Closest Companion Teaches Girl a Lesson in Believing

I suspect that even if 9-year-old Diva Anand lives to be 100, she’ll be telling this story. Her eyes will light up as she recalls those unexplainable 10 days from the summer of 1997 when she learned some lessons about life. She’ll begin by telling how she had a special friend for more than half her life, lost that special friend and then . . . well, why not just tell you the story?

One day when Diva and her twin sister Natasha were 4, their mother Jamie Anand took them shopping. She bought Natasha a stuffed-animal dog and Diva got a stuffed-animal cat. Diva named her new friend Blacke and liked him just fine. But it wasn’t until the girls were 5--and preparing for a three-week trip to Europe on which they could take only one toy--that Diva and Blacke became fast friends.

Back home, they did everything together. Blacke sat at the dinner table with Diva. He waited patiently in the bathroom as Diva prepared herself for bed at night. He went to school in Diva’s backpack through kindergarten, first and second grade. He went to soccer practice with her. When Diva was in third grade and couldn’t take Blacke to class with her anymore, either Jamie or her husband, Sanjaya, would make sure Blacke was in the car when they picked up Diva after school. Blacke went with Diva and her family to Canada and India. When Diva went through customs, she’d display Blacke’s special passport that she had made up and the agent would smile and wave both of them on through.

Given that Blacke and Diva had traveled the world, it wasn’t surprising that on June 24 of this year Diva took him to the Ice Palace in Aliso Viejo. Rink management, however, said that Diva couldn’t skate while holding him, so she returned Blacke to the school bus that brought her.

Unfortunately, when a friend’s mother picked up Diva and her friends at the rink to take them to diving class, Diva forgot she had left Blacke in the bus. When Jamie Anand picked up Diva after swimming, she found her in tears.

“She said she left Blacke on the bus,” nand said. “I called the YMCA where kids were Abeing dropped off and picked up, and the director said, ‘No, no one had seen Blacke, and the bus had already left.’ ”

The bus belonged to the Capistrano Valley School District, but Jamie had no luck with the after-hours operator. The next morning, Sanjaya began phoning, with no success. Actually, the news was worse: The bus was found, but Blacke wasn’t aboard.

Diva greeted the news “with sobs, absolute sobs,” Jamie Anand said. She and Sanjaya told her not to give up, but in truth, there wasn’t much to go on.

After dinner that night, Diva called her parents and Natasha downstairs. Diva had perched several other stuffed animals on chairs. A framed picture of Blacke rested on a stool. She proceeded to conduct what amounted to a memorial service, speaking for the animals about how much they missed Blacke.

Her parents had always felt that Diva would grow naturally out of her attachment to Blacke. But now that Blacke had disappeared without warning, Jamie said, “I felt [the service] was something Diva was doing for her own catharsis. I realized that what she was going through was the loss of a friend. After the loss of Blacke, I could definitely see the acute stages of grief going through her.”

Jamie, a former nurse and now project manager at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center, wondered if Diva might need grief counseling.

The next morning, Diva chose a picture of Blacke. Jamie bought a locket and silver chain, “so Diva could carry a picture of Blacke with her. I figured this would be the final chapter.”

It should have been. Every other night or so for the next week, Diva had a small bout with tears. Then, as part of a plan to occupy her mind, the Anands took the girls to Wild Rivers Waterpark in Irvine on the Fourth of July, 10 days after Blacke disappeared.

While Jamie stayed on the sidelines with her 2-year-old daughter, Sanjaya went on rides with the twins and two other girls. After finishing “Chaos,” Sanjaya glanced to his left, over a wrought-iron fence and toward a murky pond. “I saw this black thing lying on the concrete next to the pond,” he said. “I looked at it, I started staring at it. Then, Natasha said, ‘That sort of looks like Blacke.’ ”

It’s too bad what happened next wasn’t caught on film. “She couldn’t believe it,” Sanjaya said of Diva. “She ran to it, grabbed it, clutched it next to her heart. The water in the pond was really dirty. Blacke was greenish with algae; it was smelly, dirty, dripping. I said, ‘Give it to me, let’s wash it,’ and we took it to the showers and had Blacke under running water for 10 minutes or so before we saw clear water running out of it.”

The story has some additional tidbits, such as how Jamie labored to clean Blacke that night. But details like that get in the way of the really amazing stuff, such as the fact that the very next morning Diva was scheduled to leave town for a week of camp at Big Bear.

So, one might logically ask with puzzlement, what were the chances?

Sanjaya says: “I’ve thought about it, and to me it still seems like a miracle. The probability of this happening is so remote. What are the chances it would end up in a different place and we’d be there on that weekend and that we happened to see it before someone else found it and threw it into the trash? I still can’t believe how it happened. I keep telling Diva if you really believe in something, it’ll come true.”

Diva, who took off July 5 for Big Bear with Blacke firmly in tow and returned Saturday, said she remembers looking over the fence and seeing the telltale white patch on his stomach. After that, she remembers climbing the fence to get to Blacke and “hugging him.”

Like Sanjaya, Jamie was overwhelmed by the utter implausibility of finding Blacke. She assumes some other child found him on the bus, took him along for a day, then tossed him next to the pond.

Beyond that, who can say? She only knows that her daughter hadn’t been ready to part with Blacke, and that, for whatever reason, she got a reprieve.

“We miss sight of the fact that small miracles do happen every day,” Jamie said.

The Anand children are raised in a Christian and Hindu household. “Diva’s feeling was that God had taken Blacke and after realizing how Blacke was so sorely missed, He deposited him back in a way that he could reunite with her,” Jamie said.

Someday, Diva Anand may have another take on that. For now, why not?

Blacke will, no doubt, now live out his normal life expectancy. About which, Diva has a thought, first planted in her head by her father and which she then relayed to her mother: “A cat has nine lives,” Diva said. “Blacke only has eight lives left.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.