The Mystic Masseur (5 page)

Ganesh had become more than a regular visitor at Ramlogan’s. He was eating there every day now; and when he called, Ramlogan no longer allowed him to remain in the shop, but invited him in immediately to the room at the back. This caused Leela to retreat to the bedroom or the kitchen.

And even the back room began to undergo improvements. The table got an oilcloth cover; the unpainted, mildewed partitions became gay with huge Chinese calendars; the hammock made from a sugar sack was replaced by one made from a flour sack. A vase appeared one day on the oilcloth on the table; and less than a week later paper roses bloomed in the vase. Ganesh himself was treated with increasing honour. At first they fed him out of enamel dishes. Now they gave him earthenware ones. They knew no higher honour.

The table itself was to offer a further surprise. One day a whole series of booklets on The Art of Salesmanship appeared on it.

Ramlogan said, ‘I bet you does miss all the big books and thing you did have in Port of Spain, eh, sahib?’

Ganesh said he didn’t.

Ramlogan strove to be casual. ‘I have a few books myself. Leela put them out on the table.’

‘They look pretty and nice.’

‘Education, sahib, is one hell of a thing. Nobody did bother to send me to school, you know. When I was five they send me out to cut grass instead. But look at Leela and she sister. Both of them does read
and
write, you know, sahib. Although I don’t know what happening to Soomintra since she married that damn fool in San Fernando.’

Ganesh flipped through the pages of one of the booklets. ‘Yes, they look as really nice books.’

‘Is really for Leela I buy the book, sahib. I say, if the girl can read, we must give she something to read. Ain’t true, sahib?’

‘Is not true, Pa,’ a girl’s voice said, and they turned to see Leela at the kitchen door.

Ramlogan turned back quickly to Ganesh. ‘Is the sort of girl she is, sahib. She don’t like people to boast about she. She shy. And if it have one thing she hate, is to hear lies. I was just testing she, to show you.’

Leela, not looking at Ganesh, said to Ramlogan, ‘You buy those books from Bissoon. When he went away you get so vex you say that if you see him again you go do for him.’

Ramlogan laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘This Bissoon, sahib, is a real smart seller. He does talk just as a professor, not so good as you, but still good. But what really make me buy the books is that we did know one another when we was small and in the same grass-cutting gang. We was ambitious boys, sahib.’

Ganesh said again, ‘I think they is good books.’

‘Take them home, man. What book make for if not to read? Take them home and read them up, sahib.’

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.

‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’

It read:

NOTICE

NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!

ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!

Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’

That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.’

‘But who is your shop assistants?’

‘Leela say is the law to have the sign up, sahib. But, smatterer fact, I don’t like the idea of having a girl in the shop.’

Ganesh had taken away the booklets on salesmanship and read them. The very covers, shining yellow and black, interested him; and what he read enthralled him. The writer had a strong feeling for colour and beauty and order. He spoke with relish about new paint, dazzling displays, and gleaming shelves.

‘These is first-class books,’ Ganesh told Ramlogan.

‘You must tell Leela so, sahib. Look, I go call she and you you go tell she and then perhaps she go want to read the books sheself.’

It was an important occasion and Leela acted as though she felt its full importance. When she came in she didn’t look up and when her father spoke she only lowered her head a bit more and sometimes she giggled, coyly.

Ramlogan said, ‘Leela, you hear what the sahib tell me. He like the books.’

Leela giggled, but decorously.

Ganesh asked, ‘Is you who write the sign?’

‘Yes, is me who write the sign.’

Ramlogan slapped his thigh and said, ‘What I did tell you, sahib? The girl can really read and really write.’ He laughed.

Then Leela did a thing so unexpected it killed Ramlogan’s laughter.

Leela spoke to Ganesh. She asked
him
a question!

‘You could write too, sahib?’

It took him off his guard. To cover up his surprise he began rearranging the booklets on the table.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I could write.’ And then, stupidly, almost without knowing what he was saying, ‘And one day I go write books like these. Just like these.’

Ramlogan’s mouth fell open.

‘You only joking, sahib.’

Ganesh slapped his hand down on the booklets, and heard himself saying, ‘Yes, just like these.
Just
like these.’

Leela’s wide eyes grew wider and Ramlogan shook his head in amazement and wonder.

4. The Quarrel with Ramlogan

‘I
SUPPOSE,
’ Ganesh wrote in
The Years of Guilt,
‘I had always, from the first day I stepped into Shri Ramlogan’s shop, considered it as settled that I was going to marry his daughter. I never questioned it. It all seemed preordained.’

What happened was this.

One day when Ganesh called Ramlogan was wearing a clean shirt. Also, he looked freshly washed, his hair looked freshly oiled; and his movements were silent and deliberate, as though he were doing a
puja.
He dragged up the small bench from the corner and placed it near the table; then sat on it and watched Ganesh eat, all without saying a word. First he looked at Ganesh’s face, then at Ganesh’s plate, and there his gaze rested until Ganesh had eaten the last handful of rice.

‘Your belly full, sahib?’

‘Yes, my belly full.’ Ganesh wiped his plate clean with an extended index finger.

‘It must be hard for you, sahib, now that your father dead.’

Ganesh licked his finger. ‘I don’t really miss him, you know.’

‘No, sahib, don’t tell me. I
know
is hard for you. Supposing, just supposing – I just putting this up to you as a superstition, sahib – but just supposing you did want to get married, it have nobody at all to fix up things for you.’

‘I don’t even know if I want to get married.’ Ganesh rose from the table, rubbing his belly until he belched his appreciation of Ramlogan’s food.

Ramlogan rearranged the roses in the vase. ‘Still, you is a educated man, and you could take care of yourself. Not like me, sahib. Since I was five I been working, with nobody looking after me. Still, all that do something for me. Guess what it do for me, sahib.’

‘Can’t guess. Tell me what it do.’

‘It give me cha’acter and sensa values, sahib. That’s what it give me. Cha’acter and sensa values.’

Ganesh took the brass jar of water from the table and went to the Demerara window to wash his hands and gargle.

Ramlogan was smoothing out the oilcloth with both hands and dusting away some crumbs, mere specks. ‘I know,’ he said apologetically, ‘that for a man like you, educated and reading books night and day, shopkeeping is a low thing. But I don’t care what people think. You, sahib, answer me this as a educated man: you does let other people worry you?’

Ganesh, gargling, thought at once of Miller and the row at the school in Port of Spain, but when he spat out the water into the yard he said, ‘Nah. I don’t care what people say.’

Ramlogan pounded across the floor and took the brass jar from Ganesh. ‘I go put this away, sahib. You sit down in the hammock. Ooops! Let me dust it for you first.’

When he had seated Ganesh, Ramlogan started to walk up and down in front of the hammock.

‘People can’t harm me,’ he said, holding his hands at his back. ‘All right, people don’t like me. All right, they stop coming to my shop. That harm me? That change my cha’acter? I just go to San Fernando and open a little stall in the market. No, don’t stop me, sahib. Is exactly what I would do. Take a stall in the market. And what happen? Tell me, what happen?’

Ganesh belched again, softly.

‘What happen?’ Ramlogan gave a short crooked laugh. ‘Bam! In five years I have a whole chain of grocery shop. Who laughing then? Then you go see them coming round and begging, “Mr Ramlogan” – that’s what it go be then, you know:
Mister
Ramlogan – “Mr Ramlogan, gimme this, gimme that, Mr Ramlogan.” Begging me to go up for elections and a hundred and one stupid things.’

Ganesh said, ‘You ain’t have to start opening stall in San Fernando market now, thank God.’

‘That is it, sahib. Just just as you say. Is all God work. Count my property now. Is true I is illiterate, but you just sit down in that hammock and count my property.’

Ramlogan was walking and talking with such unusual energy that the sweat broke and shone on his forehead. Suddenly he halted and stood directly in front of Ganesh. He took away his hands from behind his back and started to count off his fingers. ‘Two acres near Chaguanas. Good land, too. Ten acres in Penal. You never know when I could scrape together enough to make the drillers put a oil-well there. A house in Fuente Grove. Not much, but is something. Two three houses in Siparia. Add up all that and you find you looking at a man worth about twelve thousand dollars, cool cool.’

Ramlogan passed his hand over his forehead and behind his neck. ‘I know is hard to believe, sahib. But is the gospel truth. I think is a good idea, sahib, for you to married Leela.’

‘All right,’ Ganesh said.

He never saw Leela again until the night of their wedding, and both he and Ramlogan pretended he had never seen her at all, because they were both good Hindus and knew it was wrong for a man to see his wife before marriage.

He still had to go to Ramlogan’s, to make arrangements for the wedding, but he remained in the shop itself and never went to the back room.

‘You is not like Soomintra damn fool of a husband,’ Ramlogan told him. ‘You is a modern man and you must have a modern wedding.’

So he didn’t send the messenger around to give the saffron-dyed rice to friends and relations and announce the wedding. ‘That old-fashion,’ he said. He wanted printed invitations on scalloped and gilt-edged cards. ‘And we must have nice wordings, sahib.’

‘But you can’t have nice wordings on a thing like a invitation.’

‘You is the educated man, sahib. You could think of some.’

‘
R.S.V.P.?
’

‘What that mean?’

‘It don’t mean nothing, but it nice to have it.’

‘Let we have it then, man, sahib! You is a modern man, and too besides, it sound as pretty wordings.’

Ganesh himself went to San Fernando to get the cards printed. The printer’s shop was, at first sight, a little disappointing. It looked black and bleak and seemed to be manned only by a thin youth in ragged khaki shorts who whistled as he operated the hand-press. But when Ganesh saw the cards go in blank and come out with his prose miraculously transformed into all the authority of type, he was struck with something like awe. He stayed to watch the boy set up a cinema hand-bill. The boy, whistling without intermission, ignored Ganesh altogether.

‘Is on this sort of machine they does print books?’ Ganesh asked.

‘What else you think it make for?’

‘You print any good books lately?’

The boy dabbed some ink on the roller. ‘You ever hear of Trinidad people writing books?’

‘
I
writing a book.’

The boy spat into a bin full of ink-stained paper. ‘This must be a funny sort of shop, you know. The number of people who come in here and ask me to print the books they writing in invisible ink, man!’

‘What you name?’

‘Basdeo.’

‘All right, Basdeo, boy. The day go come when I go send you a book to print.’

‘Sure, man. Sure. You write it and I print it.’

Ganesh didn’t think he liked Basdeo’s Hollywood manner, and he instantly regretted what he had said. But so far as this business of writing books was concerned, he seemed to have no will: it was the second time he had committed himself. It all seemed pre-ordained.

‘Yes, they is pretty invitation cards,’ Ramlogan said, but there was no joy in his voice.

‘But what happen now to make your face long long as mango?’

‘Education, sahib, is one hell of a thing. When you is a poor illiterate man like me, all sort of people does want to take advantage on you.’

Ramlogan began to cry. ‘Right now, right right now, as you sitting down on that bench there and I sitting down on this stool behind my shop counter, looking at these pretty pretty cards, you wouldn’t believe what people trying to do to me. Right now it have a man in Siparia trying to rob my two house there, all because I can’t read, and the people in Penal behaving in a funny way.’

‘What they doing so?’

‘Ah, sahib. That is just like you. I know you want to help me, but is too late now. All sort of paper with fine fine writing they did make me sign and everything, and now – now everything lost.’

Ganesh had not seen Ramlogan cry so much since the funeral. He said, ‘Well, look. If is the dowry you worried about, you could stop. I don’t want a big dowry.’

‘Is the shame, sahib, that eating me up. You know how with these Hindu weddings everybody does know how much the boy get from the girl father. When, the morning after the wedding the boy sit down and they give him a plate of kedgeree, with the girl father having to give money and keep on giving until the boy eat the kedgeree, everybody go see what I give you, and they go say, “Look, Ramlogan marrying off his second and best daughter to a boy with a college education, and this is all the man giving.” Is that what eating me up, sahib. I know that for you, educated and reading books night and day, it wouldn’t mean much, but for me, sahib, what about my cha’acter and sensa values?’

‘You must stop crying and listen. When it come to eating the kedgeree, I go eat quick, not to shame you. Not too quick, because that would make people think you poor as a church-rat. But I wouldn’t take much from you.’

Ramlogan smiled through his tears. ‘Is just like you, sahib, just what I did expect from you. I wish Leela did see you and then she woulda know what sort of man I choose for she husband.’

‘I wish I did see Leela too.’

‘Smatterer fact, sahib, I know it have some modern people nowadays who don’t even like waiting for money before they eat the kedgeree.’

‘But is the custom, man.’

‘Yes, sahib, the custom. But still I think is a disgrace in these modern times. Now, if it was
I
was getting married, I wouldn’t want any dowry and I woulda say, “To hell with the kedgeree, man.” ’

As soon as the invitations were out Ganesh had to stop visiting Ramlogan altogether, but he wasn’t alone in his house for long. Dozens of women descended on him with their children. He had no idea who most of them were; sometimes he recognized a face and found it hard to believe that the woman with the children hanging about her was the same cousin who was only a child herself when he first went to Port of Spain.

The children treated Ganesh with contempt.

A small boy with a running nose said to him one day, ‘They tell me is you who getting married.’

‘Yes, is me.’

The boy said, ‘Ahaha!’ and ran away laughing and jeering.

The boy’s mother said, ‘Is something we have to face these days. The children getting modern.’

Then one day Ganesh discovered his aunt among the women, she who had been one of the principal mourners at his father’s funeral. He learnt that she had not only arranged everything then, but had also paid for it all. When Ganesh offered to pay back the money she became annoyed and told him not to be stupid.

‘This life is a funny thing, eh,’ she said. ‘One day somebody dead and you cry. Two days later somebody married, and then you laugh. Oh, Ganeshwa boy, at a time like this you want your own family around you, but what family you have? Your father, he dead; your mother, she dead too.’

She was so moved she couldn’t cry; and for the first time Ganesh realized what a big thing his marriage was.