“When she turned eighteen, Tara had traveled to India in search of her father. She hadn't found him, but she had spent ten years in a yoga ashram in Jammu. She'd come home with Siddhartha, a four-year-old boy she'd adopted, and joined her mother in running the studio. Two years after that she'd adopted India from an orphanage in Bangkok, and two years after that China from an orphanage in Nairobi. India hadn't known there was anything different about her family until a substitute teacher in her kindergarten classroom had looked at her with an expression India would come to know well as she grew up, and asked, Aren't you one of that yoga teacher's kids? The ones with the cleft lip scars adopted from three continents? When India had told Sid about it on their way home from school, he'd said, But India and Thailand are on the same continent. It's how India had learned that adults, even teachers, didn't always know everything. To India, their family was how families were supposed to be. Many years later, when China was in her rebellious phase, she had asked Tara why she had felt the need to adopt children from three countries. I took a lifelong vow of celibacy. How else was I supposed to have children? That had been Tara's answer.” IndiaBackgroundAdopted KidsIndia DashwoodOrphanagesAdoptive Mother Book:Incense and Sensibility Source: Incense and Sensibility