Novelist Rabindranath Maharaj occupies a land every bit as exotic as his lavish name suggests, a mysterious east few literary explorers have ever imagined, let alone visited. Magnificently alone in the crowded bazaar, he works assiduously to infect the Canadian imagination with his strange foreign notions.
But it would be wrong to prejudge the quality of Maharaj’s work just because he lives and works in Ajax, Ont., a ho-hum suburb 35 kilometres east of Toronto, sandwiched between and even overshadowed by the notoriously benighted Scarborough and industrial Oshawa. Like his latest novel, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, the author’s chosen milieu is full of surprises.
Consider the doughnut shop where the 54-year-old Trinidad-born author composed much of The Amazing Absorbing Boy, a no-name joint lost in the interminable sprawl on Toronto’s ugly eastern flank: It is an architectural marvel, superbly bright and spacious, clad on three sides with two-storey walls made of clear glass and filled with amiable folk who all seem to know one another, including Maharaj. And not a single laptop in sight.
“The good thing about this place is that you meet interesting people and they give you a little slice of their experiences, like what part of Canada they came from, and so on,” Maharaj says, turning easily from a neighbourly chat with a beehived regular to literary business.
“When this is crowded, I go to a Starbucks in a Chapters close to here,” he adds. Or sometimes to a Tim Hortons, which is everywhere. “Each one for a different reason.”
But this one is the “most cozy,” he says An immigrant deeply curious about the shifting identity of his adopted metropolis – much like the bright, befuddled young narrator of his latest novel – Maharaj has staked out the centre of his universe at Cross Country Donuts, 240 Harwood Ave. S.
It’s an original view that becomes quietly remarkable when seen through the eyes of Maharaj’s boy hero, Sammy, an orphan from Trinidad shipped north to live with his long- absent, mentally ill and abusive father on a slab of foam in a condemned apartment in Regent Park, Toronto’s most notorious public-housing complex. A setting that most Canadians would recognize as fertile ground for a scathing drama of social realism becomes, to Sammy, the jumping-off point of a great adventure.
Sammy’s is no Horatio Alger story. His oddball adventures among the natives, told in the episodic manner of the comic books he loves, bring no redemption. He drifts from one menial job to another, idles with old-timers in downtown doughnut shops, falls in love with a girl who disappears and struggles with the numbing legalities of immigration. But the bitterness that overwhelmed his disappointed father gains no hold on the son, who remains buoyed by his quest to “crack the puzzle,” as Maharaj puts it, of his strange new surroundings.
Author Rabrindranath Maharaj.
The good thing about this place is that you meet interesting people and they give you a little slice of their experiences.
“The things that would have destroyed his father became a different kind of thing to the son,” Maharaj says. Every obstacle is a new adventure on the quest to belong. “Samuel thinks when you move to a new place you have to absorb a bit of the place around you, and try to allow the place itself to absorb a bit of you.”
To the extent it provides guidance to new immigrants, the novel is all about the power of imagination. “People whose imaginations are limited or bounded by what they see before them, especially if they’re in a new, perhaps threatening kind of situation, I don’t think they’re going to get very far,” he says. “I don’t want to sound too Oprah-ish or anything like that, but I really believe that if you have the power to imagine particular things you have the ability to transform them.”
