The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  But soon something strange happened to this picture I had created of Mayaro. One morning as I was leaving our apartment, when the rumble of the machines had already begun, a shoe museum popped up, right alongside Mrs. Bango parlour. The next day, waterfront trails appeared along the beach, and in less than a week, there were huge glassy buildings along the Mayaro junction and the fish stalls had been replaced with a huge market that sold Greek and Italian and Jewish and Indian food. Soon there were rows of red-leaf trees hidden beneath the coconut palms. Sometimes on the streetcar I imagined some Toronto landmark like Union Station plumb in the middle of the village.

  I wondered if my father was also contemplating some version of this combined scenery in preparation for his move to Mayaro and a couple evenings when he returned with hats and caps, the Goodwill tags still attached, I felt he was practising to be a Trinidadian saga boy. He wore the hats as he was watching MacGyver and each style transformed him from pimp to swindler to drug dealer to Pink Panther spy. Once when he was wearing a bucket hat pulled low over his forehead like Gilligan I noticed him examining what looked like a burn mark on his left hand. It was just above his wrist and I was about to ask how it had happened when I realized it was a tattoo. He was rubbing the tattoo and smirking at MacGyver as if this was some private joke between them. I shifted my position on the table to get a better view. The tattoo seemed to be of a big eye and when I went to the balcony the eye seemed to be following my move. When I returned I swallowed and told him, “That is a nice tattoo.”

  “Eh? Oh this? Is a flying saucer.”

  I guessed this was another aspect of his preparation for Mayaro, as most people his age wore tattoos of ships and anchors and rockets, but I pretended it was his final salute to my world.

  In the middle of March I visited Javier and once more Carmen accompanied me to the Pickering Go Station. There I told her the story of my friend the Amazing Absorbing Boy and though she had been joking just a few minutes earlier about “the swampy boy” she got quiet and said it was the saddest thing she had heard for a long while. I told her jokingly that she should give me her magic lantern so that I could see him in its dim glow; instead she leaned over and gave me a hug that lasted for five minutes or more. I felt really happy and peaceful then even though I did not squeeze her breast or anything.

  It was a very cold night and on the return trip I saw that all the trees were covered with ice. It seemed as if puffs of smoke had frozen and exploded into millions of tiny sparks that were clinging to all the trees and buildings. They looked like fireflies granted one last night of life before they died and they were partying like mad. Maybe it was the gloomy but magical scenery, but I thought of all the people I had met here who I would never see again. In Trinidad I was sure to bounce them up in the beach or some road but it seemed that in Canada I got to know everyone more from their absence, long after they had disappeared. In any case, I had plenty practice with this. As the train approached Toronto I saw the pack of bulldozers once more and I remembered Uncle Boysie, in describing the same scene, had remarked that the city looked as if it was being eaten up from the edges. I had thought then of a comic book word, contagion, and imagined some slowly spreading alien spore, but now I tried to see the place from his eyes. I wondered what it would look like in ten or twenty years and if like the coffee-shop old-timers I too would complain about everything that had been torn down and lost forever. In Mayaro nothing really changed; people lived and died in the same house and arguments between neighbours lasted for years but here it seemed that every week something new was added. No wonder the chimera fella from the library could never finish his Toronto poem.

  I guess all these thoughts were swinging through my head because my professors at Centennial were forever talking about adaptation and improvisation. My courses there finished at the end of May and even though I was relieved to have passed all three I was surprised at the early completion date. In Trinidad classes always ended in July. For two weeks I walked around the city and noticed what I had previously missed—every street had its own style. Before everything had seemed big and shiny and connected but I saw buildings that could have popped straight out of some dingy section of San Fernando and others that seemed so ancient and grand with their turrets and fancy windows and solid walls, it was easy to imagine ghosts roaming around in secret passages.

  During one of these strolls I walked into Barbarossa’s shop, but as he was harassing a new employee, a boy who resembled Javier, I left quickly. Twenty minutes later I wandered into Queen Bee and Mr. Schmidlap glanced from behind his Thor statue and crooked his finger at me. When I walked over he asked where I had disappeared during the last two months and I wondered whether he had Alzheimer’s like Carmen’s grandmother. I returned the next evening and took my place behind the counter.

  Soon winter went away and everything smelled fresh and grassy. In Mayaro, the old people always said this odour signalled that a snake was nearby but here instead of snakes there were squirrels and birds and hundreds of geese. The geese looked real plump and tasty and I wondered if anyone had ever pushed one of them into a bag and rushed to his apartment for a nice meal.

  A couple of the Regent Park residents began moving out to other areas. Those who remained were real worried about their own impending move with all the new travel costs, and splitting up from neighbours and friends, and losing the parks and roads they knew so well. One night I heard a very tall man saying to a woman who reached his shoulder, “Press-shure. Is true press-shure we facing.” Another night I saw a group of people gathered around a big notice stuck on our apartment doorway. The Creole woman was quarrelling with a small Sri Lankan man with a perfectly straight moustache. I think it was a nasty argument because they began to call each other really insultive names. Soon two groups formed around the two quarrelling people, Creole people on one side and Sri Lankans on the other. I was a little surprised because I was sure I had spotted some of those now on opposite sides chatting in the laundry room. I left in a hurry and returned late in the night to see what they had been arguing about. The notice said that our apartment was scheduled to be demolished in six months.

  The next day my father disappeared. That same evening after work I walked to Union and bought a return ticket to its furthest northward destination. The bus stopped at Barrie and when I got back to Union it was close to midnight. A few young women, some with backpacks, dropped out here and there and I thought that in Trinidad they would never travel alone this late. Earlier that week Uncle Boysie had written to ask about my father. At the end of the letter he mentioned some little girl whose body was found in a cornfield because her mother had been unable to pay the ransom. A week later I wrote my reply. I said that my father would probably be in Mayaro by the time this letter arrived—which surprised me, as I had not concluded this before. I thanked him for the money sent and said that my interview with the immigration people would be in four months. The next day, once more on the Go Bus, I was sure that my father was gone for good.

  Soon I began to choose new routes, travelling further too. Sometimes, I would pass a rundown little town with old shabby building and tired people roaming around the single convenience store, and I would pretend that my father had moved to one of these places, and that he was sitting at that very instant, as the train sped by, on the balcony of a grubby townhouse, smoking and trying to fill in the blank spots in his life and wondering where all the years had gone. But on the return trip, I would see him in Mayaro, in the house that was probably overgrown with all my mother’s plants. I wondered what he would think if he heard her murmuring and singing every time the night breeze hit the field of cassava. Most likely he would feel that it was a warbling bullfinch or a picoplat.

  Maybe it was fitting that my interview for landed immigrant status was conducted by a man who looked a lot like a Canadian animal. The dark circles beneath his eyes made him look exactly like a raccoon but as the interview progressed, they also gave him a cynical and suspicious appearance.
In any case I had nothing to hide and I told him of my mother’s death and I repeated my age and spelled Mayaro and my father’s name as he glanced at the documents before him. He mentioned an engineer from India who had married his own sister he then brought over, and others who sponsored complete strangers, claiming they were their children. I was thinking of this when he asked about my education and I said that I had recently started my second semester at Centennial. How long had I been in Canada he asked? The minute I answered and noticed his suspicious glance I felt that I too could hardly believe I had been here for almost two years.

  Soon after my arrival in Canada, I had been filled with wonder and confusion at this new place. At the end of my first week, my father had told me that I had to learn the rules real fast to survive. Now after all this time, I still didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I had come to Canada, expecting I would get to know this person who had left his Wonder Book of Wonders and his crazy half-finished inventions behind, but after twenty months, I still didn’t know any more of him. I didn’t know the type of job he had before his breakdown, what led to his crack-up, if he had a girlfriend, why he was so angry in the beginning, if he felt any little piece of regret about leaving my mother, and things like that. Maybe, if he had remained here, he would have landed up in a coffee shop like the one on Parliament Street, where he would complain about everything and blame everybody but himself. He was like the Spectre or the Shadow or one of these comic-book characters who had no friends or family and slipped in and out of dimensions to change into either hero or villain according to the crisis they faced.

  Summer slipped away and the place grew colder but I continued travelling. Sometimes I took several buses to extend the distance; and I discovered that past all the crowded cities with crisscrossing streets, past the shabby smaller towns where my father might be cornered, even past the long stretches of trees and rocks and cultivated fields, there were these old farmhouses with sloping red roofs and wobbly wooden fences and cattle grazing in the surrounding fields. I felt there were ravines in the back of the fields with salmon and cod—and even cascadura!—jumping about. And while I was gazing at these peaceful places I would remember my first weeks at Regent Park when I was so comforted by the familiar there, I was afraid to step outside to the strange Bizarro world.

  I tried to imagine what lay beyond, all the places Danton had mentioned. North Bay and Timmins and Longlac. Maybe I was too accustomed to small villages and towns because the only way I could wrap my head around places that stretched for hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles was by viewing them as comic-book scenes. With big flapping banners of mist swirling across icy lakes and tiny nibbling animals making freaky coot-coot sounds as they scrambled from hole to hole. And snowfall so thick it erased everything else so I could make anything I wanted of the scene. Sometimes there were strange people hiding behind trees, not showing their faces but tracking every move I made. At other times, I pictured crazy old men by their windows aiming their guns at snapping turtles in a pond, or religious scamps with bundles of wives holding pitchforks and babies, or trappers and lumberjacks feasting on moose. Whatever lay out there I wanted to see it all, panel by panel. And when I was finished, I wanted to push on. I couldn’t wait for Regent Park to disappear. I even mentioned this in a letter to Uncle Boysie and in his reply—where he stated that my father had not yet showed up in Mayaro—he warned me I should get my foot back on the ground and finish my studies.

  He said that I should be careful I didn’t fall into a make-believe world like my father and mother, and even though I knew where he was coming from, sometimes, when I am travelling and my mind is slipping all over the place, I would feel that he didn’t understand that my world wasn’t make-believe but was a patch of every amazing thing I had touched and absorbed, a dust here and a dust there.

  GLOSSARY OF TRINIDADIAN VOCABULARY

  Word definitions are quite fluid in a Trinidadian context as they depend upon other variables, such as the tone in which a word is expressed. Below are some definitions of Trinidadian words used in this novel.

  B

  bacchanal. Confusion and scandal.

  badjohn. A criminal or violent person.

  balata. Hardwood tree found in the forest, used to make furniture and floors.

  barra. A kind of flatbread made from chickpeas, used to make doubles, a type of sandwich.

  C

  caimite. Round, dark purple fruit, also called star apple.

  carite. A popular and tasty fish. Used in fish broth.

  cascadura. An edible fresh water fish with bony placoid scales.

  channa. Chick peas.

  chilli bibi. A dusty snack made with parch (roasted) corn, sugar and cinnamon.

  chupidness. Like stupidness but less of a rebuke.

  chataigne. A large prickly fruit with edible seeds. Similar to the chestnut.

  cocopanyols. Descendants of settlers from Venezuela who intermarried with other ethnic groups in Trinidad. Also cocoa-panyols.

  commess. Confusion. Frequently refers to scandalous behaviour. Also commesse.

  crapo. From the French crapaud, meaning ‘toad.’ Also crappo.

  crapo-foot handwriting. Poor penmanship.

  D

  dasheen. Tuberous root of the taro plant.

  doubles. Popular street food in Trinidad, made with chickpeas and barra.

  douennes. The ghosts of children not christened before their deaths. Also douens.

  downcourage. Frustrate.

  duncy. Stupid. Illiterate.

  F

  fête. Like bacchanal, commonly found in English-language dictionaries.

  flambeau. A torch with a bottle base.

  G

  gilpin. A large cutlass. Also guilpin.

  grop. Bunch, group, or gathering. Also grap.

  grugru. A palm tree with small edible nuts.

  gundee. Crab’s claws. Also gundy.

  H

  horning. Committing adultery, being unfaithful.

  J

  jumbies. Ghosts, often evoked to frighten children.

  K

  kitecutting. Trying to cut the string of an opponent’s kite with a piece of broken bottle.

  L

  lackarbeech. To duck school or work. Also l’ecole biche.

  lagahoo. A shapeshifting creature. Often an old man who lives alone and who transforms in the night into an animal.

  laglee. Sticky sap from the breadfruit tree. Dried and used to trap birds.

  lime/liming. A casual gathering to pass the time.

  locho. A lazy drifter. Also loacho.

  luchette. A digging tool. Once used by road workers.

  M

  macco. A busy body. Also used to describe a showy object. Also maco

  maljeau(x). Evil eye. Also mal yeux.

  mamaguy. Flatter.

  manicou. An opossum

  mash up. Wreck, ruin; or a combination of different elements.

  mauby. A bitter drink made from bark and several spices that is reputed to have medicinal qualities.

  mauvais-langue / languing. Spreading gossip or rumours.

  mingpiling. Small and skinny. Also ming piling.

  mooma. Mother.

  N

  neemakaram. Ungrateful or a betrayal.

  nowhereian. A wanderer.

  O

  obeah. A type of folk magic.

  ownway/ownwayness. Stubborn and headstrong.

  P

  parang. Spanish influenced music, mostly with guitars and maracas, popular during Christmas.

  picong. A kind of friendly heckling.

  picoplat. Seed-eating bird with a distinctive warble.

  planass. A blow with the flat side of a cutlass. Also planasse.

  pommecythere. An edible fruit, acidic when green but extremely sweet when it ripens. Also called golden apple.

  pone. Sticky golden cake made from cassava and coconut.

  pothound. A stray dog. Often a term of insult.

>   R

  rackling. Jangling metallic sound, as of broken machinery.

  roti. A type of flatbread.

  roucou. A red dye from the similarly named tree. Also roukou.

  S

  scooch. A game that involves trying to hit an opponent’s body with a softball.

  saga boy. A ladies’ man. Also sharpman.

  shadow beni. A leafy herb similar in taste to cilantro, but with a stronger flavour. Also shado beni.

  skeffy. Scheming.

  souyoucant. A vampire-like creature. Typically an old woman.

  squingy. Wrinkled.

  sweetmouth. Flattery.

  T

  tattou. Armadillo.

  W

  windball cricket. Softball cricket with few rules.

  Z

  zwill. A toy made from flattened metal bottle caps.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to The Canada Council and The Ontario Arts Council. Also to Diane Martin, Michelle MacAleese, Jennifer Lum, Michael Cho, Doris Cowan, Scott Sellers and Hilary McMahon.

  RABINDRANATH MAHARAJ is the author of three previous novels: A Perfect Pledge, which was a finalist for the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Lagahoo’s Apprentice, which was a Globe and Mail and Toronto Star notable book of the year; and Homer in Flight, which was nominated for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award; and two collections of short stories, The Book of Ifs and Buts and The Interloper, which was nominated for a Regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book. Rabindranath Maharaj was born in Trinidad and now lives in Ajax, Ontario.