With the party under way, Patricia Loison began to waltz. And as was proper, one of the first dances of the director of Alliance Française de Delhi (AFD) was with Thierry Mathou, the French ambassador to India. Both were in French colours -- blue, white, and red; in her off-shoulder dress, Loison moved gracefully under the chandelier before Pichwai paintings. A pièce montée cake installation at the other end of the ballroom, a violinist in all black, a poster of earlier versions of cultural evenings in Delhi, plates of macaroons with honey and goat cheese plus other savouries by L’Opera on little tables beside the bar—all played their part in evoking the ’50s ‘French Ball’ that Loison had re-ushered into Delhi a few weeks ago, just as summer grew in the city.
White heat bleaches the glass windows, as it were, but the office of Loison, the first Indian-origin director of Alliance Française de Delhi, whom we meet a few days later, is cool. The books, files, bulletin boards with stickies of things to do, and indoor plants set against office furniture give the room a busy look, but the arrangement all seems aimed at aiding work. At her workplace, Loison has imposed the order of a French garden. The start of her story of life was anything but.
“There are a few boxes that I open with caution and only now and then,” she says. “If I were to see a certain kind of movie or read a book. Otherwise, they stay quite closed.” In 2019, Loison wrote a book Je cherche encore ton nom (I am still Looking for your Name), published by Fayard, in which she wrote: “I could have grown up on these Delhi sidewalks begging, mirroring the fates of those little girls….”
Shishu Bhavan to a Parisian suburb
“People usually begin their books with, ‘When I was born’, mine starts with the sentence, ‘When I arrived’. I was five months old when I landed in my parents’ arms at the airport from Delhi,” says Loison. Two years later, she would herself be at the airport to receive her brother, who was from Lebanon, along with her parents Gisèle and Christian Loison, a young middle-class couple. Gisele had gynaecological problems; there was “no Angeline Jolie side” to the desire for adoption from diverse cultures. Loison was adopted from the Mother Teresa Foundation, Delhi.
Loison and her brother Franck’s upbringing was naturally a French one. “In France at that time, India was not a big presence. France knew Arabs because of colonialism, so I didn’t face that problem. I didn’t look Arab. Skin was never an issue at school. We felt and grew up French. For my parents, we could have been orange with green hair, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They thought so highly of us, we walked on water,” says Loison, her eyes lighting up. She also studied at the Lille School of Journalism, one of Europe’s most prestigious journalism school, in France.
In her twenties, however, she had a meltdown when a chance remark by a friend’s mother that she “looked Indian” led to a storm of grief, and it hit her hard: adoption meant that she had been abandoned. It hit her again when she gave birth to her first child.
“I could not hold back some extreme feelings after Luna's birth, when my parents joined us at the clinic to meet their first grandchild. I felt my biological mother talked through me re-living the separation that happened 30 years ago when I was handed to my adoptive mum. I could not stand her holding the baby…. I had a voice inside my head whispering awful things, and it was a turning point in deciding to dig in more on adoption and its consequences.”
Facing it
Loison tells this story with the openness of someone who has told the story before. Writing the book also made her look at her biological mother’s decision closely, obsessively, repeatedly. It was also the chance to tell her story, her way. “It is said if a chick is made to leave the mother, some die and some survive. So, it is with a human child. Whether you blend or cling, it’s a decision you make. You make your new family yours. Whichever family or the mother you came from, whatever happened before, you can’t have that. You can’t have both….”
When she was in her 30s, Gisèle gave her her case file. “I am told she breastfed me,” Loison says softly. Each detail has added to her mental picture of how she wants to imagine her biological mother right up to the moment of separation — from her skin, hands, and bosom to another’s. These feelings she also confronted when she gave birth. “When you give birth, you put yourself in a lineage of women but when I was giving birth my biological mom wasn’t there….” The book was Loison’s way to give her corporeal form, make her seem alive, and around.
This is perhaps not a story she wants to close; when she was part of the Press contingent covering French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s official trip to India in 2010 for LCI, the news channel of TF1 France’s first private TV channel and the biggest in Europe, she went to Shishu Bhavan to try to get a lead that she could follow up about her mother but to no avail.
At the helm
Returning to Delhi as director, AFD, may seem like coming full circle, but Loison is as French as they come. In 2023, she was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres medal with her parents proudly accompanying her to the award ceremony. “India actually makes me realise how French I am,” she says, with a laugh. She was still doing her TV anchoring when she was offered the job to helm AFD. “My profile and my life were seen as good things here,” she says.
Loison is a conservative when it comes to language. Emily in Paris is a great ambassador for France “but she speaks very bad French”— not a role model for AFD students, she says jokingly. Spellings are for Loison milestones of history. With her, you do not mess with origin stories.
“The trend now may be to simplify language, but I don’t like it. For example, forest is forêt in French. The accent on top signifies that in the Middle Ages this sign was an S. If you remove the accent for simplification, you have erased a whole part of history,” she says.
Are the students at AFD listening? “Indians have a talent for languages. The aim and business model at AFD is the study of the French language in a French bubble—see movies, we bring in artists, students participate in song contests—know the culture.” Under her watch, the Delhi premiere of All We Imagine as Light, the 2024 Cannes Grand Prix winner and an Indo-French co-production film by Payal Kapadia, was screened at the AFD.
Loison is now preparing for the India-France Year of Innovation 2026, a partnership between France and India, endorsed at the highest level between the two heads of state and French Ambassador Thierry Mathou. A new app for learning French is also an option being thought of. “People think innovation is limited to robots and AI. We need to think of education,” she says. “A French language certificate on the resume is a differentiator in the job market. There are more than 1,000 French companies in India. It’s an asset to have if you can talk to the guys in the factory in Hindi and connect with your co-workers in Europe in French. Education is the big game,” she says.