As we grew up, my mother would sit my sister and me down on the last Sunday of every month and force us to write letters to family in India. Despite being an orphan, my mom came from a large, tight-kmit Anglo-Indian family back in Hyderabad and loved the cousins she was raised with like siblings. At the time, we were the only ones who had left India to go abroad. She missed all our relatives deeply.

It was the 1970s, and my mother was recently divorced, raising two little girls on her own and finding her way in a new country. We lived in a basement apartment and couldn’t afford long-distance calls. Letter-writing was the cheapest and only way for us to maintain contact. The last thing I wanted to do was sit down for an hour after dinner and write letters to people I barely knew. But over time, my sister and I came to enjoy it. My mother would tell us stories about each family member, and it was interesting to get to know a whole clan of people who looked and sounded just like us.

When my mother died, my sister and I took her ashes back to India. We hadn’t been back for over 25 years, having visited only once when I was 10. After the funeral, we spent a month visiting relatives. Each household would take out photo albums full of photographs of us as well as the letters they’d received over the years. They’d saved them all and wanted to show us that they’d never forgotten us.

As we struggled as new immigrants, my mother ensured that we always knew who we were, where we came from and where we were going. She kept us connected to a family that was thousands of miles away but near to our hearts through a lifetime of letter-writing. And she taught me the power of storytelling.

It's a legacy to be proud of and a gift I’m grateful for every day.

During the 1930s, the Great War broke out. A 25-year-old American soldier, probably never thought that his life would change forever when he volunteered to go to France.

One night while the American unit was returning to the base after a bloody fight, Suleyman stumbled into the ground and noticed a bit of movement from the bush. Being stuck between two choices either its enemy or an animal, Suleyman found a five-year-old girl from the bushes shivering with cold and utmost fear. Due to the atrocity of the war, the girl was abandoned by her family and the whole village was killed.

During the war, it was impossible to find the child’s family so Suleyman took this little French girl under his wings and gave her an American name Flora which means like the flower. Soon, Flora became the apple of the eye of everyone living in the army camp.

For one and a half years, Flora and Suleyman became inseparable; however, every fairy tale comes to an end. When the war ended, Suleyman was sent back to USA, while Flora was put in an orphanage, the Normandy School, which was founded by the American government for orphaned French children to have an education.

For years, Suleyman always thought about Flora. When the French National Olympic Team was playing in the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, Suleyman gazed through the audience on TV, hoping to catch a glimpse of Flora, but he never could.

At the age of 85, Suleyman attended the 60th anniversary reception of the Great War where Suleyman shared his story with American and French officials. After hearing his story, a French journalist started to investigate the story, and all government files were read in detail. The moment the journalist helped dial the number, in tears, Flora said Suleyman was her hero, and everything came flooding back to her.