Trip to Mumbai
Sunanda and the Search for Lost Time
“I have no conscious memories of India - but I've never felt like a stranger here. And, I think that I would sometimes described it as first memories.” Sunanda looks almost stereotypically Indian. She has black eyes, a very slim figure and a way of talking with the hands and the body, which is strongly reminiscent of a Bollywood film. She is Swiss, since she was adopted by a couple from Basel. That was 30 years ago.
She spent only the first year of her life in an orphanage of Mumbai - but except for a vague sense of longing, Sunanda has no memory of it. Once a year she takes a break from her life in Switzerland, and pursues this feeling, flying to India, where she spends a few weeks in her old orphanage. Neither pity nor the intention to do something good drives her. Sunanda speaks of her orphanage as a fenced-in paradise on earth with two hundred children, all of whom come to you at the same time when you enter the building. Of the tragedies that the biographies of orphans often hide, she speaks little and resolutely. “It's just India,” she says with a friendly smile. Instead, she speaks for hours on the colors and the smells of Mumbai, of the inconceivable numbers of people on the streets and of the small markets full of spices and fabrics. We accompany her while she drifts for hours through the different districts of the city, until she has the impression of experiencing a fragment of her childhood, of feeling the smells or colors again. A return to the search for her lost time, so far away from home and always magical.