Long read: The tragic story of the American woman who forced her Pakistani father to take a paternity test in a court on the Costa del Sol

FOR Tamara Hibbs, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in a white family between white communities in Baltimore and Kentucky had always been a bit of an alienating experience.

she not at all fitand from his earliest memories he was always subtly aware of it.

His hair and skin were noticeably darker than any other member of his family, and he tried to explain it by talking about the Native American roots of the man he always assumed was his father.

But no one else in her entire extended family was anything like Tamara. And the names and innuendos followed, often from the people who were supposed to love her the most.

And other little clues abounded. During routine checkups, doctors and dentists idly asked if she was from the Indian subcontinent, since she had pigmentation indicative of people from that region.

It wasn’t until Tamara was fifty that her mother Barbara, suffering from Alzheimer’s in the last days of her life, blurted out the unbearable truth.

Tamara told the olive press:: “He looked at me and said: How is your dad? Have you talked to your father lately?

“Oh mom,” I said. “He died a long time ago. Like a long, long time ago.

“She says: Oh no, I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about your biological father.”

“I said: what are you talking about?

“She said: Your biological father. He is from another country. He arrived on a ship. I want to know if you’ve talked to him.

Barbara then tried to take back and dismiss the comment; walk back like a figment of her daughter’s imagination.

But the genie was out of the bottle.

Thus began an Agatha Christie-esque mystery to track down Tamara’s biological father that would take her, metaphorically, across the world and back, before landing in, of all places, Fuengirola, a small Spanish town near Malaga.

He was a man she always knew existed deep down inside. A married man who had had an affair with Tamara’s mother when she was 19 years old and got her pregnant.

But she had never understood how this man could have abandoned her to be a misfit all her life and deny her the family and inheritance that was literally her birthright.

Tamara immediately began to do a DNA test. He paired her up with people from India and Pakistan, totally foreign countries and cultures to her.

Surprisingly, he mentioned a living relative in the US: a pre-med student from Pakistan.

She contacted this young man and told him that she was looking for his biological father.

But from her age, it was clear that Tamara needed to talk to her parents, who turned out to be happy to do the DNA testing themselves.

The mother tried and was not a match. But the student’s father was a match, on his father’s side.

But the match was perplexing, as this man was only half a match; half first cousin once removed.

Something wasn’t right. But Tamara knew that she was on the right track and closer to locating her biological father.

She knew that he was a Pakistani man who had come to the US in the 1960s, studied and practiced medicine, and then left the country sometime in the 1980s.

To open the case, Tamara took her story to a genealogist who analyzed the data.

He went back to Tamara and asked her to check to see if the pre-med student’s grandfather had had a second wife.

And it turned out that yes, Tamara was a descendant of this man and his second wife.

Of that union, only two children came from Pakistan to the US, and one of them must have been Tamara’s father.

In a short time, Tamara found herself in a Whatsapp group with one of these two men, the son of the man and the genealogist.

It could have been that he was talking to his brother and father.

Over the course of a two-hour conversation, Tamara questioned this man, traded life stories, filled in the blanks, and tended to wounds that had never healed.

They determined that in 1969, the year Tamara was born, he had been living in Germany.

He wasn’t her father, he was her uncle. Still, he was closer than ever to finding her father.

His uncle gave him a cruel warning: “Yours is a very sad story.

“But until your father recognizes you and accepts you, which is something that’s not really in our culture, I can’t either.”

Tamara found out that her biological father, a successful eye doctor, was married with three children when he had the affair with Barbara, Tamara’s mother.

And then he left them too.

“He left them because he didn’t care,” his uncle said. “He cared about his work, he didn’t care about them.

“He didn’t care when he was young and he won’t care when he’s old.

“I’m sorry, but he’s not going to open Pandora’s Box.”

And then Tamara’s blood uncle closed the door on her too. “I doubt there is any reality to your story anyway. I’m sorry.”

By this time, Tamara had tracked down several relatives on her father’s side, and despite a reluctance to acknowledge or deal with an illegitimate relative, she found a good Samaritan.

A relative who supported her, to gain her recognition and justice from the man who fathered her and abandoned her, despite the shame it would bring to the family.

This person gave Tamara the names and phone numbers of her father and his wife.

They lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean on Spain’s Costa del Sol, just 25 km from Malaga.

“I hope your father accepts you, because that would be the right thing to do,” said the good Samaritan.

But this person warned Tamara: the wife and her ‘typical Pakistani mentality’ would not be receptive to her existence.

And it turned out to be so. When Tamara sent a Whatsapp message to her wife explaining who she was, she was immediately blocked without even a reply.

When Tamara contacted again from a different number, she received the coldest, most hostile response she could have imagined.

He doesn’t remember your mother; he is old and forgetful, ”wrote the wife.

“He has no desire to talk to you or meet you, and you can’t make him do it.”

Tamara cried after reading the message. It seemed his search for her had reached a cold, loveless dead end, as ruthless as the 50 years of denial she had lived through her entire life.

It was at this darkest moment that Tamara decided she would not be denied again.

She contacted a lawyer to discuss legal options to force her father to acknowledge her.

But despite all the contacts he had made with his extended family in Pakistan, and the DNA matches he had made to cousins ​​and distant relatives, he did not have the direct match he needed to convince a court to force him to take a test. of paternity. .

It was then, as much by providence as by courage and determination, that Tamara located her half-sister, the daughter her father abandoned when he left the United States.

Tamara’s sister believed her father was dead and it was a great shock to learn that he was alive and well, retired in Spain with a wife 30 years his junior.

It was also painful news, because her mother, the woman who could have been Tamara’s stepmother, had died after a life of hardship trying to raise three children alone. Believing that she had to do it alone because the man who should have been carrying her had died.

A DNA test confirmed that she was indeed Tamara’s half-sister and that her father was Tamara’s father.

The next step was to hire a private investigator to find the address of his biological father in Spain, an easy task to perform.

He found out his address in Fuengirola on November 16 and was notified on November 24.

However, the retired doctor has so far evaded the court summons, with his lawyers claiming he was “in hospital” and dismissing the evidence against him as “insufficient”.

But at least he has now recognized the authority of the court and a date for a hearing at the Audiencia de Fuengirola is currently pending.

Tamara is conducting a paternity investigation and demanding a DNA test from her father, with or without his consent.

Then what? When is this forgetful old man, who had an affair and impregnated a 19-year-old girl and abandoned her and even left his own legal family behind to start a new life with a much younger woman, is he legally declared his wife? father? So what?

“The first thing I would ask is: how dare you?”

“I feel like I have a 100% right to know who my biological father is, not because I would be proud to have him as a father, let’s get this straight.

And then there is another reason. A deeper reason even than having a court legally force the man to acknowledge the daughter he had always denied.

“I always took care of my mother or her affairs on her behalf. So I see this as my last business word regarding my mother.”