The Mystic Masseur (14 page)

‘You ain’t sell none at all?’

‘Sell ten, and all the people I sell it to going to behave like your wife father when they get to find out. Had to sell it to them as sort of charm. Pappa, that cost me a lot of work.’

‘Ninety cent commission you have to get, then.’

‘Don’t bother. You keep that for the next one you write. Anything in the way of printed matter, if it can sell, Bissoon is the man to sell it.’

‘Can’t understand it, Bissoon.’

‘Is easy. You a little too early. You see, is the sort of book you go have hell even giving away because people go think you want to work some sign of magic on them. Still, you mustn’t give up.’

‘Damn funny sort of sign!’

Bissoon looked up bewildered.

In spite of everything Ganesh still felt that something might be made of the book. He sent signed copies to the heads of all the Governments he could think of, and when Beharry found that Ganesh was sending them free, he was annoyed.

‘I is a independent man,’ he said. ‘And I don’t hold with that sort of curry-favouring. If the King want to read the book, he got to pay for it.’

This didn’t stop Ganesh sending a copy to Mahatma Gandhi, and doubtless it was only the outbreak of the war that prevented an acknowledgement.

7. The Mystic Masseur

M
ANY YEARS AFTER
the event, Ganesh wrote in
The Years of Guilt:
‘Everything happens for the best. If, for instance, my first volume had been a success, it is likely that I would have become a mere theologian, writing endless glosses on the Hindu scriptures. As it was, I found my true path.’

In fact, when the war began, his path was none too clear.

‘Is a hell of a thing,’ he told Beharry. ‘I feel I make for something big, yet I can’t see what it is.’

‘Is just why you going to do something big. I still believe in you, and Suruj Mooma still believes in you.’

They followed the war news with interest and discussed it every Sunday. Beharry got hold of a war map of Europe and stuck red pins on it. He talked a lot about strategy and ta’tics, and this gave Ganesh the idea of publishing monthly surveys of the progress of the war, ‘as a sort of history book for later on’. The idea excited him for a little, then lingered and died at the back of his mind.

‘I wish Hitler would come over and start bombing up Trinidad,’ he exclaimed one Sunday.

Beharry nibbled, eager for argument. ‘Why, man?’

‘Bomb everything to hell. Then it going to have no more worries about massaging people and writing books and all that sort of nonsense.’

‘But you forgetting that we is just a tiny little dot on some maps. If you ask me, I think Hitler ain’t even know it have a place called Trinidad and that it have people like you and me and Suruj Mooma living on it.’

‘Nah,’ Ganesh insisted. ‘It have oil here and the Germans thirsty for oil. If you don’t look out, Hitler come here first.’

‘Don’t let Suruj Mooma hear you. She cousin join the Volunteers. The dentist follow I did tell you about. Dentistry stop paying, so he join up. He tell Suruj Mooma is a nice, easy work.’

‘Suruj Mooma cousin have a eye for that sort of thing.’

‘But what if the Germans land here tomorrow?’

‘The only thing I sure about is that Suruj Mooma cousin go start breaking all sort of world record for running.’

‘No, man. If the Germans come, what we going to use for money? What about my shop? And the court-house? Is things like that does worry me.’

So, discussing the implications of the war, they began to discuss war in general. Beharry was full of quotations from the
Gita
, and Ganesh read again, with fuller appreciation, the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna on the field of battle.

It gave a new direction to his reading. Forgetting the war, he became a great Indologist and bought all the books on Hindu philosophy he could get in San Fernando. He read them, marked them, and on Sunday afternoons made notes. At the same time he developed a taste for practical psychology and read many books on The Art of Getting On. But India was his great love. It became his habit, on examining a new book, to look first at the index to see whether there were any references to India or Hinduism. If the references were complimentary he bought the book. Soon he owned a curious selection.

‘Is a lot of book you getting, you know, Ganesh,’ Beharry said.

‘I was thinking. Suppose you didn’t know about me and you was just driving through Fuente Grove in your Lincoln Zephyr. You think you would guess that my house just full up with a hundred and one sort of book?’

‘Wouldn’t guess,’ said Beharry.

Leela’s pride in Ganesh’s books was balanced by her worry about money. ‘Man, all this book-buying go do,’ she said, ‘but it not going to pay. You got to start thinking of making some money now.’

‘Look, girl. I have enough worries and I don’t want you to make my head any hotter, you hear.’

Then two things happened almost at the same time, and his fortunes were changed for ever.

The Great Belcher, continually on circuit, called one day.

‘Is a blow, Ganesh,’ she began. ‘A big big blow. You can’t trust nobody these days.’

Ganesh respected his aunt’s sense of the dramatic. ‘
What
happen now so, then?’

‘King George do me a nasty trick.’

Ganesh showed his interest. She paused to belch and call for water. Leela brought it and she drank. ‘A nasty nasty trick.’

‘
What
she do so?’

She belched again. ‘Wait, you go hear.’ She rubbed her breasts. ‘God, this wind! King George leave me. She pick up a married man near Arouca. Is a blow, Ganesh.’

‘Oh God!’ Ganesh sympathized. ‘You telling me is a blow. But you mustn’t worry. You go get somebody else.’

‘She was nobody at all when I pick she up. All the clothes she had she had on she back. I buy she clothes. I take she round, show she to people. I get the Bombays to make she nice jewellery from my own gold.’

‘Is like what I do for this husband that God give me,’ Leela said.

The Great Belcher immediately laid her sorrow aside. ‘Yes, Leela? I hearing right? Is how you does always talk about your husband, girl?’ She nodded slowly up and down and put her right palm to her jaw as though she had toothache.

‘It
shock
me to hear about King George,’ Ganesh said, trying to make peace.

Leela became shrill. ‘Eh, eh, I have a husband who lose all sensa values and dragging my name in the mud, and still you don’t want me to complain?’

Ganesh stood between the women, but The Great Belcher moved him aside. ‘No, gimme a chance, boy. I want to hear this thing out to the end.’ She sounded more hurt than annoyed. ‘But, Leela, who you is to ask your husband what he doing or what he ain’t doing? Oho! This is the thing they call ed-u-ca-tion?’

‘What wrong with education? I educated, is true, but I don’t see why that should make everybody think they could insult me as they well want.’

Ganesh laughed unhappily. ‘Leela is a good girl. She don’t mean anything, really.’

The Great Belcher turned on him sharply. ‘What she say is the gospel truth, though. Everybody in Trinidad have the idea that you just sitting down here, scratching. Scratching not like hoeing, you know. It don’t grow food.’

‘I ain’t scratching, man. I reading and I writing.’

‘Is your story. I did come to let you know about King George, seeing as she did help you out so much at your wedding, but I really want to tell you, boy, that you have me worried. What you going to do about the future?’

Through her sobs Leela said, ‘I does keep on telling him that he could become a pundit. He know a lot more than most of the other pundits in Trinidad.’

The Great Belcher belched. ‘Is exactly what I come to tell him today. But Ganesh make to be a lot more than a ordinary pundit. If he is a Hindu he must realize by now that he have to use his learning to help out other people.’

‘What else you think I doing?’ Ganesh asked petulantly. ‘I sit down and spend my good good time writing a whole big book. Wasn’t for my benefit, you know.’

‘Man,’ Leela pleaded, ‘don’t start behaving so. Listen to what she have to tell you.’

The Great Belcher went on unperturbed. ‘It have a long time now I studying you, Ganesh. You have the Power all right.’

It was the sort of statement he had grown to expect from The Great Belcher. ‘What Power?’

‘To cure people. Cure the mind, cure the soul – chut! Man, you making me confuse, and you well know what I mean.’

Ganesh said acidly, ‘You want me to start curing people soul when you see me catching good hell to cure their toenail!’

Leela coaxed, ‘Man, the least you could do for me is to give it a try.’

‘She right, you know, Ganesh. Is the sort of Power you don’t even know you have until you start using it.’

‘All right, then. I have this great Power. How I go start using it? What I go tell people? “Your soul a little run down today: Here, take this prayer three times a day before meals.” ’

The Great Belcher clapped her hands. ‘Is exactly what I mean.’

‘You see, man. I did tell you you only had to listen a little bit.’

The Great Belcher went on, ‘Is the sort of thing your uncle, poor man, used to do until he dead.’ Leela’s face grew sad again at the mention of the dead, but The Great Belcher snubbed her by refusing to cry. ‘Ganesh, you have the Power. I could see it in your hands, your eyes, in the shape of your head. Just like your uncle, God bless him. He woulda be a great man today, if only he did live.’

Ganesh was interested now. ‘But how and where I go start, man?’

‘I go send you all your uncle old books. They have all the prayers and everything in it, and a lot more besides. Isn’t really the prayers that important, but the other things. Oh, Ganeshwa, boy, I too too glad now.’ In her relief she began to cry. ‘I carrying around these books like a weight on my chest, looking for the proper person to give them to, and you is the man.’

Ganesh smiled. ‘How you know that?’

‘Why else you think God make you live the sort of life you been living? Why else you think you been spending all these years doing nothing but reading and writing?’

‘Yes, is true.’ Ganesh said. ‘I did always feel I had something big to do.’

Then all three of them cried a little, Leela prepared a meal, they ate, and The Great Belcher took up her sorrow where she had left it. As she made ready to leave she began belching and rubbing her breasts and moaning, ‘Is a blow, Ganesh. King George do me a nasty trick. Ohh! Ohh! Ganesh, Ganesh, is a blow.’ And wailing, she left.

A fortnight later she brought a parcel wrapped in red cotton spattered with sandalwood paste and handed it over to Ganesh with appropriate ceremony. When Ganesh untied the parcel he saw books of many sizes and many types. All were in manuscript, some in Sanskrit, some in Hindi; some were of paper, some of palm strips. The palm strips bound together looked like folded fans.

Ganesh warned Leela off. ‘Don’t touch these books, girl, or I don’t know what going to happen to you.’

Leela understood and opened her eyes wide.

And at about the same time Ganesh discovered the Hollywood Hindus. The Hollywood Hindus are Hindus who live in or near Hollywood. They are holy, cultivated men who issue frequent bulletins about the state of their soul, the complexities and variations of which are endless and always worth description.

Ganesh was a little annoyed. ‘You think I could do this sort of thing in Trinidad and get away with it?’ he asked Beharry.

‘I suppose, if you really know, you only jealous them.’

‘Man, I could write a book like that every day if I put my mind to it.’

‘Ganesh, you is a big man now. The time come when you must forget other people and think about yourself.’

So he tried to forget the Hollywood Hindus and set about ‘preparing himself ‘, as he said. The process, it soon became clear, was going to take time.

Leela began to complain again. ‘Man, nobody seeing you go think that it have a war going on and that everywhere people making money. The Americans come to Trinidad now, and they giving away work, with all sort of big pay.’

‘Don’t approve of war,’ Ganesh said.

It was during this period of preparation that my mother took me to see Ganesh. I never knew how she got to know about him; but my mother was a sociable woman and I believe that she must have met The Great Belcher at some wedding or funeral. And, as I said at the beginning, if I had been more acute I would have paid more attention to the Hindi phrases Ganesh muttered over me while he thumped my foot about.