V. Naipaul - The Mystic Masseur

Leela’s pride in Ganesh’s books was balanced by her worry about money. ‘Man, all this book-buying go do,’ she said, ‘but it not going to pay. You got to start thinking of making some money now.’

‘Look, girl. I have enough worries and I don’t want you to make my head any hotter, you hear.’

Then two things happened almost at the same time, and his fortunes were changed for ever.

The Great Belcher, continually on circuit, called one day.

‘Is a blow, Ganesh,’ she began. ‘A big big blow. You can’t trust nobody these days.’

Ganesh respected his aunt’s sense of the dramatic. ‘ What happen now so, then?’

‘King George do me a nasty trick.’

Ganesh showed his interest. She paused to belch and call for water. Leela brought it and she drank. ‘A nasty nasty trick.’

‘ What she do so?’

She belched again. ‘Wait, you go hear.’ She rubbed her breasts. ‘God, this wind! King George leave me. She pick up a married man near Arouca. Is a blow, Ganesh.’

‘Oh God!’ Ganesh sympathized. ‘You telling me is a blow. But you mustn’t worry. You go get somebody else.’

‘She was nobody at all when I pick she up. All the clothes she had she had on she back. I buy she clothes. I take she round, show she to people. I get the Bombays to make she nice jewellery from my own gold.’

‘Is like what I do for this husband that God give me,’ Leela said.

The Great Belcher immediately laid her sorrow aside. ‘Yes, Leela? I hearing right? Is how you does always talk about your husband, girl?’ She nodded slowly up and down and put her right palm to her jaw as though she had toothache.

‘It shock me to hear about King George,’ Ganesh said, trying to make peace.

Leela became shrill. ‘Eh, eh, I have a husband who lose all sensa values and dragging my name in the mud, and still you don’t want me to complain?’

Ganesh stood between the women, but The Great Belcher moved him aside. ‘No, gimme a chance, boy. I want to hear this thing out to the end.’ She sounded more hurt than annoyed. ‘But, Leela, who you is to ask your husband what he doing or what he ain’t doing? Oho! This is the thing they call ed-u-ca-tion?’

‘What wrong with education? I educated, is true, but I don’t see why that should make everybody think they could insult me as they well want.’

Ganesh laughed unhappily. ‘Leela is a good girl. She don’t mean anything, really.’

The Great Belcher turned on him sharply. ‘What she say is the gospel truth, though. Everybody in Trinidad have the idea that you just sitting down here, scratching. Scratching not like hoeing, you know. It don’t grow food.’

‘I ain’t scratching, man. I reading and I writing.’

‘Is your story. I did come to let you know about King George, seeing as she did help you out so much at your wedding, but I really want to tell you, boy, that you have me worried. What you going to do about the future?’

Through her sobs Leela said, ‘I does keep on telling him that he could become a pundit. He know a lot more than most of the other pundits in Trinidad.’

The Great Belcher belched. ‘Is exactly what I come to tell him today. But Ganesh make to be a lot more than a ordinary pundit. If he is a Hindu he must realize by now that he have to use his learning to help out other people.’

‘What else you think I doing?’ Ganesh asked petulantly. ‘I sit down and spend my good good time writing a whole big book. Wasn’t for my benefit, you know.’

‘Man,’ Leela pleaded, ‘don’t start behaving so. Listen to what she have to tell you.’

The Great Belcher went on unperturbed. ‘It have a long time now I studying you, Ganesh. You have the Power all right.’

It was the sort of statement he had grown to expect from The Great Belcher. ‘What Power?’

‘To cure people. Cure the mind, cure the soul — chut! Man, you making me confuse, and you well know what I mean.’

Ganesh said acidly, ‘You want me to start curing people soul when you see me catching good hell to cure their toenail!’

Leela coaxed, ‘Man, the least you could do for me is to give it a try.’

‘She right, you know, Ganesh. Is the sort of Power you don’t even know you have until you start using it.’

‘All right, then. I have this great Power. How I go start using it? What I go tell people? “Your soul a little run down today: Here, take this prayer three times a day before meals.” ’

The Great Belcher clapped her hands. ‘Is exactly what I mean.’

‘You see, man. I did tell you you only had to listen a little bit.’

The Great Belcher went on, ‘Is the sort of thing your uncle, poor man, used to do until he dead.’ Leela’s face grew sad again at the mention of the dead, but The Great Belcher snubbed her by refusing to cry. ‘Ganesh, you have the Power. I could see it in your hands, your eyes, in the shape of your head. Just like your uncle, God bless him. He woulda be a great man today, if only he did live.’

Ganesh was interested now. ‘But how and where I go start, man?’

‘I go send you all your uncle old books. They have all the prayers and everything in it, and a lot more besides. Isn’t really the prayers that important, but the other things. Oh, Ganeshwa, boy, I too too glad now.’ In her relief she began to cry. ‘I carrying around these books like a weight on my chest, looking for the proper person to give them to, and you is the man.’

Ganesh smiled. ‘How you know that?’

‘Why else you think God make you live the sort of life you been living? Why else you think you been spending all these years doing nothing but reading and writing?’

‘Yes, is true.’ Ganesh said. ‘I did always feel I had something big to do.’

Then all three of them cried a little, Leela prepared a meal, they ate, and The Great Belcher took up her sorrow where she had left it. As she made ready to leave she began belching and rubbing her breasts and moaning, ‘Is a blow, Ganesh. King George do me a nasty trick. Ohh! Ohh! Ganesh, Ganesh, is a blow.’ And wailing, she left.

A fortnight later she brought a parcel wrapped in red cotton spattered with sandalwood paste and handed it over to Ganesh with appropriate ceremony. When Ganesh untied the parcel he saw books of many sizes and many types. All were in manuscript, some in Sanskrit, some in Hindi; some were of paper, some of palm strips. The palm strips bound together looked like folded fans.

Ganesh warned Leela off. ‘Don’t touch these books, girl, or I don’t know what going to happen to you.’

Leela understood and opened her eyes wide.

And at about the same time Ganesh discovered the Hollywood Hindus. The Hollywood Hindus are Hindus who live in or near Hollywood. They are holy, cultivated men who issue frequent bulletins about the state of their soul, the complexities and variations of which are endless and always worth description.

Ganesh was a little annoyed. ‘You think I could do this sort of thing in Trinidad and get away with it?’ he asked Beharry.

‘I suppose, if you really know, you only jealous them.’

‘Man, I could write a book like that every day if I put my mind to it.’

‘Ganesh, you is a big man now. The time come when you must forget other people and think about yourself.’

So he tried to forget the Hollywood Hindus and set about ‘preparing himself ‘, as he said. The process, it soon became clear, was going to take time.

Leela began to complain again. ‘Man, nobody seeing you go think that it have a war going on and that everywhere people making money. The Americans come to Trinidad now, and they giving away work, with all sort of big pay.’

‘Don’t approve of war,’ Ganesh said.