Rabindranath Maharaj; Leila Marshy (Cayoup1)

Leila Marshy’s collection of stories, My Thievery of the People, is full of incisive political commentary on people and how we interact with and hide from each other. In this new collection, the story settings shift from Canada to the Middle East, transcending borders in a way that is familiar to anyone living in a diaspora, with roots and family spread across the world.

Marshy immediately establishes herself as a storyteller who can draw a reader in with a few precise words. Dusty book tables, paper plates, and tomatoes are all details that help conjure tense atmospheres where she peels off the facades of characters and reveals layers of meaning.

Marshy creates fascinating characters through snippets of encounters, brief windows into individual lives, leaving the reader in moments of tension that will go on to unfold beyond the narrative she provides. The opening story, “Blink Twice,” is an intense two-page scrutiny of two people meeting at an event. At a playground, “The Ugly Father” fears the day his daughter will feel revulsion for him. In “The Beekeeper,” the narrator at the side of the road comes to the creeping realization that something sinister is occurring in the beekeeper’s house. There’s a sharpness and humour to the writing style that effectively drives home the gravity of her characters’ inner turmoil.

Marshy’s repeated focus on hands creates rich textural details that zoom right into the essential aspects of the story. In “Evidence of My Thievery of the People,” she writes, “I was born to a man with thick hands. Hands that crumpled paper, signed paper, crumpled it again, threw it at faces darker than his own.” In the next story, “Ramadan,” the hands prepare food: “She works the flour with water and sprinkles of salt … Sinking her fingers in its cold stickiness, she rolls the palm of her hand to this side and that.” The precision of these details creates a sensuous recognition in the reader, just as ever-present coffee creates a bitter taste in the air. In a collection with such a global span, Marshy’s precise use of language establishes the nature of the many cities and towns that appear in the stories.

Throughout the collection, Marshy also plays with form: “A Thousand and One Nights in Palmyra’s Bed” intersperses the story of Queen Zenobia with that of an Arab woman in the present day; “The Job” is told in short vignettes, beginning with the narrator getting fired; “How To: Your Very Own Life” unveils the narrative through a list format. These deviations from conventional story form bring surprises with every turn of the page, illustrating the endless possibilities of the short story form.

From the very first story in A Quiet Disappearance, Rabindranath Maharaj’s lyrical prose is on display. “Broken Pieces” begins: “It was a time in my life when I was not troubled by the notion that we might present ourselves to watchful strangers as occasional lovers sniffing out our differences.” The poetic constructions command attention, and allow the philosophical nature of the stories to unfold slowly and deliberately.

Maharaj’s characters often grapple with death and loss, yet in “Loki,” his narrator notes how “it’s strange we never prepare for the only predictable event in our life.” Whether it’s the loss of a parent, a child, or one’s own death, or whether a death is sudden or follows a prolonged illness, the theme is explored across generations. Maharaj’s ability to infuse a dry sense of humour into these sombre themes is particularly striking. “My Better Half” opens with the lines: “Whether death taps me on the shoulder or punches me to the ground will make no difference. I am eighty-two years old and this body belongs to a different time. … Every wrinkle hides a story and some stories cannot be repeated in polite company.” The combination of introspective musings with a cheeky narrative voice allows the profoundness of Maharaj’s intent to sink in.

Introspection is a feature of many of the stories in A Quiet Disappearance. In “The Pen Pal,” the narrator recalls “an article from a science journal that explained how our view of the past deepened as we expanded our gaze.” The notion of looking to the past to understand the present is, like death, a constant theme throughout the collection.

As in Marshy’s work, the sensory details draw the reader right into the world of each story – in Maharaj’s case this is often Toronto and its environs. In “The Magical Cardigan,” he describes the region’s familiar humidity as “a tightening coat on particularly sweltering days, but in the cool misty mornings it loosened a shimmering magic that disguised colours and softened aluminium roofs.” Maharaj captures the presence of magic in the suburbs of Toronto, and reveals the magic of words to invoke sensuous realities.