A Day to Remember

She kept dreaming about a code. Did it mean anything or were her family right to be worried about her?

- PAUL STEVENS

TINDRA Salisbury dearly loved her psychiatrist husband, Justin, her two bright children, Peter (18), and Samantha (16), her comfortable home and the beautiful city in which she lived, Cape Town. A strikingly beautiful and creative person, she had set up her own successful boutique business, selling elegant dresses which she’d designed, cut and stitched.

She was from Umea, in Northern Sweden. But no one can say where in Umea she was born exactly, because as a baby she was left on the porch of a house one summer’s night with a note pinned to the basket to say her single mother could not afford to raise her.

She was adopted when she was one by a husband-and-wife medical research team who gave her the unusual name Tindra, which means to sparkle and twinkle.

The couple decided to seek sunnier climes and emigrated to Cape Town, where Tindra enjoyed a happy childhood and adolescence. In their medical circle she would eventually meet her future husband, Justin, who was just starting out on his own medical career.

YET, even in the light of all the good things that had happened to her, Tindra struggled increasingly with depression. She felt incomplete, as if she were missing an arm.

She yearned to know who her real parents were. Did she have siblings? How could she reconcile her life without knowing these basic things? It was like a cancer, eating away at her and manifesting at odd moments, like suddenly putting her head in her hands at the dinner table in the middle of a meal and weeping, to the great concern of her family.

Then one night at dinner she suddenly said, “I had a strange dream last night.”

Justin, concerned, stopped eating, put down his knife and fork and looked at her. “What was it about?”