The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj

staring at a group and she looked a little angry, which gave me the idea that maybe she was jealous. Even though I never talked with her, just the idea that there was a pretty girl close-by, who was my age, gave me a nice feeling. Off and on, I would imagine that I was sitting on one of the wooden stools in Mrs. Bango’s parlour or the dry goods store that was hooked up to a rumshop, and that the old-timers were fishermen who had just returned with their catch of moonshine and kingfishand bonito, and instead of drinking coffee and staring at the
Sun
, they were sipping Puncheon rum and quarrelling about some alderman who never returned after the elections in spite of all the bribes they sent his way. Talking and listening and never removing the cigarette from their mouths.
    Here, most of the old people ate rice puddings and drank soup with trembling spoons and nearly dead lips. There was a telephone nearby and mostly black men would come in to make calls, waving their arms and sometimes glancing at me surrounded by old-timers. Maybe they were wondering what I was doing there with all these people with brown spots on their pink faces. I pretended I was staring at the faded wall pictures of men with hockey costumes and sticks and masks posing like comic book warriors, or at the old clock that was stuck at three o’clock. Every evening a moleman came in and he too would gaze at the clock as he sipped his coffee. This moleman was neither white, black nor brown and I put him down as a
cocopanyol
, a mixture of everything. A few times I thought I should go over and talk with him but he was always concentrating so hard on the clock that I felt he might be mad. Sometimes when I glanced at the orangeish girl with her nice jewellery I would wonder how she might decorate the place if she was allowed to. It might be yellow and pink and orange instead of plain cream colour. She might have a picture of her father and mother smiling with each other just above the counter.
    Twice a week, I would head for the food bank. My father, when he was around, never asked where the food had come from and I never bothered explaining. Maybe he felt I hadbought it with Uncle Boysie’s money but one night he asked me, “You working as yet?” and when I said I wasn’t he added, “I see,” in his mocking voice. A couple days later he asked where I disappeared to every evening and I remained quiet because the coffee shop was my own little secret.
    Although the old-timers never talked with me, just being around the same familiar faces every day removed some of my loneliness. But one day, one of the group, a man of about sixty with a big head, which looked like that of Christopher Plummer from
The Sound of Music
, said something to me in a strange language. He had never spoken with me before and I felt it was to show off to the pretty oldish lady at his side. I had never seen her there before and now the Christopher Plummer man was in a happy mood, laughing and waving around his hands as he spoke.
    From then on, she was with him every evening. He began to seem slightly out of place in the gloomy group, but he would wave to me and he would say, “Yaksha mash,” or “Ko-me-chi-wa.” Though I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, his friendliness told me these were greetings of some sort, and I returned them in the Trinidadian fashion by nodding my head quickly, once. And the small pretty lady would pull at his sleeve and tell him that some day he would get into trouble for striking up conversations with perfect strangers. But she always said this loudly and with a mischievous smile, as if she was enjoying my confusion.
    Soon, the Christopher Plummer man began dressing like a
saga boy
, with burgundy and navy blue coats and brownleather jackets and medallions around his neck, maybe to match the lady who favoured these light green and yellowish pants. They seemed so different from all the old people I had ever known, not only because of their