Under the Cover: A Convergence of Solitudes

The story of how I came to write A Convergence of Solitudes begins like this: My son was working as a busboy at a restaurant in a neighbourhood a bus ride away from ours. He wasn’t too crazy about his job. One of several irritants he mentioned was in the form of a human being, a man of a certain age who sat for hours drinking scotch, always lingered past closing hours, barely met the servers’ eyes but usually attracted the attention of other diners, even held court on occasion. This guy was some sort of big shot, he said. He had no idea who he was, and no interest in finding out.One day my husband and I were out for a walk in that neighbourhood when we both glanced up and saw a man drinking by himself on the restaurant terrace. My husband recognized him first: a musician we had both idolized as teenagers. We felt he was a genius, or at least had been, in his youth. We still listened to his band’s recordings.  He’d been, still was, an ardent Québec nationalist. We stood on the sidewalk whispering about him for a few moments.  He glanced at us. The moment felt electric to me. We’d been acknowledged by this superstar, this mega talent!  But how did he feel about being gawked at and whispered about? And completely ignored by other people, especially young people? When I went home, I wrote a scene from the musician’s point of view. I named the musician Serge.The second part of this story of how my novel came to be is simply that I have always wanted to write about how my parents met, fell in love, and immigrated to Canada. It always seemed extraordinary to me. She was rich, he was poor, and this was India at the time of Partition, so they faced a myriad of harrowing obstacles. My father then beat some truly incredible odds and won a scholarship which brought him to Montreal — where they found themselves all alone in a cold, hostile world. I created a fictional couple based on my parents and named them Hima and Sunil.When I began to write these scenes, I realized that I would have to make a lot of things up, because people who could have helped me with the details had long since died. My mother was able to give me some help though. She is very old now, but her memory is still sharp.Once in a while, when my husband and I found ourselves in what we now presumed to be the musician’s neighbourhood, we made a game of guessing which house he lived in, whether it would be easy to just go and ring his doorbell, and what we would say if we were the sort of people who would do something like that. And so I began to embody a fictional character before I started to write about her: a would-be stalker. On these walks, alone or with my husband, I found myself moving through the world as my character Rani. I thought about what motivated her, and whether it would be enough to push her to carry out her daydreams.Around this time, I came across a heart wrenching talk by an Australian woman on her search for her birth mother in Vietnam. When she referred to being adopted as being stolen, I was so moved that I actually called her up – not realizing the cost of long-distance calls to Australia. At that point, I didn’t really understand why I was calling her. We spoke for almost two hours! By the end of the conversation, I found myself asking her permission to put the essence of her message into my book, and to turn her into a fictional character living in Québec. I felt I had to write her story.When she agreed, I was delighted. I’d needed a family for the musician. So, Serge got a daughter, whom I named Mélanie. And this daughter would meet Hima and Sunil’s daughter – Rani.I now had a story to tell.

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Anita Anand is an author, translator and language teacher from Montreal. She is the winner of the 2015 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize for Swing in the House and Other Stories, which was also shortlisted for the 2016 Relit Award for Fiction and the Montreal Literary Diversity Prize. Her translation of Nirliit, by Juliana Léveillé-Trudel was nominated for the 2018 John Glassco Prize. She has also translated Fanie Demeule’s novel Déterrer les os, known in English as Lightness.