Secret Daughter by Shilpi Maya Gowda

Kavita, a young mother in a poor rural Indian village, secretly takes her newborn daughter Usha to an orphanage in Mumbai. Their poverty makes a marriage worthy dowry unlikely and she, like a female born earlier, would otherwise be killed. In California, Dr. Somer Whitman longs for a child but learns that it will be impossible for her and her Indian born husband. When they travel back to India for a possible adoption the two families are forever joined when baby Usha - now Asha - returns with her new parents to the United States. With dreams of becoming a journalist, Asha returns to India on a special project and begins a search for her birth parents. The story of these two families, told through many voices over two decades, is really one of the definition of family and the bond between mother and child, biological or not.