The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  Here, most of the old people ate rice puddings and drank soup with trembling spoons and nearly dead lips. There was a telephone nearby and mostly black men would come in to make calls, waving their arms and sometimes glancing at me surrounded by old-timers. Maybe they were wondering what I was doing there with all these people with brown spots on their pink faces. I pretended I was staring at the faded wall pictures of men with hockey costumes and sticks and masks posing like comic book warriors, or at the old clock that was stuck at three o’clock. Every evening a moleman came in and he too would gaze at the clock as he sipped his coffee. This moleman was neither white, black nor brown and I put him down as a cocopanyol, a mixture of everything. A few times I thought I should go over and talk with him but he was always concentrating so hard on the clock that I felt he might be mad. Sometimes when I glanced at the orangeish girl with her nice jewellery I would wonder how she might decorate the place if she was allowed to. It might be yellow and pink and orange instead of plain cream colour. She might have a picture of her father and mother smiling with each other just above the counter.

  Twice a week, I would head for the food bank. My father, when he was around, never asked where the food had come from and I never bothered explaining. Maybe he felt I had bought it with Uncle Boysie’s money but one night he asked me, “You working as yet?” and when I said I wasn’t he added, “I see,” in his mocking voice. A couple days later he asked where I disappeared to every evening and I remained quiet because the coffee shop was my own little secret.

  Although the old-timers never talked with me, just being around the same familiar faces every day removed some of my loneliness. But one day, one of the group, a man of about sixty with a big head, which looked like that of Christopher Plummer from The Sound of Music, said something to me in a strange language. He had never spoken with me before and I felt it was to show off to the pretty oldish lady at his side. I had never seen her there before and now the Christopher Plummer man was in a happy mood, laughing and waving around his hands as he spoke.

  From then on, she was with him every evening. He began to seem slightly out of place in the gloomy group, but he would wave to me and he would say, “Yaksha mash,” or “Ko-me-chi-wa.” Though I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, his friendliness told me these were greetings of some sort, and I returned them in the Trinidadian fashion by nodding my head quickly, once. And the small pretty lady would pull at his sleeve and tell him that some day he would get into trouble for striking up conversations with perfect strangers. But she always said this loudly and with a mischievous smile, as if she was enjoying my confusion.

  Soon, the Christopher Plummer man began dressing like a saga boy, with burgundy and navy blue coats and brown leather jackets and medallions around his neck, maybe to match the lady who favoured these light green and yellowish pants. They seemed so different from all the old people I had ever known, not only because of their stylish clothing but also in the way they held hands and seemed not to have a single worry in the world. Sometimes I would play my old game and place them in a Trinidadian setting and I would imagine everyone staring and mauvais-languing this grandparent couple for carrying on like carefree teenagers. Me, I was just happy to bounce up a happy face every now and again, especially after the sourness in my father’s apartment.

  “So where are you from?” he asked about a week after the nice-looking lady showed up. I think this was the first English statement he made to me but before I could answer, he looked at the lady and added, “Wait a minute, let me guess.” She glanced from him to me, smiling. “India?”

  “No.”

  “Iran?”

  I shook my head and felt some of my shyness stripping off with this game of his. I was surprised that the other old-timers just continued staring at the Sunshine Girls in the newspapers. In Trinidad, they would have joined in the game even if they didn’t understand what was going on.

  “Are you sure? I had a friend from Iran who looked exactly like you. Could it be Pakistan or Afghanistan?”

  “Trinidad,” I told him.

  “I was wrong by just a few thousand miles, dear,” he told the lady. “And I think I know why. He’s never spoken to us. Why don’t you say something for us in Trinidadianese.” The lady whispered into his ear and he asked me, “Is bashfulness a Trinidadian trait?” I didn’t tell him that over there, bashfulness was viewed as a kind of sly weakness. A cover up for some shameful secret. Or worse, a sign of pride that was an even worse vice. Now, the old-timers seemed interested and they stared at me as if I had crawled out from a nearby hole. One of them, a short man with a red cap and a nose that resembled a big spreading yam, snorted directly at me. “Just the opposite,” I told them. “Everybody like bacchanal there.” The Plummer man leaned towards the lady and they both stared at me for a good minute or two.

  While I was walking back to Regent Park on that cool day in April, I wondered for the first time how all these people on the street and in the subway I was always watching, saw me. A couple with a pram gave me the usual one-second glance. Same with a woman who peeked up from her book, and I wondered if she had made an assessment in just one second. But how could this be? How could all of them notice my clothes and shoes and expression so quickly? Unless these things were not important. In Trinidad the glances were long and questioning; they were like the silent beginning of a conversation.

  As I crossed Shuter Street I thought once more of the coffee-shop lady question about bashfulness. Once Auntie Umbrella had called me “an only child” like if it was a sickness, but our old wooden house with its concrete posts, just a half mile from the sea, was sometimes crowded with neighbours, usually women who brought along their children. We would play marbles and top and zwill with flattened bottle caps, and scooch like the game in the movie Dodgeball, and hide and seek between the crotons and ginger lilies in the yard. I grew up with these friends, Guevara and Pantamoolie, and the whole batch of Lopi grandchildren. As we got older, we took these games to the Mayaro High School, and to the beach, where we added windball cricket and football and kite-cutting. At the beach too, we helped the fishermen pull in their seine nets and were rewarded with shining bonito and moonshine with their scales looking like small silvery shillings, and if the day’s catch was good, a nice thick kingfish. We cut classes from school, lackarbeech we called it, to hang out with the old coppery fishermen, not only for the little gifts but because of all the stories they told us about getting lost at sea and bouncing up Venezuelan coastguards and spending time in prison there. They told us, between their sips of Puncheon rum straight out of the bottle, about the sharks and barracudas they had caught, and tapirs that had swum out straight from the Amazon River and manatees that looked like pregnant mermaids. The most interesting stories, though, were about the smugglers who chose the nights and the rough coves to drop off their drugs and guns and tons of money.

  When my mother heard from my fourth-form history teacher, Mr. Chotolal, that I was skipping school to hang out with the fishermen, she got in a real bad mood and said I was following my father’s wayward path, good and proper. Before he disappeared completely, my father had been briefly a fisherman who spent many nights and weekends at sea. And when I mentioned the fishermen’s stories to mamaguy her, she said that I was becoming an “ole-talker” just like my father.

  But after a while, she had stopped complaining, even the few times I came home later than usual after a crab-catching trip in the mangrove. Maybe she was just busy with her sewing and watching her Bollywood movies from the video player Uncle Boysie had given her.

  Just thinking of my Mayaro friends and the fishermen and the drunkards who would wake up the whole village with their loud greetings when they came home late in the nights from the rumshops made me sad. I wondered what Uncle Boysie was doing the same instant I was entering the housing complex, and all of a sudden, I recalled my mother’s funeral service at the Mayaro Presbyterian church and the crowd of villagers who surprised me by showing up
at the cemetery half a mile from the church. These thoughts, especially of my mother sitting by the front window and sewing her clothes in the old Singer with the mournful Hindi song broken up by the machine’s clapping pedals, caused a little shock to crawl down my back; and all of a sudden, the place seemed colder and the air heavier and the traffic slower than usual. On my way to our apartment I wondered why my steps seemed so heavy and the distance so long. This mood lasted the next day and thankfully the old couple was not there in the coffee shop because I was in no mood for their scattered happiness.

  They showed up the following day, though, and I think the lady must have noticed the new strain on my face because for the first time she lost her smile as her companion was joking around in one of his strange languages.

  “Do you have a minute, friend?” The Christopher Plummer man gestured to an empty chair. When I sat, he let loose some foreign words in a fast shouting accent like these Japanese from Bridge over the River Kwai. The red cap man sitting with them was wearing a green blazer that made him look like an ugly macaw. He looked at me crankily before he got up with his Zane Grey western and walked shakily to the door. “Don’t mind Roy,” Christopher Plummer said. “He hates all young people. So?”

  “So what?”

  “You accepted my invitation. I suppose I should say, “Mum-moon. That’s ‘thank you’ in Persian.”

  “How do you know all these words?” I asked the question that had been on my mind since I first heard him speak.

  From his reaction, I think that was a smart question. He pulled his chair an inch or so closer to mine. “I listen to people all the time. And when I begin a conversation in their own language, they open up just like this.” He snapped his fingers. “Ja-tory!” he shouted to the orange-coloured girl who was wiping a nearby table, and when she waved to him, he told me, “See. It’s a special talent.”

  “So they are all different languages?”

  “You must try it sometimes.”

  “First, I have to learn English properly.” I didn’t tell them how much I hated Spanish and French classes at school or of a conversation with Pantamoolie. I had told him there was nothing better than comic-book English with the gulping and sighing and constant threatening. Still, I wished I knew some of these languages now so I could impress the girl but the Plummer man didn’t give me much time to reflect on this. First he told me his name was Norbert and then he began his story about how he lived in a place called Cabbagetown. From there he had moved all over the place working as a salesman until he ended up somewhere called Brantford. He and the pretty lady were going to start some sort of Internet business to export Canadian medicine to the States. The lady didn’t say anything much, just smiling and playing with her necklace as Norbert talked a mile a minute and I wondered if she, too, was imagining this strangely named town as a place where cabbages rolled on all the streets like tumbleweed from old Westerns. And children playing cricket with the small ones and football with the bigger ones.

  Norbert called out to me every evening and I soon joined the group of old-timers. From a distance they had always appeared like cows grazing and chewing their cud but I soon discovered that they had many adventures in their younger days, and had worked for a while on trains travelling through Canada. They had lived in England and other places in Europe before they landed here. I learned many other surprising facts. I discovered there were places in Canada where mostly Germans or Portuguese or Italian or Chinese lived. “This is what I like about Toronto,” Norbert told me. “Just cross the street and you are in a completely different country. Everybody’s here.”

  The way he said this I imagined that all these people had come as visitors and liked the place so much they decided to stay. I pictured them leaving the ships and rushing straight for Cabbagetown, collecting a few of the vegetables on their way. I hoped Norbert would describe this strange town but Roy glanced up from his Toronto Sun to talk about a little girl who was killed while she was waiting for her friends at some nearby street. After this, everybody got quiet and Roy returned to his newspaper.

  The next day I felt that he was continuing the topic as he brought up another shooting, this one between gang members. To tell the truth he made the city seem more dangerous and interesting than I had imagined. I remember Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was so safe the policemen wore nice red outfits and rode on horses but according to Roy the country was like Gotham City with crooks around every corner. When he pushed the Sun before another old-timer and said, “Look at the faces of these thugs and see what they have in common,” I pictured them as shady Frank Miller characters with bulging muscles and machine guns poking out from trench coats but the photograph from the papers was of a group of boys my age. They kind of resembled some of my friends from Mayaro, too.

  I soon realized this was Roy’s pet topic as he was regularly grumbling about subsidized housing and criminals who could never be deported and little children running around with guns. All these recent swarms of newcomers were congesting the place and inconveniencing people like himself with their welfare demands. Sometimes, when he went outside for a smoke I would feel that maybe he was a retired policeman who, on the days he didn’t show up, was chatting in the station with old friends.

  Even though there were no sharks and manatees and smugglers the conversations were always more interesting whenever the group talked of their old-time days. I tried to imagine how Toronto would have looked before all the tall buildings and congested streets were built. Maybe it was like Mayaro with fields of cassava and plantain and coconut trees. Some of the stories were related by a really thin, trembling man whose name I never got. He was from somewhere called Friezeland in the Netherlands and during the war, he hid many Jewish people in his house. He talked sometimes about his move in 1951 to Canada to work as a cheese maker somewhere in Thunder Bay and then to Kitchener, where he had many run-ins with Germans at some annual beer festival. Later, the Germans became his best friends. A truck driver came in now and again to complain about the long waits at the American border and his encounters with policemen in Florida. He considered most Americans as boldfaced braggarts, which was a big shock, because in Trinidad, I always felt they were not too different from Canadians. His name was Jim and although he was as red as a flask of wine, the way he stared crossly from on top of his glasses reminded me of Uncle Boysie dealing with a troublesome customer. Another man, who from a distance looked completely grey, down to his skin, said he had lost two brothers in the war. They spoke about this war quite often, and as though it had been fought just a couple months earlier.

  This was new to me: in Trinidad we had no wars (except the ones from our history texts about Captain Jenkins’s ear and those with Spanish armadas centuries ago). It felt sort of strange sitting so close to people who had some connection with a war I had seen only in the old movies starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, and sometimes while they were discussing some battle or the other, I would wonder how my Mayaro friends would react if they could see me with all these pale, wrinkly old-timers who were always wrapped-up in thick sweaters with Christmas bells and decorations. I felt they would shake their heads and laugh and make jokes—or picong—about my new friends who smelled sometimes like stale milk, and who talked with long gaps and stared outside as if they had forgotten what they were saying and who woke up coughing from little naps. I think they, too, would have been surprised that no arguments broke out between those who had lost family members in the war, and Norbert, who boasted about the fairytale cities his parents once lived in like Bavaria and Dresden. In Trinidad there would have been bottles flying on all sides because everyone there seemed to collect and save all the insults thrown at them. Every now and again, someone would mention Cabbagetown and I would pay extra careful attention as if I was in Mr. Chotolal’s history class. Once, Norbert mentioned an Ebenezer Howard fella who had designed something or the other in Cabbagetown. I almost told him that the Ebenezer name made me think of wrinkly, gi
raffe-neck men in pyjamas with long sock-hats hanging over their ears but when I glanced around the table, I felt that maybe it was a good thing I kept quiet about this.

  The orangeish girl glanced over regularly and I felt she was wondering what I was doing with this pack of old people. I wanted Norbert to call out to her again but all of a sudden he seemed to be more interested in a new topic: the scheminess of doctors who were prescribing all kinds of drugs for healthy people, and these drugs companies that were making tons of money by inventing useless drugs, even for dogs and cats. One day I told him about old Lopi who claimed he could cure diseases with secret Spanish prayers and who prescribed fever grass and aloe vera and hibiscus flowers for this and that sickness. Roy stared at me with his coated eyes and said, “Damn voodoo rubbish,” which got me a little mad, not because I disagreed but because he was so quick to criticize. Norbert then began a speech about natural drugs and different types of diets. This topic went on for a week or more, and to tell the truth, I was getting fed up with all this health talk. I believe his friend, judging from her quietness, also didn’t like this new direction. She began to go outside with Roy for a smoke whenever he got onto this topic. During those times Norbert complained to me about the chemicals in cigarettes but never to her.

  One day I saw him alone in the coffee shop. He was dressed in his usual dark suit and greeted me in another strange language so I didn’t make much of his friend’s absence. Later, he told Roy that she was on a trip to the States concerning her new business. Roy began to cough and went outside with his western paperback. I waited for Norbert to bring up the cigarette chemicals but he didn’t talk much that day, even when Roy later said that if Canadians didn’t begin to make more babies in a hurry, the country would be unrecognizable in a couple years. “Where did you say you were from?” Roy glanced over as if he had noticed me sitting at the table for the first time.