New Delhi, Jan. 25 -- In the past year, I have struggled to explain the concept of "separation" to my eight-year-old daughter Meera, who already experiences anxiety, having been adopted at the age of five-and-a-half. She was found abandoned at the age of three-and-a-half at a railway station, taken to a police station and eventually sent to an adoption centre. According to Meera, she was left on the road by her mother who said she would come to fetch her but didn't.

There are so many threads to unravel by way of understanding adoption and adoptive parents, particularly when children are older, but that's a story to be written for another time. For now, I'll stick to the aspect of separation, and how films, books and podcasts can sometime...