The Orphan Keeper Read online

  All photos are courtesy the author and used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Cover title font: PrioriSer © Emigre Font Software.

  © 2016 Three Dreamers, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, ­Shadow ­Mountain®, at ­[email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of ­Shadow ­Mountain.

  Visit us at ShadowMountain.com

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  Library of Congress ­Cataloging-­in-­Publication ­Data

  Names: Wright, Camron Steve, author. | Pliler, David, author.

  Title: The orphan keeper : a novel, based on a true story / Camron Wright with Dave Pliler.

  Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2016] | ©2016

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008709 | ISBN 9781629722245 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kidnapping victims—Fiction. | East Indian Americans—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.R53 O77 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008709

  Printed in the United States of America

  Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, UT

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  also by

  Camron Wright

  The Rent Collector

  Letters for Emily

  To the lost child in all of us, searching for home.

  “The Lord is thy keeper:

  the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.”

  —Psalm 121:5

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Study Guide

  Photo Section

  Prologue

  The car jerks to a stop in front of my home, and two men climb out. One lugs a briefcase, the other a camcorder. When they reach my door, I’m already gripping the knob, waiting for the bell, wondering if I’m ready. Muffled sounds worm their way through the carved maple, but I catch only pieces. It’s enough to know my visitors are discussing the words etched into a granite stone marker that sits near their feet, a request I make of every guest:

  Before entering, please remove your shoes.

  It’s a habit learned from my wife, a custom in India—but there’s more to it. If my journey has taught me anything, it’s that home and family are sacred, to be revered.

  The doorbell chimes. A measured breath skates across my lips and drops away as a sigh. Am I ready? Of course not, but I pull at the door anyway.

  “Gentlemen, welcome.”

  The two men are standing in their stocking feet, holding out their shoes like baby kittens. The men grin, nod, and accept my invitation to step inside. They lay their shoes on the entry rug, and then we walk toward the living room. Their eyes dart, catching everything. They are already making mental notes, questions forming in their eyes.

  “Taj, you have a stunning home!” the man closer to me says. He’s someone I met previously through an acquaintance.

  “What home wouldn’t be,” his friend observes, “adorned with so many elephants?”

  I shrug. He’s right. I have etchings and oils, photographs and figurines, rugs and runners—even the china standing at attention in our hand-carved hutch boasts a circle of tusks around its edges. My most impressive piece, however, has to be the splendid bronze sculpture in the center of my living room—eight noble elephants circling a helpless calf, protecting it from an attacking Bengal tiger.

  My guests pause before moving to a gold-framed map hung on the far wall. It whispers to the less informed that these are Indian elephants watching over my home, not the African variety.

  I nod at two chairs opposite the couch, but before my guests sit, their attention turns to a picture of my family on the table—me, my wife, our two daughters, the oldest finally a teenager.

  I’m at ease in the photo: full faced, dark bristly hair, dentist-white teeth, though one tooth in front drops slightly lower than the one beside it.

  “Terrific family—and you look very . . .” He picks his words carefully. “ . . . athletic.”

  “My wife would say stout,” I joke, “but I’m not about to argue.”

  As I find a place on the couch, I can feel anxious sweat already staining circles into the underarms of my blue cotton shirt.

  They sit across from me. “Did you grow up in Mapleton?”

  It’s a fair question, considering my skin is a near perfect match to my brown leather sofa. Add that to the fact that I’ve chosen to surround myself with the finest décor of India, and it would be reasonable for a stranger to assume that I’d carry the British-laced accent of a man from Mumbai, New Delhi, or Bangalore. But I have no accent at all. I’m as American as they are—as every neighbor on my street.

  “I’ve lived near the Rocky Mountains since I came as a small child,” I say. “We love it here.”

  “Good to know,” the taller one replies, and then curiosity gathers in his brow. “Taj, when you called, you said you’d never told your story in public. That’s pretty remarkable, because it’s a story that’s . . . well, extraordinary.”

  I wipe at the edges of my mouth. It gives me time to collect the right words. I need to be precise; these men are writers. “True, true. Very few people know the details of my life, except my wife, Priya, a sibling or two, and my children.”

  His colleague fastens the camcorder atop an aluminum tripod. He fidgets, focuses, and pushes Record. “Okay, we’re ready,” he announces to the room.

  I twist so my eyes meet the impatient camera now staring back. The man behind it shrugs, as if the first question is obvious. “Why have you kept your story a secret?”

  A simple question. A difficult answer. When I hesitate, he prods. “Are you ready to tell your story because it might inspire others?”

  “NO!”

  It’s an answer that spills out before I can stop it. I take a breath. How do I explain?

  “You’re both writers,” I say. “You take ideas and words and confusing bits of life and weave them together into a captivating story—one that you hope not only ent
ertains but somehow makes sense of the world. Is that right?”

  The man holding his laptop closes the lid. His friend sets down his notepad and pen. A glance crosses between them.

  “Well, isn’t it?” I ask again, my tone more edgy than I intend.

  “That’s the goal,” the writer by the camera admits.

  I lean closer.

  “This will appear selfish, and I don’t mean to sound that way.” I lick my lips and lower my chin. “I’m ready to tell my story, not just because it might help others—which I hope it will—but because it’s time I try to make sense of my past. I hope that by finally talking about all of this, by pulling it out and casting a little light on it . . . my desire is to somehow . . . well, I guess I want to . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m hoping to forgive God.”

  The ticking of the mantel clock is the only sound in the room.

  I straighten, look again at the camera. “Is that thing on?”

  “It is.”

  “Good. Let’s begin.”

  Chapter 1

  Erode, India, 1978

  The city of Erode was like a thousand others that dotted the vast landscape of India. How could it not be, with over half a billion people who called the country home? Erode had hotels and hostels, factories and farms, cement homes and mud huts, hope and despair—and a mischievous boy of almost eight named Chellamuthu.

  Like so many other poor children in India, the boy wore disheveled hair, warm eyes, and a naïve grin. At his age, running around the city without shoes and shirt was still a choice and not an embarrassment. Despite his family’s poverty, he was generally content—except for that constant, itchy feeling of hunger. He would never get used to that.

  “Are you ready?” Chellamuthu whispered, crouching like a hungry tiger beside the park fence.

  His timid cousin Krishna paced the dirt behind him, head bobbing, fingers twitching. “If the guard catches you, he’ll beat you like a sewer rat!”

  “Not if I’m a fast sewer rat.”

  Badri Park in Erode, a short six blocks from Chellamuthu’s home, had been finished a year earlier, and to the children living in its shadow, it was a mystical dream come true, as if they’d awakened to discover that the Taj Mahal had been built next door.

  The day the park opened, before they started to charge admission, Chellamuthu overheard a man say that the design was patterned after children’s playgrounds in America. If that was true, Chellamuthu was ready to stow away that very day.

  At the center of the park was a tall double slide that rolled out from a covered platform like twin metal tongues. While their shiny surfaces could scald a child’s skin, the thrill of plummeting down a slick piece of baking metal on one’s backside was worth the risk of burns. To the east of the slide, secluded by a planted row of trees, stood three sets of spindly swings with spidery red legs cemented securely into the ground. Their soft rubber seats dangled enticingly on steel chains, and though they were at first perplexing to Chellamuthu and his friends, the boys quickly learned, by watching children of the wealthy, the proper way to pump their legs to send the swings higher.

  To the west of the slide was Chellamuthu’s favorite ride: a round, spinning dish with attached bars, all hovering over a soft bed of sand. It was called a Merry-Go-Round, and it was brilliant! Children would gather around it in a circle and push like a stampeding ring of mules, causing the metal platter to spin so furiously that anyone attempting to hang on would be spit into the sand like bad tobacco.

  Dreams on a disk. Exhilarating!

  There was more—each piece with a name as thrilling as the ride itself: Teeter-Totter, Monkey Bars, Jungle Gym.

  Oh, what a wonderful place this America must be!

  The first several weeks the park was open, admission was free for everyone—until they finished the brick and metal fence that surrounded it. The grizzled guard who began demanding rupees at the entrance explained curtly that the fence was there to keep the children inside safe. However, his words, delivered with grunting disdain, made it clear they were now charging a “small” fee solely to keep the poor and undesirables out.

  But scarcity often breeds ingenuity.

  A single child could easily distract the guard at the gate while on the opposite side of the park a multitude of children poured over the fence like roaches. Of course, they would often be discovered, chased, and tossed outside to the cement like rubbish. But even that was exciting, making any day at Badri Park for a poor boy in India a good day.

  “Are you ready, Krishna?”

  Chellamuthu waited for his cousin to divert the guard. But this time it wasn’t so he could break into the park to play. No, today he was here on official business.

  A group of older boys from Kannaian Street had befriended Chellamuthu in town and then stopped him a week later at the bridge at Barrage Road when he was driving the landowner’s cattle across to feed. They had noticed that although Chellamuthu was athletic for his age, he was built with skinny arms. Even though he didn’t yet know the boys’ names, they had offered him three rupees to sneak into the park and see if his hand would fit through the opening of the box where the guard dropped the entrance fees.

  They said it wasn’t stealing, insisting that he take nothing from inside.

  “Just see if you can push your hands through the hole and then tell us how deep you can reach,” they said. “You know, to measure the depth of the box. We have a bet about how many rupees can fit into a box that size.”

  What could be wrong with that?

  Nothing, except his mother’s words had camped in his head, and Chellamuthu couldn’t convince them to leave: “Be honest, good son, be kind. You must, if you ever hope to see the end of your suffering and attain moksha.”

  Moksha, a state of liberation where one could finally be free from the struggles of life and the cycle of reincarnation. He was sick of the grubby word.

  But if there was a battle in his head as to what he should do, his resistance was so quickly pummeled that it never stood a chance. Now, as he crouched outside the park, the older boys had come into sight, and he was already supposed to be inside. He shoved Krishna toward the guard and then scurried to the opposite fence.

  The job would be quick. He would never get caught. He’d earn an easy three rupees.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  The family home was fashioned out of poles, mud, and mountains of woolly mammoth-type thatch that smothered the roof and walls—standard construction for the Indian poor. But it wasn’t a lonely structure. It stood as one of eighteen similar huts, looking like a lost herd of hairy animals who had lined up in two scattered rows to rest for the night.

  At the head of their ranks, indeed, towering over them, was the only hairless building of the bunch: a modern, two-story cement home with an ornate teak door, edged on three sides by a halo of sculpted brass, standing proudly atop a rise of peppered granite steps. The structure was imperial white with a hint of rose, more stately than proud, standing in stark contrast to the humble huts it watched over.

  It was the home of Mrs. Papathi Iyer, the landowner.

  She was a woman in her mid-forties, with flowing black hair, flawless teeth, and a squeaky voice. Every high-pitched sound spilling from her mouth was bursting with excitement and wonder.

  In place of the customary crimson dot that most Hindu women placed on their forehead, Papathi wore a delicate ruby jewel. But it wasn’t her hair or her jewel or her voice that Chellamuthu found so pleasing; it was her kindness. In spite of her privileged upbringing, or perhaps because of it, she was caring to all of the children, no matter their situation or caste.

  She had a husband, but he was seen only on rare occasions. He ran a business in Bangalore and was content to let his wife manage matters in Erode. Though she could have directed their affairs from the upstai
rs, looking out over her tenants in the dirt below, she preferred to sit by the front door where she could fish for children who might wander close.

  “Chellamuthu! Come here, little one!” she called out, waving him over with eager arms.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I want you to listen to the sounds around you and tell me what you hear.”

  The boy glanced behind him to see if any of his friends or cousins were watching. He didn’t want them to make fun of him later. A kid had to be careful. Then again, she would often pay him and his older brother a handful of rupees to drive her cattle from the nearby corral to the banana groves across the bridge to feed. Did he really care what anyone else might think?

  “Buses. I can hear buses,” he answered. That wasn’t surprising. The parcel of ground sat northwest of the city center, pushing up against development on one side and the Kaveri River on the other.

  “What else?” she asked.

  All right, so it wasn’t the sound of buses.

  He turned his head and closed his eyes to focus more intently. “I can hear your cattle grunting.”

  “Anything else?”

  He tried again. “I hear Banerjee chopping coconuts with his machete.”

  “Good, good. How do you know it’s Banerjee?” she asked.

  “He’s always the one chopping coconuts.”

  Chellamuthu was right. Banerjee was a wrinkled old North Indian man with few teeth, a stout right arm, and two missing fingers on his left hand. He would start early every morning, cutting open coconut husks, harvesting the meat, then stacking the discarded shells into a clumsy wooden cart.

  “What does it sound like?” she asked, with her grinning lips and soprano voice.

  Chellamuthu imitated what he heard. “Whack, whack, whack . . . whack, whack, whack.”

  “Do you know why he is always chopping coconuts?”

  Chellamuthu shrugged. “He sells them, I guess.”

  She shook her head. “No. Banerjee is helping his son, who makes coconut oil from the meat, rope from the outer husk, and charcoal from the shells. The neighbors complain that Banerjee chops for too long and too loud, that all they hear is his incessant chopping.” Her excited words practically skipped out from behind her teeth. “In truth, he is serving family. What you hear, Chellamuthu—the hacking of his machete against the coconut husk—is the sound of dharma. He is performing his duty because his dharma is to serve, and that makes it . . . beautiful. Do you understand?”