The Mystic Masseur (2 page)

Nineteen forty-six was the turning-point of Ganesh’s career; and, as if to underline the fact, in that year he published his autobiography,
The Years of Guilt
(Ganesh Publishing Co. Ltd, Port of Spain. $2.40). The book, variously described as a spiritual thriller and a metaphysical whodunit, had a considerable success of esteem in Central America and the Caribbean. Ganesh, however, confessed that the autobiography was a mistake. So, in the very year of publication it was suppressed and the Ganesh Publishing Company itself wound up. The wider world has not learnt of Ganesh’s early struggles, and Trinidad resents this. I myself believe that the history of Ganesh is, in a way, the history of our times; and there may be people who will welcome this imperfect account of the man Ganesh Ramsumair, masseur, mystic, and, since 1953,
M.B.E.

2. Pupil and Teacher

G
ANESH WAS NEVER
really happy during the four years he spent at the Queen’s Royal College. He went there when he was nearly fifteen and he was not as advanced as the other boys of his own age. He was always the oldest boy in his class, with some boys three or even four years younger than himself. But he was lucky to go to the college at all. It was by the purest chance that his father got the money to send him there. For years the old man had held on to five acres of waste land near Fourways in the hope that the oil companies would sink a well in it, but he could not afford to bribe the drillers and in the end he had to be content with a boundary well. It was disappointing and unfair, but opportune; and the royalties were enough to keep Ganesh in Port of Spain.

Mr Ramsumair made a lot of noise about sending his son to the ‘town college’, and the week before the term began he took Ganesh all over the district, showing him off to friends and acquaintances. He had Ganesh dressed in a khaki suit and a khaki toupee and many people said the boy looked like a little sahib. The women cried a little and begged Ganesh to remember his dead mother and be good to his father. The men begged him to study hard and help other people with his learning.

Father and son left Fourways that Sunday and took the bus to Princes Town. The old man wore his visiting outfit: dhoti,
koortah,
white cap, and an unfurled umbrella on the crook of his left arm. They knew they looked important when they got into the train at Princes Town.

‘Careful with your suit now,’ the old man said loudly, and his neighbours heard. ‘Remember you are going to the town college.’

When they got to St Joseph, Ganesh began to feel shy. Their dress and manner were no longer drawing looks of respect. People were smiling, and when they got off at the railway terminus in Port of Spain, a woman laughed.

‘I did tell you not to dress me up like this,’ Ganesh lied, and was near to sobbing.

‘Let them laugh,’ the old man replied in Hindi, and passed the palm of his hand over his thick grey moustache. ‘Jackasses bray at anything.’

‘Jackass’ was his favourite word of abuse, perhaps because the Hindi word was so rich and expressive:
gaddaha
.

They hurried to the house in Dundonald Street where Ganesh was to board, and Mrs Cooper, the tall and plump Negro landlady, laughed when she saw them but said, ‘The boy look like a real smart man, man.’

‘She is a good lady,’ the old man told Ganesh in Hindi. ‘You don’t have to worry about the food or anything here. She will look after you.’

Ganesh preferred not to remember what happened the next day when he was taken to school. The old boys laughed, and although he had not worn the khaki toupee, he felt uncomfortable in his khaki suit. Then there was the scene in the principal’s office: his father gesticulating with his white cap and umbrella; the English principal patient, then firm, and finally exasperated; the old man enraged, muttering, ‘
Gaddaha! Gaddaha!’

Ganesh never lost his awkwardness. He was so ashamed of his Indian name that for a while he spread a story that he was really called Gareth. This did him little good. He continued to dress badly, he didn’t play games, and his accent remained too clearly that of the Indian from the country. He never stopped being a country boy. He still believed that reading by any light other than daylight was bad for the eyes, and as soon as his classes were over he ran home to Dundonald Street and sat on the back steps reading. He went to sleep with the hens and woke before the cocks. ‘That Ramsumair boy is a real crammer,’ boys laughed; but Ganesh never became more than a mediocre student.

A fresh mortification awaited him. When he went home for his first holidays and had been shown off again, his father said, ‘It is time for the boy to become a real brahmin.’

The initiation ceremony was held that very week. They shaved his head, gave him a little saffron bundle, and said, ‘All right, off you go now. Go to Benares and study.’

He took his staff and began walking away briskly from Fourways.

As arranged, Dookhie the shopkeeper ran after him, crying a little and begging in English, ‘No, boy. No. Don’t go away to Benares to study.’

Ganesh kept on walking.

‘But what happen to the boy?’ people asked. ‘He taking this thing really serious.’

Dookhie caught Ganesh by the shoulder and said, ‘Cut out this nonsense, man. Stop behaving stupid. You think I have all day to run after you? You think you really going to Benares? That is in India, you know, and this is Trinidad.’

They brought him back home. But the episode is significant.

His head was still practically bald when he went back to school, and the boys laughed so much that the principal called him and said, ‘Ramsumair, you are creating a disturbance in the school. Wear something on your head.’

So Ganesh wore his khaki toupee in the classroom until his hair grew again.

There was another Indian boy, called Indarsingh, living in the house at Dundonald Street. He was also at the Queen’s Royal College, and although he was six months younger than Ganesh he was three forms ahead. He was a brilliant boy and everybody who knew him said he was going to be a great man. At sixteen Indarsingh was making long speeches in the Literary Society Debates, reciting verses of his own at Recitation Contests, and he always won the Impromptu Speech Contests. Indarsingh also played all games, not very well, but he had the sportsman’s instincts and it was this that caused him to be held up to the boys as an ideal. Indarsingh once persuaded Ganesh to play fooball. When Ganesh bared his pale, jaundiced legs, a boy spat in disgust and said, ‘Eh, eh, your foot don’t see sun at all at all!’ Ganesh played no more football, but he remained friendly with Indarsingh. Indarsingh, for his part, found Ganesh useful. ‘Come for a little walk in the Botanical Gardens,’ he would say to Ganesh, and during the whole of the walk Indarsingh would talk non-stop, rehearsing his speech for the next debate. At the end he would say, ‘Good eh? Demn good.’ This Indarsingh was a short, square boy, and his walk, like his talk, had the short man’s jauntiness.

Indarsingh was Ganesh’s only friend, but the friendship was not to last. At the end of Ganesh’s second year Indarsingh won a scholarship and went to England. To Ganesh, Indarsingh had achieved a greatness beyond ambition.

In due course Ganesh wrote the Cambridge School Certificate and surprised everybody by passing in the second grade. Mr Ramsumair sent his congratulations to Ganesh, offered an annual prize to the college, and told Ganesh that he had found a nice girl for him to marry.

‘The old man really rushing you,’ Mrs Cooper said.

Ganesh wrote back that he had no intention of getting married, and when his father replied that if Ganesh didn’t want to get married he must consider himself an orphan, Ganesh decided to consider himself an orphan.

‘You have to get a work now,’ Mrs Cooper said. ‘Mind you, I not thinking about what you have to pay me, but still you must get a work. Why you don’t go and see your headmaster?’

So he did. The headmaster looked a little puzzled and asked, ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Teach,’ Ganesh said, because he felt he ought to flatter his headmaster.

‘Teach? Strange. Primary schools?’

‘What you mean, sir?’

‘You’re not thinking of teaching in
this
school?’

‘Nah, sir. You making joke.’

In the end, with the headmaster’s help, Ganesh was enrolled in the Government Training College for teachers in Port of Spain, where there were many more Indians, and he felt less ill at ease. He was taught many important subjects and from time to time he practised on little classes from schools near by. He learned to write on a blackboard and overcame his dislike of the sound of scraping chalk. Then they turned him out to teach.

They sent him to a school in a rowdy district in the east end of Port of Spain. The headmaster’s office was also a classroom choked up with young boys. The headmaster sat under a picture of King George V and gave Ganesh an interview.

‘You don’t know how lucky you is,’ he began, and jumped up immediately, saying, ‘Gimme a chance. It have a boy here I must give a good cut-arse to. Just gimme a chance.’

He squeezed his way between desks to a boy in the back row. The class was instantly silent and it was possible to hear the noise from the other classrooms. Then Ganesh heard the boy squealing behind the blackboard.

The headmaster was sweating when he came back to Ganesh. He wiped his big face with a mauve handkerchief and said, ‘Yes, I was telling you that you is a lucky man. Most of the times they just lose a new man like you somewhere in the country, all up by Cunaripo and all sorta outa the way places.’

The headmaster laughed and Ganesh felt he had to laugh too; but as soon as he did so the headmaster became stern and said, ‘Mr Ramsumair, I don’t know what views you have about educating the young, but I want to let you know right away, before we even start, that the purpose of this school is to form, not to inform. Everything is planned.’ He pointed to a framed time-table, done in inks of three colours, hanging next to the picture of King George V. ‘Miller, the man you replacing, paint that. He sick,’ the headmaster said.

‘It look good and I sorry Miller sick,’ Ganesh said.

The headmaster leaned back in his chair and beat a ruler on the green blotter in front of him. ‘What is the purpose of the school?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Form – ’ Ganesh began.

‘Not – ’ the headmaster encouraged.

‘Inform.’

‘You quick, Mr Ramsumair. You is a man after my own heart. You and me going to get on good good.’

Ganesh was given Miller’s class, the Remove. It was a sort of rest-station for the mentally maimed. Boys remained there uninformed for years and years, and some didn’t even want to leave. Ganesh tried all the things he had been taught at the Training College, but the boys didn’t play fair.

‘I can’t teach them nothing at all,’ he complained to the headmaster. ‘You teach them Theorem One this week and next week they forget it.’

‘Look, Mr Ramsumair. I like you, but I must be firm. Quick, what is the purpose of the school?’

‘Form not inform.’

Ganesh gave up trying to teach the boys anything, and was happy enough to note a week-to-week improvement in his Record Book. According to that book, the Remove advanced from Theorem One to Theorem Two in successive weeks, and then moved on unexhausted to Theorem Three.

Having much time on his hands, Ganesh was able to observe Leep next door. Leep had been at the Training College with him, and Leep was still keen. He was nearly always at the blackboard, writing, erasing, constantly informing, except for the frequent occasions when he rushed off to flog some boy and disappeared behind the celotex screen which separated his class from Ganesh’s.

On the Friday before Miller was due back at the school (he had had a fractured pelvis), the headmaster called Ganesh and said, ‘Leep sick.’

‘What happen?’

‘He just say he sick and he can’t come on Monday.’

Ganesh leaned forward.

‘Now don’t quote me,’ the headmaster said. ‘Don’t quote me at all. But this is how I look at it. If you leave the boys alone, they leave you alone. They is good boys, but the parents – God! So when Miller come back, you have to take Leep class.’

Ganesh agreed; but he took Leep’s class for only one morning.

Miller was very angry with Ganesh when he returned, and at the recess on Monday morning went to complain to the headmaster. Ganesh was summoned.

‘I leave a good good class,’ Miller said. ‘The boys was going on all right. Eh, eh, I turn my back for a week – well, two three months – and when I turn round again, what I see? The boys and them ain’t learn nothing new and they even forget what I spend so much time trying to teach them. This teaching is a art, but it have all sort of people who think they could come up from the cane-field and start teaching in Port of Spain.’

Ganesh, suddenly angry for the first time in his life, said, ‘Man, go to hell, man!’

And left the school for good.

He went for a walk along the wharves. It was early afternoon and the gulls mewed amid the masts of sloops and schooners. Far out, he saw the ocean liners at anchor. He allowed the idea of travel to enter his mind and just as easily allowed it to go out again. He spent the rest of the afternoon in a cinema, but this was torture. He especially resented the credit titles. He thought, ‘All these people with their name in big print on the screen have their bread butter, you hear. Even those in little little print. They not like me.’