Found roaming the streets, Lakshya was adopted by an industrialist family in Delhi four years ago, only to be returned to his biological parents after a long-drawn custody battle. The Sunday Express catches up with him as he tries to adapt to a new life, a place he barely remembers as home.
Six-year-old Lakshya Jindal loves ice-cold mango frooties. And if you ask him what his favourite snack is, he’ll scream, “burgers”. Growing up in a sprawling mansion in West Punjabi Bagh, like any child from an affluent family in New Delhi, he was raised by parents with a readily disposable income to meet his every need and fancy.
Then one day, Lakshya’s mother, Vandana Jindal, and father, industrialist Anil Jindal, a cousin of MP Naveen Jindal, took him on a drive to the Uttam Nagar police station. Here, they introduced him to Babita and Dinesh Kumar Sharma. Quick as lightning, Lakshya was handed over to strangers he was told were his “real” parents; biological would be too difficult to explain.
With this exchange on March 11, 2008, four long years of courtroom drama came to a close: the Sharmas were granted legal custody of their son, Lakshya—or Prateek as they named him at birth. And the Jindals, who had adopted Lakshya—lost in 2004 and deposited by police at the Bal Vihar Orphanage Centre in Palam—and raised him for four years, returned home without him.
Within minutes, Lakshya was transported back to lanes, long forgotten, where he once played; to his new home—a solitary room, which his parents rent for Rs 800 a month, in a crumbling, rudimentary brick house on a dusty track off Peepal Chowk in Mohan Gardens.
The contrast to Jindal House could not be starker.
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SITTING in the corner of a dimly lit room, Lakshya is looking down, resolutely, at the floor. Almost two months after he was returned to his biological parents, he is struggling to adapt to a family and life he does not remember.
“As a baby, Lakshya would play peacefully for hours. But now he’s very naughty,” says Babita, 23, who flits between the names Prateek and Lakshya, admitting she quite likes the name the Jindals gave her son; Dinesh, however, will only use Prateek.
When first relocated, Lakshya’s erratic behaviour—throwing pots and pans, shouting, rude comments, fighting with cousins—was frequent, says Babita. “He’s beginning to listen now that I scold and slap him ever so often,” she adds with...
