V. Naipaul - The Mystic Masseur

Swami and Partap were among the new Assistant-Presidents. The boy was a simple Secretary. Indarsingh was offered the post of Fourth Assistant to the Chief Secretary, but declined.

Ganesh’s first act as President was to send a cable to the All-India Congress. Awkwardly, it wasn’t the occasion of any important anniversary. He cabled:

KEEP MAHATMAJI IDEALS ALIVE STOP HINDU ASSOCIATION

TRINIDAD WITH YOU INDEPENDENCE STRUGGLE STOP

BEST WISHES

GANESH PRESIDENT HINDU ASSOCIATION

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

VOLUME ONE Number Two of The Dharma never came out.

Swami and Partap could not hide their relief. But the boy told Ganesh, ‘I ain’t want to meddle in any more of this child-play, you hear.’ And he told Swami, ‘Next time you start up a paper leave me out.’

But The Dharma had served its purpose. Narayan kept his word and retired from public life. The election campaigns for Trinidad’s first General Elections raged around him while he remained at his house in Mucurapo in Port of Spain a useless invalid. The Hindu dropped the Each One Teach One and Per Ardua ad Astra slogans and consoled itself once more with quotations from the Hindu scriptures. The Little Bird disappeared and its place was taken by Sparks from a Brahmin’s Log-fire.

Ganesh didn’t have time for the affairs of the Hindu Association. The island elections were two months off and he found himself embroiled. Indarsingh had decided to go up in Ganesh’s ward and it was this rather than the promptings of the Association or Beharry or Swami that made Ganesh stand for the elections.

‘Narayan did have a little point there, pundit,’ Beharry said. ‘About religious visionaries. And Suruj Mooma too, she say curing soul go do but it wouldn’t put food in people mouth.’

Ganesh asked Leela’s advice.

She said, ‘But you have to go up. You not going to sit down and let that boy fool the people?’

‘Indarsingh ain’t a boy, man.’

‘It are hard not to believe that. Suruj Mooma right, you know. Too much of this education is a bad bad thing. You remain here, educate yourself, and yet you is a bigger man than Indarsingh for all the Ox-ford he say he go to.’

The Great Belcher cried. ‘Oh, Ganeshwa, is the word I was waiting for from your mouth. Is your duty to go up and help the poor people.’

So Ganesh went up for the elections.

‘But,’ Leela warned, ‘it are not going to make me happy to see my husband getting into all sort of low argument with all sort of low people. I don’t want you to drag your name in the mud.’

He didn’t. He fought the cleanest election campaign in Trinidad history. He had no platform. And his posters were the simplest things: GANESH WILL DO WHAT HE CAN, A VOTE FOR GANESH IS A VOTE FOR GOD; sometimes even plainer statements, GANESH WILL WIN and GANESH IS A MAN OF GOOD AND GOD.

He held no election meetings, but Swami and Partap arranged many prayer-meetings for him. He worked hard to expand his Road to Happiness lectures; three or even four taxis had to take the books he required. Quite casually, in the middle of a lecture, he would say in Hindi, ‘It may interest one or two of you in this gathering tonight to hear that I am a candidate for the elections next month. I can promise nothing. In everything I shall consult God and my conscience, even at the risk of displeasing you. But that is by the way. We were talking, you remember, about the transmigration of souls. Now, this theory was also put forward by a philosopher of Ancient Greece, but I have brought along some books tonight to show you that it is more than likely that the Greek got the idea from India …’

Beharry said one day, ‘Suruj Mooma don’t think the sign in front the house look nice, pundit. She say it so mildew it spoil the whole house.’

So Ganesh took down the sign which threatened that requests for monetary assistance would not be entertained, and put up a new and simpler one which said: Spiritual solace may be had here at any time.

At a prayer-meeting one evening Ganesh noticed the boy among the helpers taking away the books from the taxis to the platform. Swami said, ‘I bring the boy to apologize for what he say, sahib. He say he want to make up by helping with the poster and them. He crying all the time, sahib. And don’t mind he look little, he have a master hand for painting signs.’

The boy’s lettering was elaborate. He was never content with a plain letter; he shadowed everything and sometimes it was hard to read what he had written. But he was keen and everybody liked him. Beharry, who was also working on the posters, said, ‘I wish sometimes that God did give me a son like this. Suruj, he all right, but Suruj, pundit, he ain’t have brains, man. He always in some Remove class. It does beat me. I is a intelligent man and Suruj Mooma ain’t a fool.’

Beharry’s praise spurred the boy on and he designed the most famous poster of the elections:

GANESH is

Able

Nice

Energetic

Sincere

HOLY

Against all this it was clear from the start that Indarsingh didn’t have a chance. But he fought gamely. He got the support of the Party for Progress and Unity, the PPU, an organization hastily slung together two months before the elections. The PPU’s aims, like its organization, were vague; and Indarsingh had to fend for himself. His speeches were long, carefully thought-out things — later published by the author in book form with the title Colonialism: Four Essays — about The Economics of Colonialism, Colonialism in Perspective, The Anatomy of Oppression, The Approach to Freedom. Indarsingh travelled about with his own blackboard and a box of coloured chalks, illustrating his arguments with diagrams. Children liked him. They surrounded him at the beginning and end of a meeting and begged for ‘a little tiny little piece of chalk you did thinking of throwing away’. The older people called him the ‘Walking Dictionary’.

Once or twice Indarsingh attempted an attack on Ganesh but he soon learned better. Ganesh never mentioned Indarsingh at all.

Leela liked Indarsingh less and less as polling day came nearer. ‘All this fancy talk in all this fancy accent he are giving the people here, it are beat me why they don’t fling something big at his head.’

‘It ain’t nice to talk so, Leela,’ Ganesh said. ‘He is a good boy. He fighting a clean clean election and it ain’t so clean in the rest of Trinidad, I can tell you.’

Leela turned to Beharry. ‘You bear what he are saying? It are just this sort of goodness and big mind that is dangerous in Trinidad. He ain’t have enough, it look like, from people like Narayan.’

Beharry said, ‘Well, it have a lot in what the pundit say. Indarsingh is a good boy, but he still a boy. He does talk too big. Mark you, that all right for we here. I could understand and Ganesh pundit could understand, but is different for the ordinary people.’

One night Ganesh came back late to Fuente Grove from a prayer-meeting at Bamboo Walk, a village at the boundary of his ward. Upstairs in the drawing-room Leela, Beharry, and the boy were, as usual, working on the posters. They were at the dining-table. But Ganesh saw somebody else kneeling next to the refrigerator, filling in the outlines of a GANESH IS A MAN OF GOOD AND GOD poster spread on the floor. He was a big fat man; but it wasn’t Swami.

‘Hello, sahib,’ the man said casually, and went on filling in the letters.

It was Ramlogan.

‘Hello, Ramlogan. It have a long time I ain’t see you.’

Ramlogan didn’t look up. ‘Busy, sahib. Very busy with the shop.’

Ganesh said, ‘Leela, I hope you have a lot of food for me tonight. Anything that leave over, I could eat all of it. I hungry like a horse. Eh, but Leela, you ain’t give your father anything?’