{ "item_title" : "Untouchable", "item_author" : [" Richard Convery "], "item_description" : "RUN, NAGGYA, RUN At five years old, Naggya has already learned to run, and to run fast. In a makeshift hut on the poorest land outside a village in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, his father Arud drinks through the day and most of the night. When the money runs out, he comes home to take whatever his wife has managed to hide. One morning, in the haze of first light, Naggya and his mother Punea flee toward the jungle. Punea does not survive. The funeral is short, the grave is unmarked, and a five-year-old boy understands that he has become the latest orphan with nowhere to turn.A CHILD ALONEFor days and long, lonely nights Naggya wanders in search of the only relative he has ever met, a woman he knows only as Aunty. He hides from the police, sleeps beneath rice husks, and is chased off by a shepherd. Starving and exhausted, he silently repeats his mother's words: Son, you must be strong. When his aunt Rastard finally spots him at the edge of the fields, she hides him from the landowner and takes him to her single-room hovel. But Rastard is a childless widow, she is sick, and she knows the women beside her in the fields would take her place in a moment. She cannot find the words to tell Naggya what has happened to his mother, and she cannot see how she will ever raise him.ONE CHILD AT A TIMENot far away, a young Dalit named Elijah has abandoned the philosophies he once preached at university. A single encounter with a homeless six-year-old orphan seared his heart, and under the veranda of his parents' two-room mud house he began Son-Shine, a refuge and school for children nobody else will take. In the face of letters of demand, threats of closure, corruption, and the ever-present risk of violence, Son-Shine keeps growing. Now a shiny yellow school bus, the dying wish of a sixteen-year-old girl named Kristen, is bumping along a monsoon-washed road into the village where Naggya is hiding.INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTSUntouchable is a work of fiction, yet much of it is drawn directly from the life-and-death experiences of Elisha, the founder of the Son-Shine orphanage and school, whom the author first met in 2009 and relied on throughout years of research. The result is a window into the daily lives of India's Dalits, the people who fall outside the four main categories of the traditional caste hierarchy and are considered untouchable.INSIDE THESE PAGES- The world of a Dalit child in rural Andhra Pradesh, told through a boy's eyes- The hardship, discrimination, and inhumane treatment faced by the lowest caste- The courage of a dying aunt and the compassion of a young man who would not turn children away- A story of pain and suffering, and of triumph and hope against all oddsHere is the boy who learned to run before he turned five, the aunt who hid him from the landowner while hiding her own illness, and the young man who decided to start a revolution not to the masses, but merely to one. Their lives meet in a village where the monsoon has washed out the road, where a stranger in clean clothes steps off a shiny yellow bus and smiles at a starving little boy.For readers of literary and inspirational fiction who want to understand the human cost of caste, and for anyone moved by stories of faith, rescue, and the difference one person can make, Untouchable: From Beatings to Broadway is a journey you will not forget.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/95/830/481/1958304816_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "31.99", "online_price" : "31.99", "our_price" : "31.99", "club_price" : "31.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details