The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Andrea Gunraj has written a sparkling first novel – part of Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction series – about a Caribbean family riven by economic hardship, fatherlessness, and fierce sibling rivalry. The titular Seetha is the daughter of Neela, one of two main protagonists in the novel. Contrary to the claim on the book’s cover, however, Seetha’s disappearance is not sudden, but, rather, agonizingly anticipated by Neela, who lives under constant threat from the child’s mercenary, racketeering father. The meat of the novel is the events leading up to Seetha’s abduction, which have their roots in the childhood of Neela and her brother, Navi. Left to the care of their grandmother when their mother goes overseas to find work, the two fight for the mother’s sporadic, long-distance affections. Neela is particularly jealous of Navi’s academic accomplishments, and wages a war of sabotage against him. A deep animosity persists between the two even after Navi leaves to pursue a career in the north.     Neela forfeits her own future the day she takes up with a local thug, Jaroon. Neela becomes pregnant, and, disenchanted with Jaroon, escapes back to her village, knowing it is a matter of time before the child’s father comes to claim his daughter back. Gunraj – who is of Guyanese descent – has her characters speak in the creole of their unidentified island nation, and the dialogue, which has a logic and musicality that is entirely transfixing, is one of the novel’s many strengths. Gunraj’s characters are sometimes histrionic, but it is testament to her sublime control over the material that the story never becomes so. What we get, instead, is a riveting, expertly told tale full of satisfying counterbalances and impeccable narrative timing. This is an exciting, memorable debut. 

"The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha announces the arrival of a wonderful storyteller. The dynamics of the relationship between Navi and Neela, a brother and a sister, and how their individual lives play out show that fate is unalterable depending on one’s social standing in life. Andrea Gunraj has written a book that you won’t be able to put down — a thrilling and excellent read."
—Musharraf Ali Farooqi, author of The Story of a Widow

“This is certainly a novel to relish, and I’m sure — I hope — we will see much more of Gunraj in the future.”
— The Globe and Mail

Neela Keetham and her brother Navi yearn to escape their hometown of Marasaw. Living with their grandmother after their mother had left years before to find work abroad, they struggle against the poverty and limited opportunities available in Marasaw. Navi hopes to prosper from his talent as a math prodigy, while Neela constantly battles to find some talent to rival her brother’s.
 
Despite the support of their grandmother and friends, both Navi and Neela find that escaping their circumstances, much less their past, is no easy task. The siblings make their separate ways out of Marasaw, but each must make sacrifices and damaging compromises along the way. They also learn dark and dangerous truths about each other, driving them apart in fear and anger.  
 
As Navi and Neela work tirelessly to create new lives for themselves, the outside world, far from being a paradise, is revealed as more punishing and unfair than the world they left behind. Navi wins a prestigious government internship, but his success ironically snuffs out the opportunity for a lasting, loving relationship with a fellow intern. On the strength of rumours and the word of her boyfriend Jaroon, Neela daringly makes her way to a resort town hidden in the rainforest to work as a teacher, only to find that this “Eden,” and Jaroon, are not what they seem.
 
Chastened and wiser for their experiences, Neela and then Navi are both forced by circumstances to return home. The disappearance of Neela’s daughter, Seetha, leads them back to each other and into the complex and mysterious bonds of family. To save Seetha, Neela and Navi must attempt to heal their damaged relationship and along the way they discover that in the cruel and imperfect world in which they live, hope may still prevail.

Andrea Gunraj is a community outreach worker for METRAC (www.metrac.org), which promotes the rights of women and children to live free from violence and the threat of violence. Her parents immigrated from Guyana, a region whose culture and politics have infused Gunraj’s writing. She and her husband live in Toronto.

One

Neela’s abilities had first manifested themselves when she was ten and her brother, Navi, was twelve. Navi was the smart child, known throughout the neighbourhood for his ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide faster and better than any other twelve-year-old, and probably better than anyone else in Marasaw. He would pace around his grandmother’s rickety wooden house in grey school shorts and an undershirt, using whatever he came upon to test his mathematical speed and accuracy. Twenty-seven and twelve tin cup is thirty-nine tin cup! A hundred and three by six tea towel is six hundred and eighteen tea towel! Neela’s grandmother, only in her early forties when Neela and Navi were near puberty, encouraged her grandson’s domestic calculation rampages. She challenged him to problem-solve questions: “If I throw seventy-seven black-eye pea in dis pot and boil it for forty-nine days, and spill two quart-a water straining de peas out, but forget de fire on and almost burn down de town by eleven o’clock, how much peas left?”

In his younger days, Navi would stare at the sandy floorboards and, after some reflection, whisper, Seventy-five? But these days he had learned better. “De same amount you start with, Granny.”

“Ah Navi-boy,” she sighed, with an artificial old-lady voice, “you too quick for your old granny.”

While the whole neighbourhood prophesied about Navi’s future as a banker or engineer, thrilled that their modest town should possess a boy of such talent, Neela’s prospects were rarely discussed. They were hardly noticed in light of her brother and this manifested itself in bodily form – she grew skinnier, shorter and more awkward than he. She tried to do mathematics like her brother, but she would pass household objects and forget to put them into equations. Even when she made a painful effort to do so, she was never as daring, as acrobatic, as Navi. Nine and four channa is twelve . . . no, thirteen channa . . . She was aware of how silly she sounded coming up with those lacklustre sums. “Alright girl, dat’s good,” was as much of a confirmation as Granny could muster, flipping and oiling roti on the stove. “Must follow your brother’s example when he wins de contest.”

The famous Children’s Mathematical Challenge, or the CMC, as the students had nicknamed it, had been initiated by a foreign diplomat who had come to the country. Dismayed at the lack of competitions between schools, he had originally founded the Student Spelling Challenge. He had laboured to get headmasters from towns all over the country to send their most talented spellers to the competition, but his excitement hadn’t ignited the country’s imagination. It was only years later that the diplomat’s son, convinced that arithmetic, not English, was the world’s common language, transformed it into a popular math competition.

Navi was Marasaw Elementary School’s natural choice. After the headmaster announced that Navi would attend the CMC in the capital city, adult townsfolk took credit for the boy’s brilliance. I taught de boy for four years, his teacher told the other teachers. He takes after my family, you know, his grandmother informed her neighbours. It’s his name we raise to heaven in prayer, man, his Sunday school teacher confirmed. But deep down, they knew Navi’s uncanny skills didn’t come from any of them – it wasn’t clear how he achieved his spectacular sums, but they knew full well that he didn’t need anything from them to know that three by six hundred and seven papaw is one thousand eight hundred and twenty-one papaw.

Still, Navi was generous in his acceptance of the honour. “It’s my family, my neighbours, my school and all de good citizens of Marasaw dat made dis happen. Without them teaching and guiding me, I would not even be able to spell seee-emmm-seee,” he declared in a speech to the whole school, for which he received applause made insincere by his classmates’ secret jealousy and overly sincere by his teachers’ delight. “Will you join me now, fine students and teachers of Marasaw Elementary,” he said in conclusion, “to sing our school’s most beautiful anthem? For I am going to dis Challenge only for you.” More than two hundred children, sweating in uniforms cuffed by green and orange bands, stood up noisily.

But Neela didn’t sing. She had no choice in attending the assembly, but she had the choice of whether or not to sing. As the others belted out the school’s anthem in that off-key, half-shouting way they always did, Neela mouthed the words, pretending to take heaving breaths between stanzas. She had started such little feats of rebellion the afternoon her granny and brother sat at the kitchen table to write his acceptance speech. Her anger had begun to seethe against Navi’s lofty accomplishments, and she knew that the time had come for her to act. I done with being his copycat, done being his hand-puppet. Her underground revolt might go unnoticed, but she didn’t need anyone’s attentions. She would still strive to poison the enthusiasm swirling around Navi and his mathematics. He gon’ be sorry, real sorry…

“Hey, girl,” a classmate with puffy ponytails whispered from behind her, between verses three and four, “you so lucky to have a brother like dat!” Neela pretended to be too absorbed in her singing to hear the compliment.


Neela attempted to throw a tantrum, whining to continue playing outside with her friends, but her grandmother would have none of it. “Get your tail in here and help you brother finish packing de bags!” Granny commanded. So Neela kept silent when the three of them took a taxi to the dock at the edge of town. She sucked in her Look over there! when, as their ferry started across the river, a large orange bird that had captured a squirmy fish in its beak perched on a post and stretched out its wings. She held her tongue and clamped her teeth when they arrived on the other side and descended from the boat along wobbling wood planks, dizzy with noontime sun and confused by shouts of family meeting family, Eh boy, eh girl, we over here! Navi’s vocal calculations extended to their surroundings while they awaited a minibus – palm trees and expansive bushes, taxi drivers bullying customers, a girl selling ginger beer, stacks of bleached crates acting as chairs. Passengers packed into a lime green van and held tight as it whipped down crowded city streets, blasting everything in its path with a horn rigged to sound like a siren. But, wedged between old women and their plastic bags, Neela refused to affirm her grandmother’s reflection: “Dis driver a madman, I tell you . . .”

It was the first time that Neela had visited the capital and stayed as a hotel guest. Even though her Marasaw hometown of aged houses and elderly neighbours was only a mile across the river, it seemed terribly unsophisticated in comparison to the city. Never again would she be as mesmerized as she was this time – all the colourfully dressed ladies, shops constructed with bricks, humming mopeds and taxis, poor children jumping in puddles of brown water. It was so animated, so celebratory, even in its most mundane elements. As they walked by the sprawling outdoor market, Neela envisioned the Big Top described in her Royal English Reader for Students textbook. Mighty lions jump through flaming hoops while seals balance balls and clowns tickle everyone’s fancy, she recalled when they passed a crowd cheering a jester; he manoeuvred his homemade marionette to flirt with bashful little girls.

That evening, Navi applied arithmetic to everything in the hotel room, more impressive than ever dividing and multiplying the pillows and sheets. “Neel babylove,” Granny said, “whole day you quiet. What happen, ba-ba, you sleepy? Go to sleep.”

“Yes, Granny,” she answered, too genuinely tired to go through her nightly Ow Granny, a little longer, nah routine.

Granny rubbed her hand over a folded blanket on the bed. “See how nice these hotels does be? Watch how pretty dis blanket is. You must enjoy de place while you here – feel it, nah?” she asked, hoping to engage Neela’s interest. “Now hear, children, both-a you,” Granny said, over twelve hundred and sixty beds minus four hundred and thirty beds, “must call me ‘Mommy’ when we out tomorrow, you understand? Nav? Hear, Neela?”

“Yes, Mommy,” they replied with equally distracted voices. As Navi became more lavish in his calculations, Neela sank lower into the despair of her brother’s sure victory at the contest. Grudgingly, she acknowledged that her silent campaign had made no impact on his spirits or abilities. He spent the night dreaming of stars and planets and moons to add and subtract – he had the strange gift of calm. Although she had seen no results, Neela was too stubborn to abandon her protest. She brought the soundless demonstration into the bustling hotel auditorium the next morning. Navi and dozens of other uniformed children were lined up on stage in velvet-backed chairs, restlessly awaiting the opening speech.

“Ladies and gentlemen, family and friends, students and educators, thank you for being with us today as we mark our thirty-seventh annual Children’s Mathematical Challenge. This is a truly marvellous event of higher learning that I look forward to every year,” the diplomat’s son said, cloaked in a woollen suit at the polished wood podium. “As you are well aware, the fifty fine boys and girls before you have been selected as your country’s most promising young...