Author Rabrindranath Maharaj at a coffee shop in Ajax, Ont.DAVE CHAN
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.
"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."
Maharaj is a walking advertisement for his own advice. A successful teacher on his way to becoming a high-school principal in Trinidad, he threw it all over at the age of 37, bringing his wife and three young children north to study creative writing at the University of New Brunswick. His fate was set when his first book, The Interloper, was nominated for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
He moved from a high-rise apartment in Mississauga, where his wife and now-grown children still live, to another in Ajax, and continued to write novels that are much admired but sell poorly.
"Some people can look at my life, like my father and mother for instance, and say, 'This fellow has made a series of bad decisions,'" Maharaj allows, admitting that literary life in the new country is "touch and go." But the advantage he gained is the chance to write what he wants. "And I suspect having a narrow readership is the price I pay for that - just writing the kind of book I would want to read."
With its local setting, artfully simple style and abundance of engaging characters, The Amazing Absorbing Boy could well change that. Torontonians in particular will find themselves immersed in a familiar city they never knew, guided by the sort of new citizen they see everywhere but can barely recognize.
"Somebody asked me whether this book was a series of love letters to Toronto," Maharaj says. The answer is no - not exactly. "It's a series of intimate letters to a person you don't know all that well," he says. "Because you don't know this person all that well, you don't know if these letters will be tossed aside or looked at with wonder, as in, 'You know, I never saw it this way before!'"
Wonder aside, it is almost certainly true that no native-born Canadians have ever seen their country the way Maharaj and Sammy present it in The Amazing Absorbing Boy. Whether they like it or not - or even notice his efforts - the bard of Ajax is quietly redrawing the literary map of his adopted country.