Trushali
- 19 July 2026
TOI Lifestyle Desk / etimes.in / Jul 19, 2026, 13:10 Â IST
Most 14-year-olds are thinking about school, friends, and the weekend. Devanshi Yadav was thinking about becoming a mother. Not a biological mother. An adoptive one. At an age when most children are still figuring out who they are, Devanshi had already looked at the world around her and decided something quietly, firmly, and completely: that one day she would give a child a home, a name, and a life built entirely on love. That decision, made in childhood, took more than a decade to become real. And when it did, it changed two lives completely.
The childhood that shaped everything
Devanshi grew up carrying a weight that no child should have to carry. Her father, an army martyr, was killed in a terrorist bomb blast when she was just nine months old. She never knew him. She grew up watching her mother, a police officer, raise her alone with dignity, strength, and absolute refusal to let the world’s judgment become their story. That example planted something deep inside Devanshi. The belief that a family does not need a conventional shape to be whole. That love, when it is intentional and fierce, is more than enough. She also grew up as a survivor of sexual assault and an acid attack, two experiences that could have broken her and, instead, built in her an unshakeable mission. To raise a daughter who knows her worth from day one. To show a little girl, from the very beginning, that she is enough, that she is everything.
The baby girl who started it all
In her twenties, Devanshi was teaching at an orphanage in Delhi when she met a baby girl with a hearing and speech impairment. Together, they arranged cochlear implants for her. Devanshi wanted to adopt her. The organisation did not allow it. She walked away without the baby, but not without clarity. “That experience was the turning point,” she said. “The moment my quiet calling transitioned into a concrete decision. I realised my desire to be a mother never depended on a biological connection.”
She registered for adoption. She completed the paperwork, the home study, the evaluations, and every single step of a process she describes not as a burden but as a protection, one designed entirely for the safety of the child at the center of it. And then, at a court in Delhi, she held Vanmayi for the first time. Every hurdle, she says, became worth it in that single moment.
Raising Vanmayi, one honest conversation at a time
Vanmayi Devanshi Yadav is seven and a half years old today. She is confident and curious, and she speaks about adoption at school competitions without a flicker of hesitation. That did not happen by accident. It happened because Devanshi decided, from the very first day, that honesty was not optional in their home. It was the foundation. She introduced Vanmayi to books about adoption, about surrogacy, and about all the different shapes a family can take so early that the concept never felt foreign or strange. It simply felt like the truth of their life, told with love, repeated with warmth, and owned completely by a little girl who has never been made to feel like anything other than chosen.
“There was never a moment of telling her,” Devanshi said. “She has known from day one.” A real-life lesson arrived through their neighborhood indie dogs. When Vanmayi helped find loving homes for them, she understood adoption not as a concept but as something tangible, something beautiful and full of meaning.
The people who questioned her, and the ones who held her up
Adopting as a single woman in India does not come without opinions. People asked Devanshi how she would manage alone. They raised their eyebrows at her unconventional path. They wondered, sometimes out loud, why she had not chosen something simpler. She did not argue with them. She simply focused on Vanmayi. “Seeing my name as the sole parent on her official documents, with no father’s name required, feels like a liberating win,” she said. “It is my quiet way of smashing the patriarchy, one document, one question, one raised eyebrow at a time.” Her mother and grandmother, initially uncertain, came around the moment they saw her determination. Today, her mother is Vanmayi’s most devoted Nani, living proof that the courage of one generation shapes the next.
A mother, an activist, and a woman who chose her life
Devanshi is also the founder of Shaheed Ramashray Welfare Society, an NGO working with survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence, and child welfare. She is an advocate, a public voice, and a full-time mother. She does not pretend it is easy. She does not claim to have it perfectly figured out. “Motherhood demands far more than we ever acknowledge,” she says. But she has found a way to weave her work and her parenting together so that Vanmayi grows up not apart from her mother’s mission but alongside it.
She is learning about adoption, mental health, and advocacy not from textbooks but from watching her mother live it every day. And perhaps that, more than anything, is the most beautiful thing Devanshi has given her daughter. Not just a home. But a way of seeing the world that makes her brave enough to speak about her own story at a school competition, with confidence, with pride, and with a smile that belongs entirely to her.