Read an Excerpt From A Quiet Disappearance by Rabindranath Maharaj

Our featured title today comes from Rabindranath Maharaj, a widely celebrated author who has captured readers' hearts and imaginations for years now with his award-winning work. His latest title in a collection of short stories, where this writer has shown vast depth and skill throughout his career. 

In A Quiet Disappearance (Mawenzi House), we find beautiful prose and expertly crafted short fiction about aging men and women from the Caribbean islands. Each character finds that they must confront their pasts and examine the main joys and regrets that have led them to this point in their lives. They have complicated stories, especially as immigrants who have lived different lives in very different places, and their humanity is in full display on every page.

We're delighted to share this excerpt from one of the stories from this stunning new collection, in advance of its release later this month!

An Excerpt From A Quiet Disappearance by Rabindranath Maharaj

The Pen Pal 

One evening, while he was walking along the deserted Lakeshore, his foot swept a robin. It was the end of fall when everything seemed eviscerated. Colours, odours, motion, texture. November, this indifferent month, was his favourite and during his recent strolls, his attention always on the ground before him, he sometimes recalled an article from a science journal that explained how our view of the past deepened as we expanded our gaze. The writer was referring to the universe, but he had been drawn to this notion of keeping the world at a distance by never looking back. 

He stood for a while, not sure what he was expecting or what he should do, and when he noticed the bird’s feet twitching, he hurried on, thinking it would be better if he had stepped on the weak body and ended its misery. Insects were already about, drawn to the scent of death and soon they would swarm the dying bird. 

These evening walks, especially after the stresses of his classes, were always calming but now his thoughts drifted once more to the cream envelope, sealed with a sticker of spiralling roses, that he had retrieved from his mailbox the previous day. Inside was a folded sheet of parchment paper. The hurried writing and the uneven wavy letters did not match the formality and the substance of the contents.

It had begun with a challenge and an apology.

“You may not remember me, likely because we have never met. Perhaps we were passing acquaintances. But what really is a passing acquaintance? All acquaintances are passing; if not, they soon become clawing (hah!) and dyspnoeic.” The sender, who signed of with the name, Grace, was from South Carolina, a state he had never visited and about which he knew little. He had placed the letter in his briefcase and during the morning recess at his college he reread it. The writer’s breast cancer had metastasized to her bones, lungs, and liver and her doctor had advised her to make peace with the world. So she had posted copies to everyone with whom she had come into contact. Because of her profession, the list, compiled from several address books and email contacts, was extensive and disorganized. At the end of the page, she apologized if the letter had been sent to someone unacquainted.

The following morning he spotted a young couple embracing beneath a tree and he wondered if the letter-writer was a university fling from a quarter century earlier. He quickly dismissed this notion, as there had been the suggestion of a sinewy humour he could not recall in his former partners.

Later in the day, while his class was reading Tess of the D’Urberville, he thought of the letter. He guessed this was because of the harsh hand the two women, the heroine of the novel and his letter-writer, had been dealt. The letter, though, could not be more different from Hardy’s fatalistic tone, and its composer, until her last diagnosis, seemed in control of her life. Other tragic characters too brought this woman to mind. Lena Grove. Rosa Dartle. Juliet and Ophelia. Helen and Hera. All the women in the nineteenth-century American lit course.

A week passed and he was reminded daily of Grace. This was disconcerting because, after the turbulence of his breakup and relocation, he had streamlined his life into a narrow focus. The one activity he had not given up—and the only thing he looked forward to—was his hour-long solitary walk each evening. During that hour, he would feel the stresses of the day melting away: the departmental rivalries, the worthless conversations, the lumpy flirtations of middle-aged men and women. 

Now, during his strolls, he could not put aside the letter. Not so much the disease it mentioned but rather its unusual tone and language. He tried to imagine the expression on the writer’s face, the texture of her skin, the clothes she wore, the view outside her window, the clutter on her table, the colour of her walls, the leaves on her potted plant as she wrote phrases like “the deliquesce of delight” and “the furtiveness of errant joy” and “the withholding gaze.” She preferred to not use bcc in her communications because she did not want to “instigate a community of mourners.”

During his half-hour in the lunchroom, he glanced at the other teachers leaning forward on their cushions of fat as they bit into their gristle and dusted crumbs from their trousers. He listened to the whistling laughter that interrupted their chomping and he thought of the letter writer ravaged by the disease but ever graceful. (Once, he was shocked to imagine her as improved by cancer, with chiselled cheekbones and fragile eyes, mulling over her losses.)

Sometimes he overheard whispered conversations about Mel, a teacher in her mid-forties whose husband may or may not have left her following some traumatic event, and although the staff offered her sympathetic greetings in the corridors, he always kept his eyes on the ground whenever he passed her.

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Rabindranath Maharaj is an award-winning author of several novels, among them The Amazing Absorbing Boy, winner of the Trillium Book Award and the Toronto Book Award; A Perfect Pledge, a Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize finalist; and Homer in Flight, a Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award finalist.