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 misplaced 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.