Maryanne and David McFarland could barely contain their excitement as they waited at the Salt Lake City International Airport for an orphanage attorney to hand them an infant girl swaddled in a pink blanket.

"Here's your daughter," he said.

Their first thought: She looks different from the picture.

And the baby was different.

She was supposed to be me.

Just as they turned to walk away, the owner of the orphanage saw the mistake.

"You have the wrong baby," she said, swiftly transferring me from another couple's arms into those of my adoptive parents.

A simple, but ultimately life-altering act.

Moments such as this have shaped my life and have led me back to Salt Lake International, where I will leave from today for the southern Indian city of my birth and the orphanage where I spent my first six weeks of life.

I'm returning to see how my life could have been if the young girl who gave birth to me had made a different decision. She could have aborted me. She could have committed the then-common practice of infanticide. She could have abandoned me to the streets.

Instead, her family happened to know the owner of an orphanage, so I was one of the lucky babies who survived.

My parents already had been told they would get another little girl, but she died in the orphanage. I was the replacement.

When my parents received the phone call telling them about me, Sheena Easton happened to be playing in the background. The debate about whether to name me Erin or Arlene ended with the last note of "For Your Eyes Only."

My parents had only a couple of hours to straighten the baby room, mix up some formula and pick up baby Sheena, their first child.

I had a relatively normal childhood, one in which India rarely figured. My adoption agency held Indian parties, but I was too young to recognize any personal or cultural relevance. And I hated the food.

That changed as I grew older, as did my fascination with my home country.

During my sophomore year at the University of Utah, I enrolled in a semester's worth of classes all about India that culminated in a three-week trip to the north of the country. We met with government officials, helped build a school in a small town and played tourist.

It was during that trip that I finally realized how one stranger's decision had drastically changed my life. I will forever regret my actions when I encountered a young Indian girl on the streets of New Delhi, begging for a few rupees, her 6-year-old voice drained of emotion because she was so hungry. I shunned her and instead walked into a Pizza Hut for dinner.

That precise moment helped me realize that instead of sitting down with my classmates and teachers to enjoy thoroughly American food in a restaurant, I could have been that little girl, belly swollen from hunger, begging for help. I had reacted callously because I was so thrown into shock by the possibility that I could have lived a completely different life.

I cried for a week straight in India because every time I had a moment to stop and think, I was overwhelmed by guilt, knowing that the life I knew might never have existed.

I was working for my school newspaper at the time, and I wrote columns about my trip, chronicling the culture shock, moroseness and joy I felt while I toured northern India.

Four years later, those columns led to this opportunity.

An Indian adoptee from South Carolina found the columns online and contacted me. She has been tracking down Indian adoptees across the country. Six months later, I found myself in a room with the International Adoptee Congress, spending three intense days conversing, planning and brainstorming.

I left that conference with the goal of sharing the parts of my story I already knew, and filling in the holes.

I will walk the streets my birth mother paced and visit the orphanage I was born in. I will see the life I could have led if chance hadn't had its way with me.

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* SHEENA MCFARLAND can be contacted at smcfarland@ sltrib.com or 801-257-8619. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.