Free The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj

she was waiting on somebody when she turned and saw me gazing. I rushed away; it was not a young girl but an old lady with a stiff smile and a pointed chin. I remembered Pantamoolie saying he could tell the ages of all the Mayaro women by how high up on their waists their dresses were, as they went up half inch each year. He would have real problems here because of these thick coats that could disguise any kind of shape.
    I decided to visit this Cabbagetown place that evening instead of Coffee Time. When I crossed Gerrard and Carlton streets I tried to ask directions from a boy my age but he backed away and held up his hands as if I was going to attack him. A man with a long beard and dirty clothes pointed to the north and I walked for ten minutes or so before I realizedI had not marked the buildings for my return trip. I was about to turn back when I spotted a building that could have been drawn by Gene Colan. The steeples and old-fashioned windows and solid brick walls made it look like a castle. Or maybe the Wayne Manor. I wandered around the compound until I came to a plaque that read, Toronto Necropolis. Necropolis: I had come across the word in horror comics and on my way back I imagined that all the old Cabbagetown ghosts were roaming around the place and also complaining about how much the place had changed.
    For the next week I, too, roamed around the place, looking for shops with vacancies advertised on their windows but the owners—in all types of accents, some hard to understand—each asked me about my Canadian experience as if they were setting some trap. When next I went to the coffee shop, Roy said, “Look who’s here. We thought you had gone back to Mexico.”
    He laughed in his coughing way and I decided he had made a joke. But that mood didn’t last for too long because they soon moved on to their favourite subjects: high taxes to pay for these welfare immigrants, some useless human rights group, young people crime, and old falling-apart army helicopters and tanks. This last topic set off Norbert and the trembling man about the war, and a museum in Ottawa, and Dresden, and the big holocaust. Then Jim, the truck driver, mentioned another of his trips to Carolina and said that Canada was getting too soft and unimportant, and everybody got real quiet as if this was really what they had been arguing about for the lasthalf an hour. To tell the truth that put me at ease, and during the remainder of that session, I felt that maybe these old Canadians liked to throw out all their grievances just to see where they would hook up. Maybe they were like old people everywhere else, always complaining about how things were turning out and how much better they used to be. Uncle Boysie himself used to say the same thing about Mayaro.
    The next day on my way to Coffee Time, I made a list of my own grievances, which was easy because that same morning my father had complained about my idleness. Later in the coffee shop, it took about an hour before I got the chance to mention this big wall concerning Canadian qualification, and immediately Roy asked if I had applied for welfare. When I shook my head, he seemed a little surprised so I didn’t bother to ask about whether I could qualify or not. For the rest of that evening, the only thing all these old people talked about were their long-time jobs as cheese-makers and icecream truck drivers. I don’t know if they were throwing out advice but I was sure no one would hire me to make cheese or drive ice cream trucks. Then Norbert said that nowadays people were more interested in money than in happiness, and everyone got quiet for a while.
    I let another week skip by before I returned to the coffee shop and when I got there, the old people table was empty. I ordered a coffee and sat by myself. I noticed the orangeish girl staring in my direction but every time I smiled she looked away and I felt I was wasting all these friendly looks on the bare wall. I concentrated on my