‘I thought I was adopted by Mormons, but the truth is that I had been sold’

[2025/8/31] by The Telegraph

It sounds like the closing scene of a Hollywood tear-jerker, but this is real life in the raw. Almost two decades since, as a seven-year-old, he had been snatched away from his mother, the now adult Taj Rowland is standing looking straight at her.

It is what he has wanted every day since kidnappers seized him as he was scavenging for food at the bus station in his home city of Erode in Tamil Nadu, southern India. They then sold him into a chain that saw him end up growing up with overseas adopters in America.

As his mother, Arayi, meets Taj’s gaze, the look of recognition in her eyes is unmistakeable. Yet he cannot quite bring himself to speak to her. Worse, he turns his back and makes a hasty exit.

“I remember that scene as if it was yesterday,” he recalls. It all took place in 1997, on the outskirts of Erode. He was 26. It is one of the pivotal moments in Stop Rewind: The Lost Boy, a new, emotionally charged 10-part podcast documenting his story.

Today, in his early 50s, and running a successful import-export business between India, where he was born, and America, where he grew up, Taj has so far been talking to me fluently about his extraordinary life story, so fluently indeed that there are moments when he could be telling someone else’s dramatic tale rather than his own.

But when it comes to describing the reunion with his birth mother, he suddenly stumbles. “Excuse me for a minute,” he mutters as his eyes tear up and he moves away from the laptop screen in his Indian office that is connecting us.

When he returns, he is back to utterly composed and ready to relive that heart-wrenching day. “I was in Erode asking villagers lots of questions but I kept hitting road block after road block in my search for my birth family.”

It was his Indian business partner, Christopher Raj, who was doing the talking, since Taj had forgotten all his Tamil within a year of two of arriving in America. Finally, they made a breakthrough and were directed to a simple hut with a rough floor, in a poor area of the city. Its occupant – whom he later learnt was his sister-in-law – had gone to fetch his mother.

“I had carefully planned in my mind how I wanted the moment I found my mother to be,” Taj explains. In this scenario, he would have had his Indian wife, Priya, at his side (raised in Tamil Nadu in a middle-class family before emigrating to the US as a young adult, she can speak the language), and she would be able to explain the whole shocking kidnapping saga to his mother.

But on that actual day, Priya was away, at her brother’s extended wedding celebrations two hours away in the city of Coimbatore. It had been travelling together from the States to join that party that had finally given Taj his first opportunity since his kidnapping to go in person to Erode to search out his birth family.

As his mother walked towards him, he says, he just knew it was her. He was pretty sure, too, that she knew it was him.

“It was a brutal moment. I was crying, but I couldn’t have them see I was crying. So I walked away. I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything.”

He found somewhere nearby with Raj to stay overnight, and tried to call Priya to help him disentangle his emotions. And then came what he describes as “the most incredible bit” of the whole story.

“My mother turned up at the door where we were. Now she was the one finding me, though I had been trying to find her. She now was the huntress.”

This time the two of them simply wrapped their arms around one another. “It was a relief. Suddenly here was the resolution of all the hopes I had had from being a young boy through to adulthood. It was just overwhelming.”

‘It was complete fear. I had no control’

Stop Rewind, researched and presented by award-winning former BBC foreign correspondent Emma Jane Kirby, charts the background to that moment, a journey that crosses three continents. And – unlike the 2016 Oscar-nominated film Lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman and telling a roughly similar story of a lost Indian boy and his adoptive mother – it doesn’t stop at the moment of reunion. It goes on to explore the almost 30 years since, during which Taj has struggled to make up for lost time, and to adjust to having not one but two mothers, not one but two families.

The memories he retains of his first seven years are fragmentary: growing up in a low-caste family in poverty, with two brothers and a sister; cooking on an open fire, only intermittently going to school, earning a few coins for helping clean the local sesame oil factory. “I can still recall that smell.”

His father was a violent alcoholic. As a young boy, Taj had watched as he beat his mother.

By the age of seven he was sneaking off with his older brother, Selvaraj, to the local bus station to beg, steal or borrow some scraps of food. On that fateful day in 1979, some older boys befriended him there, gave him snacks and then enticed him on to a bus.

Before he knew it, he was heading away from the only place he knew. He begged to be let off, but the boys delivered him to an orphanage a couple of hours away run by Paul Thiruthuvadoss, one of the first Indians to convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the Mormon church.

Thiruthuvadoss had links with other Mormons in America and arranged overseas adoptions for what he presented as orphan children. The connection was especially strong with Utah, where the legal checks on such arrangements were less onerous than elsewhere.

And it was in Utah, in the city of Orem, that Linda Rowland and her sports coach husband Fred, unable to have children themselves, had already adopted three young boys from domestic agencies but were now wanting a girl to “complete” their family.

Through their own Mormon congregation, they were put in touch with Thiruthuvadoss. “He seemed like a nice guy,” Linda says in the podcast, so nice that he ultimately talked them into adopting a boy who, he assured them, had been orphaned. And was just three years old.

Just before Christmas 1979, Chellamuthu – Taj’s birth name – boarded a plane for America with Thiruthuvadoss and a group of other children. “I didn’t think, ‘Wow, I am on a plane,’” he says. “It was complete fear. I had no control.”

Linda and Fred were there waiting for him at the airport in snow-bound Utah as he emerged wearing shorts, T-shirt and no shoes. “Everyone was looking at us as if we were doing something wrong,” she now remembers thinking, but she firmly believed God wanted her to offer a new life to a child with no one else to look after him.

“I was crying and clinging to Paul,” Taj says. “He was the only thing I knew.”

But now, knowing so much more, how does he regard him?

“Experience does change you and I have now been working in India for 28 years and seen pretty much all there is to see. There is no fairness. It is set up in such a way that the only opportunity you have is to fail.”

So, in his eyes, Thiruthuvadoss (now dead) gave him the opportunity to succeed in life. “In terms of life enjoyment, I am truly happy I ended up in Utah, so I have no ill feeling towards him, even if he may have crossed a few barriers.”

‘The only brown kid in town’

Those first years, though, were gruelling – both for Taj Kyber Rowland, as his new parents named him, picking the only Indian-sounding names they could find in National Geographic magazine, and for Fred and Linda. Even when he learnt to speak English, he just cried and shut them out.

When Linda took him shopping, he would steal things. Even as she poured out love, he refused to engage. Then one day, early on, he told her she wasn’t his mother because already had a mother called Arayi.

“I remember those words burning my insides,” Linda tells Kirby. When she tried to contact Thiruthuvadoss, or his associates, about returning Taj to his birth family – in other words, by her lights, doing the right thing – she was met with a blank wall of evasion and unanswered calls. “We were very guilty. I couldn’t be consoled.”

In desperation, she encouraged Taj to speak in Tamil about his real home on audio cassettes, so as to keep the memories alive for when he was older. She didn’t understand a word of what he laid down on tape.

With any sort of reunion appearing impossible, all of them accepted that they had to make the best out of a bad situation. “I don’t really understand the word ‘trauma’,” says Taj. “In India, I had been a survivor, and in Utah I had to survive. It’s the hierarchy of needs. You’ve got to feed your belly.”

He did more than survive. It may have meant “shutting away” Chellamuthu inside him and never mentioning his past to anyone, but that allowed him to thrive at school, integrate in the church community and – even though he was, as he puts it, “the only brown kid in town” – emerge as head boy.

From her contributions to the podcast (Fred is now dead), it is clear Linda loved Taj. Did he return that love?

“There is a big difference between appreciation and love,” he replies coolly. “I’ve never loved anything except for my wife and my children [he has two grown-up daughters with Priya: Sharmalee and Tayjel]. But I have deep appreciation for my adoptive mother and my adoptive family.”

‘I couldn’t fit in with that apple-pie world’

It wasn’t all plain sailing. To take the heat out of a rising domestic temperature in the Rowland house in his teenage years, one of the elders suggested Taj, then 17, spend two years overseas as a Mormon missionary. He hoped for India but got the East End of London.

It may not have been his first choice, but it proved an epiphany that threw open the box in which he had sealed away Chellamuthu. “Talk about a melting pot, I was mixing with people who looked like me. I felt assimilated very quickly – the sounds, the smells, the clothes, the food. Suddenly I felt Indian.”

And that couldn’t be turned off once back in Utah. “I made a decision I wouldn’t date any more Caucasians. I couldn’t fit in with that apple-pie world ever again.”

In this, in one of the startling twists and turns in his story, he unexpectedly got his way because, while he was away, the first Indian restaurant had opened in Orem and its owner, also from Tamil Nadu and a Mormon convert, was being helped by his younger sister, Priya. “My life changed the moment I saw her. I knew I had to marry her. Without Priya, I don’t know where I would be.”

When he eventually took Priya home to meet Fred and Linda, they showed her old photographs of Taj when he first came to Utah. Buried among the albums were those cassette tapes recorded in his early days.

By now he couldn’t speak a word of Tamil, the language he was speaking on the tapes, but Priya could. As she listened, she started to translate, and the full horror of his kidnapping spilt out. It is the moment that gives the podcast its title.

Rewinding meant Taj now knew – with Priya’s full support – that he had to go back to India to find his family. Her brother’s wedding in Tamil Nadu provided the opportunity.

The emotion of the “happy ending” of finding his lost family, he reports, was soon replaced by practical challenges. “The whole imbalance of the haves and the have-nots kicked in.”

Within a year of that first meeting, he had “saved up a bit of money, came back and moved my mother, my siblings and their children into a bank manager’s villa, with a room for each of them. I bought everything new – tables, chairs, stoves. I even taught them how to brush their teeth”.

If he expected gratitude, he was disappointed. Soon after he headed back to Utah, they moved out. “They were back in the hut.”

It felt like a rejection at the time, but now he sees something bigger at play. “Indian society wouldn’t allow them to jump ahead that fast. They didn’t feel comfortable. They weren’t accepted. That was my mistake, my lack of knowledge.”

With his mother and his siblings, he has learnt over the years that the changes he can help them make are limited to financial matters and, even then, never so much that it will humiliate them. “But the trajectory I knew I could control is how to educate my nieces and nephews, taking them all the way through graduation from college and into a job.”

That, he hopes, will break the generational grip of poverty. “We have a nurse, one who makes microchips, another in business, another doing a PhD in engineering.”

Potentially the hardest thing in rediscovering his family, though, was meeting his father again. “When I disappeared, he was a true drunk, always roaming the streets, never at home, but when I saw him again for the first time, he became a part of the family again and lived at home until he died.”

Again, he gives the impression of holding in emotions. In another of the audio tapes Linda had made, this time when Taj had a decent enough grasp to answer her questions in English, he had suggested that his father had in some way been involved in the kidnapping.

Taj gets irritated when I raise it. “Complete, utter nonsense! My adoptive mother asked a lot of leading questions to a scared little boy. I said things when I didn’t understand English.”

He won’t go any farther, but admits the disagreement cast a cloud over his ongoing relationship with Linda. “I never wanted my adoptive mother ever to come to India. I just didn’t want my two worlds to collide.”

In 2015, however, at Linda’s insistence, Taj “felt obligated” to accompany her and Fred there. The meeting of Linda and Arayi is another of the set pieces in the podcast series.

Linda was standing waiting outside Arayi’s house as Taj’s birth mother walked towards her. She was returning from washing her hair in the river and her eyes were firmly cast down, leaving Linda anticipating she was going to be angry.

The opposite was true, Taj recounts. “She just embraced Linda, showed her appreciation to her for caring for me when she couldn’t. It eased Linda’s soul and she deserved that. She had come to ask my real mother’s forgiveness when she didn’t really have to.”

‘In Utah, I feel I have a costume on’

Today Taj’s home base remains in Utah, but he makes regular trips to India for business and family. When his daughters were of school age, he would take them there for long holidays. Now he and Priya are thinking about moving permanently to Tamil Nadu.

His life, I suggest, must feel like a Venn diagram, two circles of families, one American, one Indian, and with him in the middle where they overlap. He shakes his head.

“I am not the guy in the middle. There is complete and utter separation, purposely done, and in my emotional make-up too. I have no joy on the Western side, but on the Indian side, I look forward to going. I can’t wait to see them again, to sit on the ground and eat on a banana leaf with them.”

And yet, almost 30 years on from finding his mother, Taj still hasn’t relearnt Tamil. It is as if he is maintaining a certain detachment.

“The language I am living is pure unequivocal love that is there [with his birth mother]. When I am in Utah, I feel I have a costume on. In India, I feel I am really myself.”

He is describing himself as two people – Chellamuthu and Taj, separated by that early trauma – who are slowly and painfully becoming one. “I don’t really understand the word ‘trauma’, but generally I am a really closed person who has been dealing with all that happened to me, the raw emotion, in a private domain for a very long time. Now, though, I am getting a little bit closer to who I am.”

It is as close to a happy ending as he can manage.

News from: The Telegraph