The Mystic Masseur (3 page)

He needed all Mrs Cooper’s solace when he went back to Dundonald Street.

‘I can’t take rudeness like that,’ he told her.

‘You a little bit like your father, you know. But you mustn’t worry, boy. I can feel your aura. You have a powerhouse for a aura, man. But still, you was wrong throwing up a good work like that. It wasn’t as if they was working you hard.’

At dinner she said, ‘You can’t go and ask your headmaster again.’

‘No,’ he agreed quickly.

‘I been thinking. I have a cousin working in the Licensing Office. He could get you a job there, I think. You could drive motor car?’

‘I can’t even drive donkey-cart, Mrs Cooper.’

‘It don’t matter. He could always get a licence for you, and then you ain’t have to do much driving. You just have to test other drivers, and if you anything like my cousin, you could make a lot of money giving out licence to all sort of fool with money.’

She thought again. ‘And, yes. It have a man I know does work at Cable and Wireless. Eh, but my brain coming like a sieve these days. It have a telegram here for you, come this afternoon.’

She went to the sideboard and pulled an envelope from under a vase stuffed with artificial flowers.

Ganesh read the telegram and passed it to her.

‘What damn fool send this?’ she said. ‘It enough to make anybody dead of heart failure.
Bad news come home now
. Who is this Ramlogan who sign it?’

‘Never hear about him,’ Ganesh said.

‘What you think it is?’

‘Oh, you know …’

‘But ain’t that strange?’ Mrs Cooper interrupted. ‘Just last night I was dreaming about a dead. Yes, it really strange.’

3. Leela

A
LTHOUGH IT WAS
nearly half past eleven when his taxi got to Fourways that night, the village was alive and Ganesh knew that Mrs Cooper was right. Someone had died. He sensed the excitement and recognized all the signs. Lights were on in most of the houses and huts, there was much activity on the road, and his ears caught the faint hum, as of distant revelry. It wasn’t long before he realized that it was his father who had died. Fourways seemed to be waiting for the taxi and the moment people saw Ganesh sitting in the back they began to wail.

The house itself was chaos. He had hardly opened the taxi doors when scores of people he didn’t know scrambled towards him with outstretched arms, bawling; and led, almost carried, him into the house which was full of even more mourners he didn’t know or remember.

He could hear the taxi-driver saying over and over, ‘Man, I guess long time what the case was. We stepping on the gas all the way from Port of Spain, driving like madness all in the dark. And the boy so mash up inside he not even crying.’

A fat, sobbing man embraced Ganesh and said, ‘You get my telegram? Fust telegram I send. I is Ramlogan. You don’t know me but I know your father. Just yesterday, just yesterday’ – Ramlogan broke down and wept afresh – ‘just yesterday I meet him and I say, “Baba” – I does always call him that – “Baba,” I say, “come inside and have something to eat.” I take over Dookhie shop now, you know. Yes, Dookhie dead nearly seven months now and I take over the shop.’

Ramlogan’s eyes were red and small with weeping. ‘ “Baba,” I say, “come inside and have something to eat.” And you know what he say?’

A woman put her arms around Ganesh and asked, ‘What he say?’

‘You want to know what he say?’ Ramlogan embraced the woman. ‘He say, “No, Ramlogan. I don’t want to eat today.” ’

He could hardly finish the sentence.

The woman removed her hands from Ganesh and put them on her head. She shrieked, twice, then dropped into a wail: ‘ “No, Ramlogan, I don’t want to eat today.” ’

Ramlogan wiped his eyes with a thick hairy finger. ‘Today,’ he sobbed, holding out both hands towards the bedroom, ‘today he can’t eat at all.’

The woman shrieked again. ‘Today he can’t eat at all.’

In her distress she tore the veil off her face and Ganesh recognized an aunt. He put his hand on her shoulder.

‘You think I could see Pa?’ he asked.

‘Go and see your Pa, before he go for good,’ Ramlogan said, the tears running down his fat cheeks to his unshaved chin. ‘We wash the body and dress it and everything already.’

‘Don’t come with me,’ Ganesh said. ‘I want to be alone.’

When he had closed the door behind him the wailing sounded far away. The coffin rested on a table in the centre of the room and he couldn’t see the body from where he was. To his left a small oil lamp burned low and threw monstrous shadows on the walls and the galvanized-iron ceiling. When he walked nearer the table his footsteps resounded on the floor-planks and the oil lamp shivered. The old man’s moustache still bristled fiercely but the face had fallen and looked weak and tired. The air around the table felt cool and he saw that it came from the casing of ice around the coffin. It was a room of the dead, strange with the smell of camphor balls, and there was nothing alive in it except himself and the squat yellow flame of the oil lamp, and they were both silent. Only, from time to time, the water from the melting ice plopped into the four pans at the feet of the table and punctured the silence.

He didn’t know what he thought or felt but he didn’t want to cry and left the room. They were waiting for him to come out and quickly encircled him. He heard Ramlogan saying, ‘Come on, man, give the boy air. Is his father dead, you know. His only father.’ And the wailing began again.

No one asked him about plans for the cremation. Everything seemed arranged already and Ganesh was content that it should be so. He allowed Ramlogan to take him away from the house, with its sobs and shrieks and lamentations, its gas lamps, oil lamps, bottle flambeaux, bright lights everywhere except in the small bedroom.

‘No cooking here tonight,’ Ramlogan said. ‘Come and eat at the shop.’

Ganesh didn’t sleep that night and everything he did seemed unreal. Afterwards he remembered the solicitude of Ramlogan – and his daughter; remembered returning to the house where no fire could be lit, remembered the sad songs of the women lengthening out the night; then, in the early morning, the preparations for the cremation. He had to do many things, and he did without thought or question everything the pundit, his aunt, and Ramlogan asked him. He remembered having to walk round the body of his father, remembered applying the last caste-marks to the old man’s forehead, and doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.

When it was all over – his father burnt, the ashes scattered, and everybody, including his aunt, gone away – Ramlogan said, ‘Well, Ganesh, you is a man now.’

Ganesh took stock of his position. First he considered money. He owed Mrs Cooper eleven dollars for two weeks board and lodging, and he found that of his own money he had no more than sixteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. He had about twenty dollars to collect from the school, but he had made up his mind not to ask for it and to return it if it were sent him. He had not stopped at the time to think who had paid for the cremation; it was only later, just before his marriage, he found that his aunt had paid for it. Money was not an immediate problem, now that he had the oil royalties – nearly sixty dollars a month – which made him practically a rich man in a place like Fourways. Still, the royalties could dry up at any moment; and although he was twenty-one, and educated, he had no means of earning a living.

One thing gave him hope. As he wrote afterwards in
The Years of Guilt
: ‘In conversation with Shri Ramlogan I learnt a curious fact. My father had died that Monday morning between five minutes past ten and a quarter past ten – just about the time, in short, when I had the dispute with Miller, and was deciding to give up my teaching job. I was much struck by the coincidence, and it was only then, for the first time, I felt I had something big ahead of me. For it was indeed a singular conspiracy of events that pulled me away from the emptiness of urban life back into the stimulating peace and quiet of the country.’

Ganesh was happy to get away from Port of Spain. He had spent five years there but he had never become used to it or felt part of it. It was too big, too noisy, too alien. It was better to be back in Fourways, where he was known and respected and had the double glamour of a college education and a father recently dead. They called him ‘sahib’, and some parents encouraged their children to call him ‘Teacher Ganesh’, but this brought back unhappy memories and Ganesh made them stop it.

‘It wrong to call me that,’ he said, adding cryptically, ‘I feel I was teaching the wrong things to the wrong people.’

For more than two months he loafed. He didn’t know what he wanted to do or what he could do, and he was beginning to doubt the value of doing anything at all. He ate at the houses of people he knew and, for the rest, merely wandered around. He bought a second-hand bicycle and went for long rides in the hilly lanes near Fourways.

People said, ‘He doing a lot of thinking, that boy Ganesh. He full with worries, but still he thinking thinking all the time.’

Ganesh would have liked his thoughts to be deep and it disturbed him that they were simple things, concerned with passing trifles. He began to feel a little strange and feared he was going mad. He knew the Fourways people, and they knew him and liked him, but now he sometimes felt cut off from them.

But he couldn’t escape Ramlogan. Ramlogan had a sixteen-year-old daughter he wanted married, and wanted married to Ganesh. It was an open secret in the village. Ganesh was always getting little gifts from Ramlogan – a special avocado pear, a tin of Canadian salmon or Australian butter – and whenever he passed the shop Ramlogan was sure to call him in.

‘Eh, eh, sahib. What happening that you passing without saying a word? People go think we vex.’

Ganesh could not find it in his heart to refuse Ramlogan’s invitation, though he knew that whenever he looked at the doorway leading to the room at the back of the shop he was going to see Ramlogan’s daughter peering through the grimy lace curtains. He had seen her on the night of his father’s death, but he hadn’t paid much attention to her then. Now he saw that the girl behind the curtains was tall; sometimes, when she peered too closely, he could see her eyes wide with mischief, simplicity, and awe, all at once.

He couldn’t link the girl with her father. She was thin and fair, Ramlogan fat and almost black. He seemed to have only one shirt, a dirty striped blue thing which he wore collarless and open down his hairy chest to just where his round and big belly began. He looked of a piece with his shop. Ganesh got the impression that every morning someone went over everything in it – scales, Ramlogan, and all – with a greased rag.

‘It ain’t dirty,’ Ramlogan said. ‘It just
look
dirty. Sit down, sahib, sit down. You ain’t have to blow any dust or anything away. You just sit down on that bench against the wall and let we have a good chat. I is not a educated man, but I like to hear educated people talk.’

Ganesh, reluctantly seated, did not at once respond.

‘It have nothing like a good chat,’ Ramlogan began, slipping off his stool and dusting the counter with his fat hands. ‘I like hearing educated people giving off ideas.’

Meeting with further silence, Ramlogan remounted his stool and spoke about the death. ‘Your father, sahib, was a good man.’ His voice was heavy with grief. ‘Still, we give him a good funeral. Fust funeral I attend in Fourways, you know, sahib. I see a lot of funeral in my time, but I go say now and I don’t care who hear me say it, that your father funeral was the best I see. Smatterer fact, Leela – my daughter, you know, second and best – Leela say is the best funeral
she
see. She say she count more than five hundred people from all over Trinidad at the funeral, and it had a lot of cars following the body. People did like your father, sahib.’

Then they both fell silent, Ramlogan out of respect for the dead, Ganesh because he didn’t know what he was expected to say; and the conversation ended.

‘I like these little chats we does have, sahib,’ Ramlogan would say, walking to the door with Ganesh. ‘I ain’t educated meself but I like to hear educated people giving off ideas. Well, sahib, why you don’t drop in again? Let we say, tomorrow?’

Ramlogan later solved the conversation problem by pretending that he couldn’t read and getting Ganesh to read the newspapers for him; and he listened, elbows on the counter, his hands holding his greasy head, his eyes filling with tears.

‘This reading, sahib, is a great great thing,’ Ramlogan once said. ‘Just think. You take up this paper that to me just look like a dirty sheet with all sort of black mark and scrawl all over the place’ – he gave a little self-deprecating laugh – ‘you take this up and – eh! eh! – before I have time to even scratch my back, man, I hear you reading from it and making a lot of sense with it. A great thing, sahib.’