The Other Side of the Moon

By Rajendra Kumar

David, a mine engineer stationed in Kenya, and his wife, Marla, unable to conceive, adopt a black infant and name him Thomas. After coming back to the States, Marla goes through corrective surgery and gives birth to a girl, Kim. Growing together Thomas and Kim fall in love and have sex. When Thomas accidentally learns that his adoptive parents do not really want him, he leaves home and Kim becomes a runaway to be with him. Since Kim is still underage, the young lovers escape to Mexico to evade the law and end up in Barra de Potosi where they are robbed by two gamberros, and their lives are threatened. Escaping from there, with the help of a local boy, they settle in Guadalajara where Thomas is able to find work as a tour guide and Kim kills time as a homemaker. After Kim attains legal adulthood, the lovers decide to go back to the States, but not before expressing their gratitude to the kid in Barra de Potosi to whom they owe their lives. Upon arriving in the village, they find that the kid was killed by the gamberros for helping them and his mother is destitute. They leave what cash they have for the mother and, as they prepare to leave, come face to face with the gamberros who want to punish them for their past escape. This time they are saved by the kid’s mother hurling bricks at the gamberros who are injured and later thrown in jail. After settling in the States, Thomas decides to go to Kenya to find his mother, and Kim decides to go with him. Thomas learns that his mother died missing him. He also discovers the truth about his birth and adoption and that truth makes hims angry at his adoptive parents. Just so he does not get cared away with emotions and does something revengeful which destroys his and Kim’s future, he decides to leave the States. To him, self exile appears to be the only way to safeguard their lives and their forbidden love and so he and Kim settle in Barra de Potosi and adopt as their mother the woman who had saved them from the gamberros.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rajendra Kumar
• Release date: Jun 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311085368

Rajendra Kumar

Rajendra Kumar, a retired psychologist, divides in time between writing, hiking, and traveling. Writing has been a passion with him since age 12. His work reflects unconventional ideas which rattle the cage of tradition. It also makes you feel all kinds of emotions and prods you to think about a variety of issues.

Book preview

The Series:

This series of love stories presents many different ways in which humans express love, the most personal of emotions, and all the varied ways in which they experience its consequences, both sweet and sour.

This Story:

The Other Side of the Moon is a story of forbidden love. Forbidden because the lovers in the story, Thomas and Kim, are underage, and they are brother and sister. Also Thomas is black and adopted while Kim is white and natural born. They escape the clutches of law by going to Mexico where, although robbed and threatened with death, they are saved by a kid, later killed by the robbers. After Kim becomes an adult and the threat of Thomas being treated as a child sexual molester gone, they come back to the States. However, Thomas is restive who wants to find his birth mother and the truth about his adoption. Thomas and Kim travel to Kenya. What Thomas learns makes him want to kill his adoptive father. So as not to get carried away by his emotions which would only destroy his and Kim’s lives, the young lovers self exile themselves to Mexico. There they become adoptive son and daughter of the mother who and whose son had, at different times in the past, saved their lives from the hoods.

To provide the reader with a sample of more of the actual story, most of the front matter appears at the end.

The Smashwords Edition

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON

Rajendra Kumar

Head hung low, eyes fixed at toes, face taut, body rigid, hands clasped in lap, Kim, 15, sat in the client chair in front of me. She was in my office, not by choice. Brought to me by her mother, Marla Hunz. The problem: Running away from home.

Oh shit. I haven’t had any success with juveniles. I haven’t had much success with adults either in spite of the claims by some of them to have felt better after seeing me. What am I going to do with her?

After her mother left, Kim looked at me and said, What are you gonna do with me? She stole my question, smart ass.

Nothing, I answered so as not to acknowledge her shrewdness. After all, therapy is a game of wits.

Aren’t you gonna fix me?

Man, isn’t she sharp?

You need fixing? I countered.

Then why am I here?

You tell me.

You playing games with me? I’m not an idiot. I have been dumped here for an hour. Right? Right. These sessions are an hour long. Right? So what are we going to do for an hour? Fix me? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what you’re getting paid for?

She is right. It means I am in a wrong profession trying to do the impossible, trying to fix other people’s lives. Who the hell has any competency to do that? But I have to make a living through a profession that was ill conceived by my underdeveloped late-teens brain, and so I smile and pretend that I am the right person for the job.

Still, I answer honestly, I don’t fix anyone. So you tell me what you want to do for an hour.

Sometimes honesty is the best way to deal with hostility.

Huh! I have been to two other therapists. No one asked me a question like that.

I’m not an ‘other’ therapist. I said and repeated my earlier question, So you tell me what you want to do for an hour?

Sit here and be bored so that you get your... whatever you charge. But I’m not gonna answer any of your goddamn questions.

I am not going to ask you any questions. I am not even going to talk to you unless you choose to do so. And you don’t have to be bored. There’s TV you can watch, or play video games, or read books, or listen to music, or even dance, sing, or... you choose.

I choose? If my mom finds out, you’ll be fired.

So be it.

It’s not that I don’t care about my job. I guess I have brains enough to figure out that this is a no-go task anyway. Anyone who has been to two therapists isn’t going to last with me for more than a session.

Really?... Man, you are weird, but I like you.

So, what do you want to do?

I don’t know, I’ll think of something.

All right, I’m gonna watch, see what she is up to?

Kim moved over to the couch in front of the TV and sat looking at the blank screen. I watched her curiously.

A few minutes later she got up and took a chair at the desk equipped with a computer. She turned on the computer and started to surf the internet. She even printed a few pages and put them into her purse.

Why here? She could have done this in the privacy of her home. I guess just to pass time. And, what is it she is looking for? I am curious.

About half an hour later she turned toward me and said, Can I talk to you?

A breakthrough without any attempt on my part, a teenager wanting to talk to a therapist. Wanting to? She has opened a channel of communication, better make use of it.

Of course.

She came to sit in front of me and said, "You’re okay, doc. You are not