leave my body, even while showering? The document I decided to leave back at the apartment that day? That one. None of the checklists I had reviewed though to mention bringing Anika’s passport, but where else would the Visa be going? That one was on me. Surprisingly for a government entity (especially a US one), they said they’d accommodate our 8:30 appointment if we could go and come back by 11. So we rushed everyone back home, grabbed the passport, went back to the embassy and submitted everything we needed to get the Visa. We would get it either that very day or the next. I was able to pick it up the next day, leaving just the exit permit, which we should have gotten by Thursday evening.

• Spoiler alert: it did not come by Thursday evening. By Friday afternoon, I was engaged in what is known among adoption experts as the chase protocol, which sounded much cooler than it ended up being. First, I had to wait for about 1.5 hours while these two Statler-and-Waldorf-@$$-mfers swatted away people looking for help to exit the country like they were mosquitos. Having learned from all the mistakes I saw being made, I was able to get through them to the main office. There, I was met with blank stares and incredulity that I would deign to check on the status of my application. Eventually, I got some officer who chastised me, told me they always have these problems with the adoptions and that I should tell the Indian government agency responsible for adoptions that they’re doing things wrong. Begrudgingly, the officer told me I should leave and just keep checking my e-mail; it would be done that day. Business closed at 6:30; we finally received the permits at 6:43. I think I developed a stomach ulcer in those 13 minutes.

• It was finally time to head to the airport! We did it! We were packed, had all our bags organized, etc. At the Delhi airport, you have to show your ticket to even get inside the terminal, so I was ready with my boarding passes and corresponding passports all in order, pre-opened to the picture page. 4 of us got through and only Anika was left. I had called the airline the day we got her passport to have her added as a lap child. There was some confusion about the pricing system, but the rep I spoke to said they’d resolved it and Anika had been added to our reservation with the same confirmation number and was assigned to my seat. Apparently, none of that was true. I ended up having to plead with the ticket agent who had originally directed me to call reservations to get a supervisor who then just handled it himself and got us a ticket after confirming that there was no record of her getting one originally.²

Maybe this was all just preparation for what’s to come. I will say that I could do without government entities and paperwork for at least a few weeks. I’m excited to eventually return to India without all these processes tainting the experience.

Jet lag cares nothing for the Geneva Conventions. I see now how sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. The last 24 hours have wracked our bodies, though the girls somehow seem to be doing ok. Historically, I’ve been more affected going to India than I have on my returns…but clearly, traveling with children changes the game just a bit. I had tried to stay awake for most of the 16+ hour flight from Delhi to Newark in the hopes that I would have just a really long Saturday. I mostly succeeded, save for about an hour or so which necessitated me rewatching the same 15 minute chunk of Ant Man and The Wasp: Quantumania about 8 different times. We were utter zombies our first night back at home, barely making it through putting all three girls to bed. We were woken up by the luggage delivery guy around 12:15 and woke up to Akila in our faces at 3:30 but otherwise made it feeling sleepy through the night despite our bodies thinking it was daytime. The 3:30 wakeup was particularly startling because we had left the light on next to our bed after the 12:15 wakeup, so I really did think I was ending a nap. As I write this around 3 PM on Sunday, I’m wondering how I’m going to last another 8 hours without a nap.³

Amma’s Corner, Part Two. The coda to Act I of our play…

Programming Note. This was only ever intended to provide updates while we were traveling, but I have enjoyed the process of documenting things this way, so I may post the occasional update. As Nishi says above, thanks to all of you who have followed along; it really did help during the times we were floating in the wilderness of bureaucracy without a clear path home. But we’re here now, and it is so ______ sweet.

1. Not ideal for a medium dependent on the written word.

2. At a much higher price too, of course.

3. Update: I did not last an hour. I napped from 4 - 5 and it was a grave mistake, as I somehow felt worse after.