Avtar Singh grew up in Amritsar hearing rumors that the woman raising him wasn’t his mother. He ignored them. “I thought, the neighbours are just making up stories,” he told The Guardian. They were true. His father had emigrated to Canada to teach, leaving Avtar with his grandparents. His grandmother raised him and called him Titu.

Just after his ninth birthday, he was flown to Canada alone, in a three-piece suit, speaking no English. He soon learned the language and blended in at school. At home, he was an afterthought. When he was 14, the family went on vacation and left him behind for two weeks. “She didn’t have any of the warmth that my grandma had,” he said of the woman he thought was his mother. “She absolutely hated me.”

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Years later, while visiting Avtar and his wife Rosey, his grandmother whispered to Rosey that Avtar was his father’s son from a first marriage. Avtar got a first name from his father and nothing else: Savinder. “I was stonewalled.”

Then, Rosey’s antenatal tests came back with anomalies. A geneticist asked about family medical history, but Avtar couldn’t........

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