The Orphan Keeper

by Camron Wright

  But would it work for Chellamuthu?

  Fred repeated the new name slowly, so his son would understand.

  Taj Khyber Rowland.

  It should be like asking an American boy if he’d want to change his name to John Wayne, Elvis Presley, or Nick Fury. What was not to like?

  Would Chellamuthu agree?

  Everyone faced the boy and waited.

  Chellamuthu needed time to think. He didn’t need to speak English to know that his start in America had been rough. Children at school laughed when he spoke, some sneered, and he hadn’t seen another dark-skinned kid since landing.

  He looked around at the faces of his new family. If he couldn’t understand their words, how would he ever grasp their culture?

  Do they really eat peanut butter because they like it?

  He wanted to fit in here in this strange new place, but would changing his name make a difference?

  It wasn’t until Fred took the large world-globe down from on top of the cabinet in the family room and set it in the middle of the kitchen table that his predicament began to sink in.

  “Here,” Fred said, motioning to the room around them and then to a miniscule spot on the globe in the western United States, perhaps hoping his son would comprehend the correlation.

  Fred then spun the globe all the way around to the opposite side.

  “India,” he said, as he tapped a finger to the map.

  Chellamuthu grabbed the globe and twisted it around to find the two spots again—United States, India. India wasn’t just far away, it was on the opposite side of the cursed world! The only way he could get farther away from home would be if they packed him into a rocket ship and shot him out into space.

  He twirled the globe around a third time, using his fingers to measure the length of the separating ocean with his fingers.

  Too far to walk.

  Too far to drive.

  Too far to swim.

  The impenetrable stone fence around the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children had been daunting. The deep ocean barrier surrounding every shore of America was impossible.

  Fred’s clamoring object lesson rang clear: America didn’t need a fence. Chellamuthu was never going home.

  Bam, bam, bam.

  In his dream, Eli was once again carrying bricks as a child, working at the factory where he’d been enslaved. This time it was different. Instead of being beaten across his back with a switch, Eli wielded a hammer and was breaking apart the bricks as fast as they could be cast.

  Bam, bam, bam.

  At first he was alone, smashing the bricks with impunity, singlehandedly. Then, other children began to appear, each carrying their own hammer.

  Bam, bam, bam.

  “MR. ELI! We have a problem. Sir! Wake up!”

  Rajamani, panting and wide-eyed, was shaking Eli awake at his desk where he’d fallen asleep.

  “There are policemen at the front gate. They are with a man from the American consulate. They insist on an inspection.”

  Eli blinked, rubbed at his eyelids, commanded they open. “An inspection? Of what?”

  “The Lincoln Home!”

  He straightened. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I told them I’d get a key to let them in. Then I came to wake you.”

  Bam, bam, bam.

  Adrenaline pulsed. “That’s good. Thank you, Rajamani.” He jerked open a drawer on his desk, rummaged inside. “Is Maneesh here?” he asked, his terror rising.

  Rajamani waited. “No, sir. I haven’t seen him in a few days.”

  Eli pulled a key from the clutter in the drawer. He pried open Rajamani’s fingers and placed it in the center of his palm.

  “Take this and unlock the back door in the room where the children sleep. Gather the children—not the babies, just those who can speak. I’ll open the front gate for the inspectors to let them in.”

  Rajamani was confused. “Gather the children? What should I tell them?”

  Bam, bam, bam.

  Eli’s panic was now in full view.

  “Open the door . . . and then tell them to RUN!”

  Chapter 20

  When Chellamuthu walked in from wrestling practice, Linda already had dinner on the table. After the family had finished eating, she pointed toward his room. “You need to clean your room and make your bed.”

  When Chellamuthu didn’t understand his new mother—which was most of the time—he had two choices: shrug in ignorance, which caused her to repeat what she’d said, each time louder, as if the problem were his hearing; or nod with enthusiasm, giving her the impression he’d understood her English to perfection.

  Each option had its advantages. While the latter was preferred, the long-term consequences were unpredictable. Tonight, he was too tired to play the game. He shook his head back and forth, hoping she’d go away.

  No such luck. Linda repeated her command with more volume than expected.

  Chellamuthu met her volume with more rigorous head wagging.

  Linda, obviously exhausted from her day’s work, signaled for Rux to take Chellamuthu by the hand and show him what to do.

  No hand-holding was necessary. Chellamuthu stood and followed Rux into their room. There, waiting for them on top of their bare mattresses was a stack of freshly washed sheets.

  Chellamuthu’s mouth ripped open. He shoved Rux aside and rushed to the bed.

  “No. No! NO!” he shouted in English, as he tore apart the pile of linens. When he found nothing, he raised the mattress with two hands and scoured beneath.

  He had already learned that hiding food wasn’t necessary, that it annoyed his mother when she found it. But he’d never told her about the picture he’d drawn of his family.

  Everyone holds secrets that need protecting.

  Chellamuthu had received a flashlight for Christmas, and on occasion, after Rux had gone to sleep, he would pull out his drawing from beneath the mattress and shine the light across familiar faces.

  Last night, he was too cold to climb out of bed, and so he placed his carefully folded picture between the sheets at the foot of his bed, promising himself to put it back under the mattress in the morning.

  He’d forgotten.

  Now, shaking the uncaring sheets like a wolf might shake a rabbit, he was screaming phrases in Tamil that no one in the room—or likely the city—could understand.

  Enga! Enga!

  What had she done with his picture?

  Linda dashed in, at first confused by the fevered scene, until a vague notion of her potential wrongdoing soon gelled. Her chin lowered. Her eyes squinted. Her guilt-ridden face flushed with fear. She motioned for her son to follow her.

  They trekked together to the laundry room for a joint investigation of the crime scene. When she lifted the lid of the washer, both peered inside.

  What they saw wasn’t blood, but it might as well have been.

  On the inside of the drum were four small scraps of limp and tattered paper clinging to the side for dear life—but there was no life left in them. Each was about the size of a mangled thumb, with the faint remains of lost lines that nobody, including Chellamuthu, could make out.

  He carefully peeled the scraps away from the drum, cuddled them in his hand, and trudged silently back to his room, where he laid them like wounded soldiers on his desk. He tried to reassemble them, but the ragged pieces were no longer breathing. The largest was possibly the top of Selvaraj’s shoulder, the smallest was Anu’s little face. The remaining two were nothing but smudged strokes, muddied color, and faded scribbles of unidentifiable family.

  Once again, everything was lost.

  Linda repeated her apology, somberly made his bed, and then slunk from the room. When she returned twenty minutes later—always the problem solver—she carried colored pencils, sheets of paper, and m
isplaced hope. She doodled with a pencil in midair, miming that he could sit down and resurrect his lost masterpiece.

  He took the pencil and touched its colored tip to paper, but he couldn’t form the words—in Tamil or otherwise—to explain why the task was now impossible.

  When he’d first drawn his picture with all of his aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives peppered into the background, he’d left one off. It was true he had seven uncles on his mother’s side—but he’d once had eight.

  The missing man had moved with his family to the village of Nadipudi, near the Bay of Bengal, when Chellamuthu was just three. The uncle and his family had come back to Erode once since their move, on their way to perform a Yatra, and had made plans to visit again—until a cyclone hit. The vicious storm had attacked the region of Nadipudi with such fury that, within minutes, swollen, debris-laden waters had crested over their village and wiped it clean away, like a woman might casually wipe spilled tea from a table. No trace of his uncle or the family had ever been found.

  Chellamuthu hadn’t included his uncle in the drawing because he couldn’t remember what the man looked like.

  The problem had now spread.

  When Linda held out a second sheet of well-intentioned paper, Chellamuthu knocked it away. He couldn’t draw his family again because he was having problems remembering their features. His memories, like his paper in the washing machine, were churned, torn, and dying.

  The picture had been serving as his anchor, helping him cling to India—albeit precariously—by connecting him to his past. With his last thread now frayed, broken, and dangling, his own untethered existence would also soon wash away and drown.

  It would be as if his family had never existed.

  The house was still when Chellamuthu slid out of bed.

  Fred and Linda had been teaching him to pray, and while it felt awkward without a shrine, tonight he was making an effort.

  He ground his teeth, set his jaw, struggled to form the words.

  Lord Shiva . . .

  He coughed as the sounds stuck in his throat.

  What was the point? His family didn’t know he’d been kidnapped. Even if they did, he was half a world away. They could never afford to come and get him.

  The truth hissed in his ear like a snake.

  Shiva can’t do anything.

  Chellamuthu stood without finishing. At the desk he picked up the remaining scabs of paper and with fingernails tearing like fangs, he shredded them into bits of negligible scraps. He pinched them between his fingers and flicked the wad into the garbage.

  A storm was swelling. A wave that had been rising off-shore was cresting now toward the room—it was coming for him.

  He didn’t care. He wouldn’t swim. He wouldn’t gasp for air.

  Chellamuthu was done fighting, paddling, remembering, trying.

  He wiped at the tears dripping down his face and then climbed into his box-shaped bed. Loneliness draped her spindly fingers around his neck and squeezed as Chellamuthu released a final breath.

  But the grip loosened.

  In the shadowed and shivering room, the boy coughed softly and then reached forward to pull the blanket over his head as if he were folding closed the flaps on a cardboard box.

  With his face covered, Taj Khyber Rowland drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 21

  1990, Ten Years Later

  Taj stared into the trophy case that guarded the school’s main auditorium. It was a rare quiet moment, because when the bell rang in exactly three minutes, organized chaos would settle in with shoving students trying to be first inside.

  The spot where Taj stood would get especially crowded. The senior class photo had just been posted and every let’s-talk-about-me student in the school would be trying to find himself or herself in the picture.

  For Taj it was easy.

  Of the nine hundred and thirty-one students in the Mountain View High School Senior Class of 1990, all were white but one—a single black sheep in a very white flock.

  That wasn’t what perplexed him.

  As he leaned close to the glass, a voice behind him began to sing.

  “One of these things is not like the other . . .”

  Taj didn’t need to turn around. The gravelly vocals of his best friend, Rod Lewis, flung their arms around Taj and held him tight—like always.

  Rod pushed in beside Taj, squished his nose up against the case, and let his gaze rake back and forth across the photo. “Where are you again?” he asked, pretending to swoon.

  He was a kid who valued one-liners, and Taj loved him for it.

  Rod didn’t wait. “There you are—front row, surrounded by cheerleaders. Honestly, when I die, I want to be you!”

  “Is there something strange about this picture?” Taj asked, ignoring the praise. “Besides the fact that I’m dark?”

  Rod’s eyes billowed. The world was his stage. “You’re DARK?”

  “Do you have a serious bone in your body?”

  “My mandible is serious most of the time.”

  “That’s not even a real bone.”

  “You should have listened in anatomy.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Taj insisted. “There’s something odd that I can’t figure out.”

  Rod didn’t need a second look. “You’re standing between two hot, happy, delicious cheerleaders—what adjectives did I miss?—and both girls love you. You’re wearing a varsity letter jacket—swimming and wrestling. You’re the student body president, the most popular kid in school, with an amazing best friend. And you’ve moved out—against your parents’ wishes and while still in high school—and are living in your own apartment with college kids.”

  Rod slammed his head to Taj’s chest. “I love you, man!”

  Taj bumped him away. “I’m serious.”

  “Dude! Look at the picture! The only thing odd is your face. You look like someone just shot your dog. You’re the saddest king of the world I’ve ever seen.”

  Only Taj’s mouth moved. “I don’t have a dog.”

  Rod was losing patience.

  Taj continued. “Is Lily dating me because I’m a novelty?”

  “Novelty?”

  “The only Indian in four counties.”

  “Indian? Taj, you’re as American as Twinkies—chocolate Twinkies, but Twinkies nonetheless. I can’t speak for Lily, but . . .”

  “I can speak for Lily!” A petite blonde pushed her way between them. Her engaging eyes wore little makeup, didn’t need it.

  “You guys talking about me? Don’t stop.”

  She tossed them a teasing smile, let it dangle. Lily could land about any boy in the school, but she had chosen Taj. She already had her arm around him, pulling him close.

  “Yes, we are!” exclaimed Rod, not wanting to waste the question. “I say you’re smarter than you are beautiful, but Taj disagrees. What do you think?”

  Rrrrrrring. Rrrrrrring.

  Doors burst open. Students filled the hall. Taj, Lily and Rod filed into the auditorium and took their usual seats on the front row. Once the student body was settled, the principal stepped to the mic.

  “Thank you all for coming. To introduce the assembly, please welcome your student body president, Taj Rowland.”

  The walls in the guidance counselor’s office were drab, dim—weary. Bill Baker, the counselor who had called Taj out of class, sat at his desk as he gestured toward the boy to take the waiting chair. For Taj, the surroundings were fitting, since he would have described the man as ordinary—height, weight, hair color, personality. Taj wouldn’t have been half surprised to glance at the man’s family photo and find 2.3 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog barking back. At least the guy had a sense of humor.

  “Taj, thanks for coming. Have a seat. Give me a second.” Baker flipped opened a file folder
.

  Taj sat, stretched, leaned back. When he lifted his feet toward the desktop, Baker raised his head. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Taj swiveled. “I have swimming practice, so coach wondered if we can make this quick?”

  “You’re right,” the counselor answered dryly, as his eyes let go of the paper. He leaned forward. “This is only about your future. Let’s get through this right away, so you can get back to something more important, shall we?”

  It was hard not to appreciate the man’s sarcasm. Taj leaned in to meet him. “Fine. What do we need to talk about?”

  Baker picked up the top paper. His lips flattened as he studied the figures. “You’re on schedule to graduate, but your grades are slipping. Is there a problem?”

  When the man’s eyes lifted, Taj was ready. “Did you ever have parents?”

  Baker didn’t crack a smile. He’d heard them all.

  “Parents—yes, I have parents.”

  “Unless you’re too old, you’ll remember they can be difficult.”

  “I’m thirty-two.”

  Taj was nodding with his entire body. “My point.”

  “Parents are parents. We all deal with them.” Baker said. “Speaking of which, I understand you’re no longer living at home, that you moved out a month or two ago. How’s that working out?”

  “Who told you? My dad?” The pitch in Taj’s voice shifted.

  “We do work at the same school. Let’s just say it came up.”

  A shrug from Taj insisted he wasn’t concerned. His nervous hands claimed otherwise.

  Baker continued. “Are your jobs going well? You’re working two of them now to pay for your apartment—right?”

  “Is there anything you don’t know, oh Great One?”

  “I know that you haven’t applied to any colleges yet. You better have a good reason.” It was lean-forward time.

  “That must be tiring.” Taj noted.

  “What’s that?”

  “Being stuck in a job where your only two choices are to lean forward or lean back.”

  It was the first time Baker smiled. “Yes, it is, and for the record, when nobody is watching, I’ll even spin around—but you didn’t answer my question. Is college not in your plans?”