The Mystic Masseur (16 page)

‘Is books you selling on the side, or what?’ the taxi-driver asked.

The woman looked sideways at him and nodded towards the sign. She began to say something when the taxi-driver, for no apparent reason, blew his horn and drowned her words.

Leela came running out, but with a glance Ganesh told her to keep out of the way. To the woman he said, ‘Come into the study.’

The word had the desired effect.

‘But take off your shoes here in the verandah first.’

Respect turned to awe. And when the woman brushed through the Nottingham lace curtains into the study and saw all the books, she looked abject.

‘My only vice,’ Ganesh said.

The woman just stared.

‘I don’t smoke. I don’t drink.’

She sat awkwardly on a blanket on the floor. ‘Is a matter of life and death, mister, so whatever I say you mustn’t laugh.’

Ganesh looked straight at her. ‘I never laugh. I listen.’

‘Is about my son. A cloud following him.’

Ganesh didn’t laugh. ‘What sort of cloud?’

‘A black cloud. And every day is getting nearer. The cloud even talking to the boy now. The day the cloud reach him the boy go dead. I try everything. The real doctors and them want to put the boy in the mad-house in St Ann’s, but you know that once they put anybody there they does get mad for true. So what I do? I take him to the priest. The priest say the boy possess, and paying for his sins. It have a long time now I see your advertisement, but I didn’t know what you could do.’

As she spoke Ganesh scribbled in one of his note-books. He had written,
Black boy under a black cloud;
and he had drawn a great black cloud. ‘You mustn’t worry. Lots of people see clouds. How long your son has been seeing the cloud?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, the whole bacchanal begin not long after his brother dead.’

Ganesh added to the black cloud in his note-book and said, ‘Hmmh!’ Then he chanted a short Hindi hymn, snapped his notebook shut, and threw his pencil down. ‘Bring the boy tomorrow. And don’t worry about priests. Tell me,
you
see the cloud?’

The woman looked distressed. ‘No. That is the thing. None of we ain’t see the cloud, apart from the boy.’

‘Well, don’t worry. Things would be bad if you really did see the cloud.’

He led her to the taxi. The taxi-driver was sleeping with the
Trinidad Sentinel
over his face. He was awakened, and Ganesh watched the car drive away.

‘I did feel this coming, man,’ Leela said. ‘I did tell you that your luck change.’

‘We don’t know what going to happen yet, girl. Give me a chance to think this thing out.’

He remained a long time in the study consulting his uncle’s books. His ideas were slowly beginning to form, when Beharry came in a temper.

‘Ganesh, how you so ungrateful?’

‘What happening now?’

Beharry looked helpless in his anger. He nibbled so furiously that for a while he couldn’t speak. When he could, he stammered. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know. Why you couldn’t walk up to the shop to tell me what happen, eh? For a hundred and one weeks you coming up all the time, but today you prefer to make me leave my shop, leave only little Suruj in charge, and come to see you.’

‘But I was going to come later, man.’

‘Tell me, what go happen if somebody come to the shop and beat up little Suruj and Suruj Mooma and thief everything?’

‘Was going to come, Beharry. Only thing I was doing a little thinking first.’

‘No, you wasn’t. You just getting conceited now, that is all. Is the trouble with Indians all over the world.’

‘But this new thing I handling is something really big.’

‘You sure you could handle it? But look, you see how stupid I is, still letting myself be interested in your affairs! You could handle it?’

‘God will give me a little help.’

‘All right, all right. Give me all this flashy talk. But don’t come round begging me for anything, you hear.’

And Beharry left.

Ganesh read and thought deeply all that day and most of the night.

‘I don’t know why for you wasting all this time on one little black boy,’ Leela said. ‘Anybody would think you was a schoolchild doing homework.’

When Ganesh saw the boy next morning he felt he had never seen anyone so tormented. It was torment heightened by a deep sense of helplessness. Though the boy was thin now and his arms looked bony and brittle, it was clear that he had once been strong and healthy. His eyes were dead, lack-lustre. In them you could see not the passing shock of momentary fear, but fear as a permanent state, fear so strong that it had ceased to thrill.

The first thing Ganesh said to the boy was, ‘Look, son, you mustn’t worry. I want you to know that I can help you. You believe I can help you?’

The boy didn’t move but it seemed to Ganesh that he had recoiled a little. ‘How I know that you not laughing at me, just as everybody else laughing at the back of their mind?’

‘You see me laughing? I believe in you, but you must believe in me too.’

The boy looked down at Ganesh’s feet. ‘Something tell me you is a good man and I believe in you.’

Ganesh asked the boy’s mother to leave the room and when she left he asked, ‘You see the cloud now?’

The boy looked Ganesh in the face for the first time. ‘Yes.’ The voice was part whisper, part scream. ‘It here now and the hands it reaching out getting longer and longer.’

‘Oh, God!’ Ganesh gave a sudden shriek. ‘I see it now too. Oh, God!’

‘You see it? You see it?’ The boy put his arms around Ganesh. ‘You see how it chasing me? You see the hands it have? You hear what it saying?’

‘You and me is one,’ Ganesh said, still a little breathlessly, breaking into pure dialect. ‘God! Hear my heart beating. Only you and me see it because you and me is one. But, listen to something I going to tell you. You fraid the cloud, but the cloud fraid me. Man, I been beating clouds like he for years and years. And so long as you with me, it not going to harm you.’

The boy’s eyes filled with tears and he tightened his embrace on Ganesh. ‘I
know
you is a good man.’

‘It just can’t touch you with me around. I have powers over these things, you know. Look around at all these books in this room, and look at all those writings on the wall and all the pictures and everything. These things help me get the power I have and cloud fraid these things. So don’t frighten. And now tell me how it happen.’

‘Tomorrow is the day.’

‘What day?’

‘It coming to get me tomorrow.’

‘Don’t talk stupidness. It coming tomorrow all right, but how it could take you away if you with me?’

‘It saying so for a year.’

‘What, you seeing it for a whole year?’

‘And it getting bigger all the time.’

‘Now, look, man. We must stop talking about it as though we fraid it. These things know when you fraid them, you know, and then they does behave like real bad Johns. How you getting on at school?’

‘I stop.’

‘What about your brothers and sisters?’

‘I ain’t have no sisters.’

‘And your brothers?’

The boy broke into a loud cry. ‘My brother dead. Last year. I didn’t want him to dead. I never want Adolphus to dead.’

‘Eh, eh, but who saying you want him to dead?’

‘Everybody. But it ain’t true.’

‘He dead last year?’

Tomorrow go make one year exact.’

‘Tell me how he dead.’

‘A truck knock him down. Ram him against a wall, break him up and mash him up. But he was trying to get away even then. He try to pull hisself away and all he could do was take his foot out of the shoe, the left foot. He didn’t want to dead either. And the ice only melting in the hot sun and running down on the pavement next to the blood.’

‘You see this?’

‘I didn’t see it happen. But it was really me that shoulda go to buy the ice, not he. Ma ask me to go and buy some ice for the grapefruit juice and I ask my brother to go instead and he go and this thing happen to him. The priest and everybody else say was my fault and I have to pay for my sins.’

‘What sort of damn fool tell you that? Well, anyway, you mustn’t talk about it now. Remember, you wasn’t responsible. Wasn’t your fault. Is clear as anything to me that you didn’t want your brother to dead. As for this cloud, we go fix him tomorrow self, when he get so close to you I could reach him and settle him.’

‘You know, Mr Ganesh, I think he getting fraid of you now.’

‘Tomorrow we go make him run, you watch and see. You want to sleep here tonight?’

The boy smiled and looked a little perplexed.

‘All right. Go home. Tomorrow we go settle this Mister Cloud. What time you say he was coming to get you?’

‘I didn’t tell you. Two o’clock.’

‘By five past two you go be the happiest boy in the world, believe me.’

On the verandah the boy’s mother and the taxi-driver sat silently, the taxi-driver on the floor with his feet on the step.

‘The boy go be all right,’ Ganesh said.

The taxi-driver rose, dusting the seat of his trousers, and spat into the yard, just missing the display of Ganesh’s books. The boy’s mother also rose and put her arm around her son’s shoulders. She looked without expression at Ganesh.

After they had gone away Leela said, ‘Man, I hope you could help the lady out. I feel too sorry for she. She just sit down quiet all the time, not saying anything, she face small with sadness.’

‘Girl, this is the most important case anybody ever handle in the world. I know that that boy going to dead tomorrow unless I do something for him. It give you a funny feeling, you know. Is like watching a theatre show and then finding out afterwards that they was really killing people on the stage.’

‘I was thinking, man. I didn’t like the taxi-driver. He come here, he see all the books, he never mention them once. He ask for water and for this and that and he ain’t even say, “Thank you.” And he making a pile of money bringing these poor people here every day.’

‘Girl, but why you have to be like your father for? Why you have to try to take my mind off what I doing? You want me to start driving taxi now?’

‘I was just thinking.’

When he had washed his hands after eating, Ganesh said, ‘Leela, take out my clothes – the English clothes.’

‘Where you going?’

‘It have a man I want to see in the Oilfields.’

‘What for, man?’

‘
Tonerre!
But you full of questions today. You and Beharry is one.’

She asked no more questions and did as she was told. Ganesh changed from dhoti and
koortah
to trousers and shirt. Before he left he said, ‘You know, sometimes I glad I get a college education.’

He came back radiant later in the afternoon and immediately began clearing out the bedroom. He paid no attention to Leela’s objections. He placed the bed in the drawing-room, the study; and took the table from the study into the bedroom. He turned the table over on its top and arranged a three-sided screen round the legs. He made Leela hang a heavy curtain over the window, and he went over the wooden walls systematically, blocking up every chink and cranny that let in light. He rearranged the pictures and quotations, giving the goddess Lakshmi pride of place just above the screened and upturned table. Below the goddess he placed a candle-bracket.

‘It look frightening,’ Leela said.

He walked about the darkened room, rubbing his hands, and humming a song from a Hindi film. ‘It don’t matter if we have to sleep in the study.’

Then they agreed on arrangements for the next day.

All that night camphor and incense burned in the bedroom and in the morning Ganesh, rising early, went to see how the room smelled.

Leela was still asleep. He shook her by the shoulder. ‘It look all right and it smell all right, girl. Get up and milk the cow. I hear the calf bawling.’

He bathed while Leela milked the cow and cleaned out the cow-pen; did his
puja
while Leela made tea and
roti
; and when Leela started to clean the house, he went for a walk. The sun was not yet hot, the leaves of razor-grass still looked frosted with the dew, and the two or three dusty hibiscus shrubs in the village carried fresh pink flowers that were to quail before midday. ‘This is the big day,’ Ganesh said aloud, and prayed again for success.

Shortly after twelve the boy, his mother and father arrived, in the same taxi as before. Ganesh, dressed once more in his Hindu garments, welcomed them in Hindi, and Leela interpreted, as arranged. They took off their shoes in the verandah and Ganesh led them all to the darkened bedroom, aromatic with camphor and incense, and lit only by the candle below the picture of Lakshmi on her lotus. Other pictures were barely visible in the semi-darkness: a stabbed and bleeding heart, a putative likeness of Christ, two or three crosses, and other designs of dubious significance.

Ganesh seated his clients before the screened table, then he himself sat down out of view behind the screen. Leela, her long black hair undone, sat in front of the table and faced the boy and his parents. In the dark room it was hard to see more than the white shirts of the boy and his father.