"Attention shoppers! We have a lost mommy in the store!" Few fears bring greater dread to a parent's heart than to be in a crowded place, twist around and realize that their son or daughter-the child who was right behind them-has vanished.
Every parent has felt the terror, even if it was only for a second. Now imagine the fear stretching into an hour, a day, a week-a year. For Arayi Gounder, the worry lasted nearly two decades.
If you presume this is a depressing story, too close to home for any parent to continue reading, you'd be wrong. Instead it's a story of persistence, determination and hope. It started in 1978, in Erode, India, where the youngest son of Arayi Gounder, a boy of seven named Chellamuthu, was kidnapped from the streets, driven three hours away in a van with other stolen children, and sold to a Christian orphanage. Weeks later, he was sent by the orphanage to an unknowing couple in the United States, adopted by a family who couldn't understand a word he was speaking, who had no idea he had a frantic mother nearly nine thousand miles away. It took months before the boy learned enough English to tell his parents he wasn't an orphan, that he already had a family, but by then it was too late. Countless letters, phone calls, and attempts to track down his family failed. In the end, there was nothing they could do but love him-but for Taj it wasn't the end.
He went to school, played sports, earned his Eagle Scout. He served as student body president, dated pretty blond girls, and was well liked by everyone he met-and yet questions always pestered. "Who am I? How exactly did I end up here? Will I ever make it back to India? Will I find my family, my first home?"
What Taj couldn't know was that back in India, his mother had never given up searching, hoping, praying-and life has a funny way of listening to the silent pleadings of a worried mother, even when her child has been carried half-a-world away. When the time was right, circumstances began to fall into place (events that some would later call miracles).
Taj decided to serve a mission for his church. He was sent to London where large communities of Indians make the city home. At first Taj was nervous, but soon his interactions spurred dusty and forgotten memories. He likened the experience to his brain switching channels, showing him tiny flashes of a life he'd spent years trying to forget. Enough memories surfaced that he even scribbled a crude map of landmarks from his hometown-a river, a park, the huts where his family lived.
After he returned from London, he enrolled at the local university. He'd been raised in a predominantly white community, where he couldn't remember meeting another Indian. Imagine his surprise when a new restaurant opened below his mother's office-an Indian restaurant.
The owner's sister, Priya, was stunning and Taj was smitten. When he brought her home to meet his parents, his mother pulled out some of the old letters she'd received from India years early, when trying to find Taj's family. Imagine everyone's surprise when Priya unfolded one of the letters and recognized the handwriting-it had been written by her father, a man who'd been friends with the orphanage owner in India years earlier.
Against her family's wishes, the young couple married. A year later, when Priya's brother in India announced his wedding, Taj found himself on a plane, holding his map, finally returning to the country that seemed to be calling him home. While he longed to find his family on the trip, there were problems: he had one week, few clues and a country of a billion people waiting. Unbeknownst to him, however, his faithful Indian mother continued pleading, wishing, tugging him closer, across time and from half a world away.
When Taj found the orphanage abandoned, he knocked doors. When other leads dried up, he hired a taxi to ride around in circles, city after city, looking for anything familiar. On the last day, at the last minute, when it appeared he'd be heading home in failure, the familiar sound of an old man hacking coconuts connected dots in his head.
It was late afternoon when Arayi went to bathe in the river, a religious ritual where she would plead once again to the gods to bring her son home-only this time her bath was interrupted by her daughter-in-law's cries. "There are men here asking for you, men from America. They bring news of Chellamuthu!"
Not quite twenty years after a boy went missing off the streets of India, were a mother's pleas finally answered. It was a reunion that was glorious and beautiful, evidence to the fact that amidst all the world's noise and problems, a mother's whispered prayers can still be heard. Arayi never gave up hope-and her son finally came home.
Camron Wright is the award-winning author of Letters for Emily, which was a Readers Choice award winner, as well as a selection of the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. His most recent book, The Rent Collector, won Book of the Year, Fiction, from ForeWord Reviews; Best Novel of the Year from the Whitney Awards; and was a nominee for the prestigious 2014 International DUBLIN Literary Award.
Connect with Camron Wright on Twitter and at web. The Orphan Keeper [Shadow Mountain Publishing] will be available via Amazon and through other major and independent booksellers nationwide as of September 6, 2016.
