The Mystic Masseur (20 page)

‘And still he are calling it a little bird.’

‘You right, girl. The little bird grow up and come a big black
corbeau
.’

‘Dangerous man, pundit,’ Beharry warned. When Beharry came now to see Ganesh he had to go to the fern-smothered verandah upstairs. Downstairs was one large room where clients waited. ‘The time go come when people go start believing him. Is like a advertising campaign, you know.’

‘If you ask me,’ said Leela, in her fatigued, bored manner, ‘the man is a disgrace to Hindus in this place.’ She rested her head on her right shoulder and half-shut her eyes. ‘I remember how my father did give a man a proper horse-whipping in Penal. It are just what Narayan want.’

Ganesh leaned back in his morris chair. ‘The way I look at it is this.’

Beharry nibbled, all attention.

‘What would Mahatma Gandhi do in a situation like this?’

‘Don’t know, pundit.’

‘Write. That’s what he would do. Write.’

So Ganesh took up pen again. He had considered his writing career almost over; and was only planning, in a vague way, a spiritual autobiography on the lines of the Hollywood Hindus. But this was going to be a big thing, to be attempted much later, when he was ready for it. Now he had to act immediately.

He wanted to do things properly. He went to Port of Spain – his courage failed him at the last moment and he wore English clothes – to the Registrar-General’s Office in the Red House. There he registered Ganesh Publishing Company, Limited. The insignia of the firm was an open lotus.

Then he began to write again and found, to his delight, that the desire to write had not died, but was only submerged. He worked hard at his book, sitting up late at night after treating clients all day; and often Leela had to call him to bed.

Beharry rubbed his hands. ‘Oh, this Narayan going to get it good.’

The book, when it came out two months later, was a surprise to Beharry. It looked like a real book. It had hard covers; the type was big and the paper thick; and the whole thing looked substantial and authoritative. But Beharry was dismayed at the subject. The book was called
The Guide to Trinidad
.

‘Basdeo do a nice job this time,’ Ganesh said.

Beharry agreed, but looked doubtful.

‘It go knock hell out of Narayan. It go do you a lot of good and it go do Leela a lot of good.’

Beharry dutifully read
The Guide to Trinidad
. He found it good. The history, geography, and population of Trinidad were described in a masterly way. The book spoke about the romance of Trinidad’s many races. In a chapter called
The East in the West
, readers were told that they would be shocked to find a mosque in Port of Spain; and even more shocked to find, in a village called Fuente Grove, a genuine Hindu temple which looked as if it had been bodily transported from India. The Fuente Grove Hindu temple was considered well worth a visit, for spiritual and artistic reasons.

The anonymous author of the
Guide
was enthusiastic about the island’s modernity. The island, he stressed, had three up-to-date daily newspapers, and foreign advertisers could consider them good investments. But he deplored the absence of any influential weekly or monthly paper, and he warned foreign advertisers to be wary of the mushroom monthlies which claimed to be organs of certain sections of the community.

Ganesh sent free copies of the
Guide
to all the American Army camps in Trinidad, ‘to welcome’, as he wrote, ‘our brave brothers-in-arms’. He also sent copies to export agencies and advertising agencies in America and Canada which dealt with Trinidad.

Beharry did his best to hide his bewilderment.

Leela said, ‘It are beat me, if I see why for you doing all this.’

He left her to her worries; ordered her to get tablecloths, lots of knives, forks, and spoons; and warned her to look after the restaurant properly. He told Beharry it would be wise for him to lay in large stocks of rum and lager.

Presently the American soldiers began to pour into Fuente Grove and the village children had their first chew of gum. The soldiers came in jeeps and army lorries, some in taxis with girl-friends. They saw elephants in stone and were reassured, if not satisfied, but when Ganesh took them on a tour of his temple – he used the word ‘tour’ – they felt they had their money’s worth.

Leela counted more than five thousand Americans.

Beharry had never been so busy in all his life.

‘Is like what I did think,’ Ganesh said. ‘Trinidad is a small place and it ain’t have much for the poor Americans to do.’

Many of them asked for spiritual advice and all who asked received it.

‘Sometimes,’ Ganesh said, ‘I does feel that these Americans is the most religious people in the world. Even more than Hindus.’

‘Hollywood Hindus,’ muttered Beharry, but he nibbled so badly Ganesh didn’t catch what he was saying.

After three months
The Hindu
announced that it had to cut the number of its pages because it wished to help the war effort. Not many people besides Ganesh noticed that there were fewer advertisements for patent medicines and other internationally known products.
The Hindu
lost the glamour of illustrated advertisements; and Narayan was making money only from plain statements about small shops here and there in Trinidad.

But The Little Bird still twittered.

9. Press Pundit

G
ANESH FOUND HIMSELF
now a philosopher and arbiter. Indian villages in Trinidad still had
panchayats
, councils of elders, and he was often invited by them to give judgement in a case of minor theft or assault, or to settle a quarrel between husband and wife. Often, too, he was asked to address prayer-meetings.

His arrival at such a meeting was impressive. He came out of his taxi with dignity, tossed his green scarf over his shoulder, and shook hands with the officiating pundit. Then two more taxis came up with his books. Helpers fell upon these taxis, grabbed armfuls of books, and took them to the platform. The helpers were proud and busy people then, and looked almost as solemn as Ganesh. They ran from taxi to platform and back again, frowning, never saying a word.

Seated on the platform under a tasselled red canopy, and surrounded by his books, Ganesh looked the picture of authority and piety. His gaily-dressed audience rippled out from the platform in widening circles of diminishing splendour, from well-dressed businessmen and shopkeepers just below the platform to ragged labourers at the back, from extravagantly bedecked children sleeping on blankets and cushions to naked, spidery-limbed children sprawling on sugar-sacks.

People came to hear him not only because of his reputation but also because of the novelty of what he said. He spoke about the good life, about happiness and how to get it. He borrowed from Buddhism and other religions and didn’t hesitate to say so. Whenever he wished to strengthen a point he snapped his fingers and a helper held a book open towards the audience so that they could see that Ganesh wasn’t making it all up. He spoke in Hindi but the books he showed in this way were in English, and people were awed by this display of learning.

His main point was that desire was a source of misery and therefore desire ought to be suppressed. Occasionally he went off at a tangent to discuss whether the desire to suppress desire wasn’t itself a desire; but usually he tried to be as practical as possible. He spoke with fervour about the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Sometimes from that he moved on naturally to the war, and war in general, and to the quotation from Dickens’s
Child’s History of England
that ‘war is a dreadful thing’. At other times he said that happiness was only possible if you cleared your mind of desire and looked upon yourself as part of Life, just a tiny link in the vast chain of Creation. ‘Lie down on the dry grass and feel Life growing out from the rocks and earth beneath you, through you, and upwards. Look at the clouds and sky when it isn’t hot and feel that you are part of all that. Feel that everything else is an extension of you. Therefore you, who are all this, can never die.’

People sometimes understood and when they got up they felt a little nobler.

And it was precisely for this that now, in 1944, The Little Bird began attacking Ganesh. It seemed to have reconciled itself to his ‘so-called mysticism’.

The Little Bird said: ‘I am just a little birdie but I think it is surely a retrograde step for any community these days to look up to a religious visionary …’

The Great Belcher told Ganesh, ‘And, boy, Narayan start copying you. He start giving lectures now – in the towns. And he showing his own books and thing too. Something about religion and the people.’

‘Opium,’ Beharry said.

Every new revelation of The Little Bird was carefully studied in Fuente Grove.

‘It ain’t your mystical powers he jealousing now, pundit. He working for the elections in two years’ time. First election with universal adult franchise. Yes, universal adult franchise. Is what he have his eye on.’

Later issues of
The Hindu
seemed to show that Beharry was right. Spare inches of the magazine were no longer filled up with quotations from the
Gita
or the
Upanishads
. Now it was all:
Workers’ Unite! Each One Teach One, Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, Per Ardua ad Astra
, The Hindu
is an Organ of Progress, I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it
. The Little Bird began to agitate for A Fair Day’s Pay for a Fair Day’s Work, and Homes for the Destitute; later it announced the opening of
The Hindu
‘Homes for Destitutes’ fund.

One day Leela said to Suruj Mooma, ‘I are thinking of taking up social welfare work.’

‘My dear, is the said selfsame thing that Suruj Poopa
begging
me to do a long long time now. But, my dear, I ain’t have the time.’

The Great Belcher was enthusiastic and practical. ‘Leela, it have nine years I know you, and is the best idea you ever have. All this food I does come here and see you throwing away, you could give to poor people.’

‘Ah, Aunt, it are not much that I does throw away. If something are not use today, well it are use tomorrow. But how I could start up with this social welfare work?’

‘I go tell you how they does do it. You just get some children together, bring them inside the restaurant, and feed them up. Or you go outside, look for children, and feed them outside. Christmas-time come round now, you pick up two three balloons and you go round giving them away.’

‘Yes, Soomintra beginning to stock a lot of prutty prutty balloons.’

And every Sunday now Leela, with the help of The Great Belcher, did social work.

Ganesh worked on, unperturbed by Narayan and The Little Bird. It was as if Narayan’s taunts had encouraged him to do just the thing for which he was attacked. In this he was far-sighted; for certainly it was the books he wrote at this time which helped to establish his reputation, not only in the country, but also in Port of Spain. He used the material of his talks for
The Road to Happiness.
After that came
Re-incarnation, The Soul as I See It, The Necessity for Faith.
These books sold regularly and well; but none of them had spectacular success.

And then, one after the other, appeared the two books that made his name a household word in Trinidad.

The first book began: ‘On Thursday, May 2, at nine o’clock in the morning, just after I had had breakfast, I saw God. He looked at me and said …’

What God Told Me
must surely rank as a classic in Trinidad literature. Its stark simplicity, almost ingenuousness, is shattering. The character of the narrator is beautifully revealed, especially in the chapters of dialogue, where his humility and spiritual bewilderment counter-point the unravelling of many knotty metaphysical points. There were also some chapters of spirited prophecy. The end of the war was predicted, and the fate of certain local people.

The book set a fashion. Many people in many parts of Trinidad began seeing God. The most celebrated was Man-man of Miguel Street in Port of Spain. Man-man saw God, tried to crucify himself, and had to be put away.

And only two months after the publication of
What God Told Me
Ganesh scored a stupendous success of scandal. His inspiration was the musical toilet-roll rack. Because
Profitable Evacuation
was published during the war its title was misunderstood; fortunately, for it might not have been allowed if the authorities knew that it was concerned more or less with constipation. ‘A vital subject,’ Ganesh wrote in his Preface, ‘one that has adversely dogged human relationships since the beginning of time.’ The gist of the book was that evacuation could be made not only pleasurable but profitable, a means of strengthening the abdominal muscles. The system he recommended is roughly that which contortionists and weight-lifters call excavation.

This, printed on thick paper, with a cover of brightest yellow decorated with a lotus, established Ganesh finally, without question.

Left to himself Ganesh might not have taken any further action against Narayan. The Little Bird was only a twitter of protest amid whole-hearted and discerning applause. But people like The Great Belcher and Beharry didn’t like it.

Beharry, in particular, was upset. Ganesh had opened up to him vaster vistas of reading and knowledge; and it was because of Ganesh that he prospered. He had put up his new shop, all concrete and plaster and glass. Land-values in Fuente Grove had risen and he had profited by that too. From time to time he was asked by various Literary-Debating-and-Social-Welfare Societies to talk on aspects of Ganesh’s career: Ganesh the man, Ganesh the mystic, the contribution of Ganesh to Hindu thought. His fate was bound up with Ganesh’s and he, more than anyone, resented Narayan’s attacks.

He did what he could to encourage Ganesh to act.

‘The man attack you again this month, pundit.’

‘
Gaddaha!’

‘But it does look bad bad, pundit. Especially now that Ramlogan beginning to write against you in
The Hindu.
Is dangerous.’

But Ganesh wasn’t worried that Narayan was preparing for the 1946 elections. ‘I ain’t burning to be one of those damn crooks who does go up for elections.’

‘You hear the latest, pundit? Narayan form a party. The Hindu Association. Is a election stunt, pundit. He ain’t have a chance to win in Port of Spain. He have to come to the country and that is where he frighten you beat him.’

‘Beharry, you and me know what sort of thing Indian associations is in this place. Narayan and those people just like little girls playing dolly-house.’

Ganesh’s judgement was sound. At the first general meeting of the Hindu Association Narayan was elected President. The following were also elected: four Assistant-Presidents, two Vice-Presidents, four Assistant Vice-Presidents; many Treasurers; one Secretary-in-Chief, six Secretaries, twelve Assistant-Secretaries.

‘You see? They ain’t leave nobody out. Look, Beharry, boy, going about talking to all these prayer-meetings, I get to know Trinidad Indians like the back of my own hand.’

But then Narayan began playing the fool. He began sending off cables to India, to Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru and the All-India Congress; in addition to anniversary cables of all sorts: he noted centenaries, bicentenaries tercentenaries. And every time he sent a cable the news was reported in the
Trinidad Sentinel.
There was nothing to prevent Ganesh sending his own cables; but in India, where they didn’t know what was what in Trinidad, what chance would a cable signed
GANESH PUNDIT MYSTIC
have against one signed
NARAYAN
PRESIDENT
HINDU
ASSOCIATION
TRINIDAD
?