Joe Miller

To the best of my knowledge, I don't really know who I am. My origins are a mystery. I never knew my mother or my father, for I was given away shortly after I was born. What I do know is that my mother was Bengali, my father was European, and my birth in East India was most likely the result of a love affair during the years leading up to World War II.

I was brought to a convent orphanage near Calcutta, India on 15th August 1935. The nuns baptized me with the Christian name "Joseph" in honour of the convent's patron saint. There is no record of my original name, or whether I had been given a Bengali or European name by my mother.

Years later in 1945, after I met the man who would save me from certain death, the Mother Superior wrote letters about what she knew of my birth and my early years. These documents are some of the only scraps that tie me to who I am and where I come from. They are like tantalizing fragments from a puzzle that is missing the most important pieces. I wrote this memoir to try and answer the most elemental question that there is: "Who am I?"