Into How Many Rugs Are Woven Haunting Histories?

“For 16 hours a day, boys as young as 51/2 hand-knot yarn around a loom’s warp,” the story in the Sunday paper read. “The stare and lash of loom owners bind the children, sold by their parents for $50 apiece, to planks on which they sit in dirt wells. Amarnath, an 8-year-old, said this of his loom owner, ‘For 11/2 years he did not give us green vegetables or milk. He locked us in a room every night. He did not even allow us to have a bath.’”

The accompanying picture showed a group of boys, their shoulders hunched, fists curled crab-like and fingertips shining pink and smooth from tying knots. One of them leaned against a bicycle. His head barely reached the seat.

I slammed down the paper. My sons, 5-year-old Sam and 6-year-old Drew, jerked their heads up from the comics that scattered across the floor. They watched, their eyes wide, as I whipped back a corner of my Indian rug.

Sure enough, tiny knots formed a needlepoint too intricate for any machine to stitch. I ran my hand across its velvety surface. Could my beautiful family heirloom have been hand-knotted by boys who’d been sold by their parents, abused by their owners and physically maimed?

I looked at my sons. A chill snaked up my arm.

In the following months I covered my rug with overstuffed couches, chairs and large coffee tables. I let the California sun shine through our shutters and bleach its beautiful design. When someone complimented its fawning peacocks, blue poppies and bronze amphorae, I would not explain my rug’s history. How could I? I’d see those poor Indian boys from the newspaper story, squatting like grasshoppers and tying square knots with their calloused fingers.

I could see them watching as Drew and Sam uncovered pastel eggs from under the rug’s corners and tore into shiny red and green wrapped bundles that scattered over its silky surface. With eyes sunk into their wizened faces, they looked on as my sons trekked across the rug on their way outside to skateboard. Hungry, sad beyond crying, the Indian boys missed their moms. They would not look me in the eye.

Then recently, while I visited my hometown in central Illinois, my mom said, “Martha, will you go through some boxes of old pictures? You might want to take some back to California with you.”

I sat on the chill concrete of the basement floor, breathed in the bitter smell of aging paper and fingered through stacks of black-and-whites until I came across a photo of two babies, my grandmother Antoinette and my Great-Aunt Dot. Beyond them stood a white-haired man with arms folded across his puffed-out chest. He smiled at his daughters.

My grandmother told me this man, my great “Grandpa Beans,” had been beaten and abandoned by his mother and father. Yet as a young man he’d opened a chain of confectionaries in Indiana, owned one of the first automobiles in the state and furnished his home with the finest furniture, Haviland china, Gorham silver.

The photograph I held was taken in a room that contained some of the antiques in my living room. The Indian rug covered the floor.

And this time when I looked at it, instead of seeing those black-eyed boys with shoulders and hips jutting through stretched, brown skin I saw my grandmother, older than the baby in the photograph. She practiced the piano that sat on the rug and translated her French homework while sprawled across it. I saw her returning home after graduating from IU in 1922 and watched as she and my Grandpa Leo spread it across the floor of their living room.

Then I imagined my mom bopping across the rug in a poodle skirt and my Uncle Tommy striding across it in the black cassock of a young seminarian. I remembered dancing with my sisters on it while Sweet Emma and Preservation Hall played on the stereo, and my grandma pounded along on the piano. I recalled the day she cupped my chin in her hand and said, “Someday, this rug will cover your living-room floor.”

After I got home, I pushed the coffee table off of my Indian rug and shoved the couch onto the hardwood floor. Brushing my hand across the rug’s soft burgundy wool, I thought about my sons taking their first steps across its cloud-like scrolls and tiny minarets. Once again my rug’s beauty emerged. I decided to uncover its origins as well.

I contacted a local rug historian who told me that, indeed, children were involved in my rug’s weaving. But 100 years ago, rug making was a village and tribal trade. I smiled when he said, “The children who wove your rug did so while sitting among their own families.”

But the Web sites Rugmark.org and GlobalMarch.org informed me that in the last 30 years, the demand to purchase Indian rugs at low prices has become so high it has generated increased production. And although India’s child labor laws ban workers younger than 14, boys continue to be sold into the rug-making industry. Sometimes they even vanish from villages, only to be found in factories years later. This year, as Drew and Sam hung shiny globes on our Christmas tree branches high above my reach, the Indian boys watched once again. Somberly they stroked the proud peacocks, and with their pink fingertips, they traced the branches that curl around the urns. One turned back a corner to show me the perfect petite point of knots on the underside.

Then each one caught my eye and disappeared.