Nyamini

In 1979, Nyamini and I were taken to a hotel on Jalan Raden Saleh in Jakarta to meet the people who would become our parents. I don’t remember that first encounter. What I do remember is her. She felt safe.

Nyamini was older, confident, and already a little wiser about how this world worked. She moved around me like a big sister, protective without making a show of it. In the middle of so much uncertainty, we found each other. Two girls about to leave everything behind, standing on the edge of a future we couldn’t imagine.

One afternoon, she proudly demonstrated her “special talent.” She could bend her thumb all the way back until it touched her wrist. I had flexible fingers, too, but I had never tried something like that. She laughed, told me it was easy, and before I could protest, she grabbed my hand to show me. It hurt. A lot. I immediately decided this was a skill I did not need to master. She laughed at my dramatic reaction, and somehow that laughter stitched us closer together. We were in the same boat, after all.

Nyamini spoke Bahasa Indonesia and tried to teach me words using memory cards our new parents had bought. My own mother tongue was different; Bahasa still felt foreign in my mouth. She had lived longer with Mama Jane and knew what it meant to be chosen, and not chosen. Prospective parents had once sent her back. Her advice was simple and serious: be obedient, or they might return you. I listened. She sounded like someone who understood survival.

One day, we went on an outing with our new families. A driver from the orphanage brought us to the botanical gardens in Bogor. I remember being amazed by the enormous water-lily leaves floating like green islands. For the trip, I wore bright red shoes. They were beautiful and painfully small. I wanted to take them off, but the asphalt burned under the sun. I cried, then put them back on, because there was no other option. That detail has stayed with me: beauty, discomfort, endurance all wrapped into one small memory. Under a tree covered in blossoms, my new father wanted to take a photograph of us. We picked pink flowers from the ground to put in our hair. Only then did we notice the ants crawling inside them. We burst into giggles, half disgusted, half delighted, while he captured the moment anyway.

On the way back, we sneaked up behind our new mothers with blades of grass and tried to tickle them. Naughty, conspiratorial, united. For a brief time, we were just children having fun. Not long after, I developed a fever and became very ill. My memories of the hotel blur and then fall away. Nyamini went to a family in northern the Netherlands. Life scattered us, as adoption so often does. Letters didn’t come. Phone numbers weren’t exchanged. Children depend on adults to keep connections alive, and ours quietly dissolved.

Years later, during a period when my own mind was breaking under the weight of unanswered questions, I felt an urgent need to find her again. It was 2011. I didn’t remember her surname. I had withdrawn from my parents and couldn’t ask them. So I turned to the only thing I had: Google. Her first name led me to a story about an Indonesian nurse named Nyamini who had been killed in 1998. Without a last name, I couldn’t be sure. The possibility was too heavy, too unreal. I closed the browser and tried to forget.

But some doors don’t stay closed. In 2018, after watching Zembla, I gathered the courage to reconnect with my parents. Together we searched again. They couldn’t remember her surname either, but they did remember her Dutch brother's name. Through him, I found her photograph. I knew her instantly. She was the same girl who had laughed while twisting my thumb, the one who warned me to behave, the one who stood beside me with ants in her flowers.

It was her. After speaking with her brother and her mother, the confirmation came. My childhood friend, my almost-sister, had died many years earlier. Grief arrived late but landed hard. For days, I walked around stunned, mourning not only her death but the reunion I had secretly rehearsed in my heart. I had imagined us as adults, sitting at a table, comparing memories, filling in each other’s missing pieces. I wanted to thank her for protecting me. I wanted to tell her she had been right about survival. We never got that chance. Another path back to my past closed without mercy. Yet something gentle happened, too. Our parents reconnected, and in their conversations, they recognised the same pain, the same patterns, the same struggles in their daughters. In losing us, they had also lost one another. Through us, they found each other again. I try to hold on to that.

Nyamini will always remain the girl in the garden, laughing with ants in her hands. My big sister, for a brief and fragile moment in time. And maybe, in remembering her, I am still keeping a promise between two children who once stood side by side, about to cross an ocean, doing their best to be brave.