All The Single Daddies

Divorced, adoptive, widowed or by choice, men raising children alone face a unique set of challenges.

- Mitali Parekh

A majority of the Indian population struggles to recognise the definition of a single father, but in the recent past, two examples leap to people’s minds — actor Tusshar Kapoor and Pune-based software engineer Aditya Tiwari. Kapoor has said in interviews that he always wanted to become a parent, and with his 40th birthday fast approaching, he approached Mumbai-based IVF specialist Firuza Parikh to help him out via surrogacy, while Aditya adopted a baby boy with Down’s Syndrome earlier this year.

ADITYA & AVNEESH

Twenty-nine-year-old Aditya’s path to fatherhood was more instinctive and impulsive. “I had gone to Jyoti Niwas orphanage [run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity] in Indore to distribute sweets on my father’s birthday,” he says. “There, I saw Avneesh, the only baby who had not been adopted out of six. The nuns told me he was a ‘mental child’. This is the broad term we club special children under. Avneesh has Down’s Syndrome, two holes in his heart, weak eyesight and because of a problem with his knees, may never walk. His chances of adoption within India were slim; they would try a foreign adoption for him, since non-Indians are less discriminative against special children.”