V. Naipaul - The Mystic Masseur

Every day Leela became more refined. She often went to San Fernando to visit Soomintra, and to shop. She came back with expensive saris and much heavy jewellery. But the most important change was in her English. She used a private accent which softened all harsh vowel sounds; her grammar owed nothing to anybody, and included a highly personal conjugation of the verb to be.

She told Suruj Mooma, ‘This house I are building, I doesn’t want it to come like any erther Indian house. I wants it to have good furnitures and I wants everything to remain prutty prutty. I are thinking about getting a refrigerator and a few erther things like that.’

‘I are thinking too,’ Suruj Mooma said. ‘I are thinking about building up a brand-new modern shop, a real proper grocery like those in Suruj Poopa books, with lots of tins and cans on good good shelf —’

‘— and all that people says about Indians not being able to keep their house properly is true true. But I are going to get ours painted prutty prutty —’

‘— a long time now Suruj Poopa say that, and we going to paint up the shop, paint it up from top to bottom, and we going to keep it prutty prutty, with a nice marble-top counter. But, mark you, we not going to forget where we live. That going to be prutty prutty too —’

‘— with good carpets like therse Soomintra and I see in Gopal’s, and nice curtains —’

‘— morris chairs and spring-cushions. But look, I hear the baby crying and I think he want his feed. I has to go now, Leela, my dear.’

With so much to say to each other now, Leela and Suruj Mooma remained good friends.

And Leela wasn’t talking just for the sake of talk. Once the house was completed — and that, for a Trinidad Indian, is in itself an achievement — she had it painted and she expressed her Hindu soul in her choice of bright and clashing colours. She commissioned one house-painter to do a series of red, red roses on the blue drawing-room wall. She had the British Guianese temple-builder execute a number of statues and carvings which she scattered about in the most unlikely places. She had him build an ornate balustrade around the flat roof, and upon this he was later commissioned to erect two stone elephants, representing the Hindu elephant god Ganesh. Ganesh thoroughly approved of Leela’s decorations and designed the elephants himself.

‘I don’t give a damn what Narayan want to say about me in The Hindu ,’ he said. ‘Leela, I going to buy that refrigerator for you.’

And he did. He placed it in the drawing-room, where it hid part of the rose-design on the wall but could be seen from the road.

He didn’t forget the smaller things. From an Indian dealer in San Fernando he bought two sepia reproductions of Indian drawings. One represented an amorous scene; in the other God had come down to earth to talk to a sage. Leela didn’t like the first drawing. ‘It are not going to hang in my drawing-room.’

‘You have a bad mind, girl.’ Under the amorous drawing he wrote, Will you come to me like this? And under the other, or like this?

The drawings went up.

And after they had settled that they really began hanging pictures. Leela started with photographs of her family.

‘I ain’t want Ramlogan picture in my house,’ Ganesh said.

‘I are not going to take it down.’

‘All right, leave Ramlogan hanging up. But see what I going to put up.’

It was a photograph of a simpering Indian film-actress.

Leela wept a little.

Ganesh said blandly, ‘It does make a change to have a happy face in the house.’

The one feature of the new house which thrilled them for a long time was the lavatory. It was so much better than the old cess-pit. And one Saturday, in San Fernando, Ganesh came upon an ingenious toy which he decided to use in the lavatory. It was a musical toilet-paper rack. Whenever you pulled at the paper, it played Yankee Doodle Dandy .

This, and the sepia drawings, were to inspire two of Ganesh’s most successful writings.

Narayan’s attacks increased, and varied. One month Ganesh was accused of being anti-Hindu; another month of being racialist; later he was a dangerous atheist; and so on. Soon the revelations of The Little Bird threatened to swamp The Hindu .

‘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.