V. Naipaul - The Mystic Masseur

She moved with alacrity to the refrigerator.

Ramlogan kept on filling in letters.

‘What you think of it?’

‘Is very nice wordings, sahib.’ Still Ramlogan didn’t look up.

‘Leela think them up.’

‘She is like that, sahib.’

Leela handed round the Coca-Cola.

Ramlogan, who was resting forward on his hands, knelt upright and laughed. ‘It have years now I selling this Coca-Cola but you know, sahib, I never touch it before. Is so it does happen. You ever notice that carpenters always living in some sort of breakdown old shack?’

Leela said, ‘Man, your food waiting for you in the kitchen.’

Ganesh went through the drawing-room to the large room next to the back verandah.

Leela had tears in her eyes. ‘Man, is the second time in my life you make me feel proud of you.’ She leaned on him.

He didn’t push her away.

‘The first time was with the boy and the cloud. Now is with Pa.’

She wiped her eyes and seated Ganesh at the kitchen table.

In the week before polling day Ganesh decided to suspend mystic activity and hold a Bhagwat , a seven-day prayer-meeting.

He said, ‘Ever since I small I promising myself to hold my own Bhagwat , but I could never find the time.’

The boy said, ‘But now is the time to move around, pundit, talking to the people and them.’

‘I know,’ Ganesh said sadly. ‘But something telling me that if I don’t have a Bhagwat now, I would never have one again.’

Leela didn’t approve. ‘Is easy for you, just sitting down and reciting prayers and thing to the people. But they don’t come to Bhagwat just for prayers, I can tell you. They come for the free food.’

However, The Great Belcher and Suruj Mooma and Ramlogan rallied round and helped Leela with the great week-long task of cooking. The Bhagwat was held in the ground floor of the house; people were fed in the bamboo restaurant at the side; and there was a special kitchen at the back. Logs burned in huge holes in the ground and in great black iron pots over the holes simmered rice, dal , potatoes, pumpkins, spinach of many sorts, karhee , and many other Hindu vegetarian things. People came to the Bhagwat from many miles around and even Swami, who had organized so many Bhagwats , said, ‘Is the biggest and best thing I ever organize.’

Leela complained more than ever of being tired; The Great Belcher had unusual trouble with the wind; Suruj Mooma moaned all the time about her hands.

But Ramlogan told Ganesh, ‘Is like that with women and them, sahib. They complaining, but it have nothing they like better than a big fête like this. Was the same with Leela mother. Always going off to sing at somebody wedding, coming back hoarse hoarse next morning and complaining. But the next time a wedding come round and you turn to look for Leela mother — she ain’t there.’

As a supreme gesture Ganesh invited Indarsingh to the last night of the Bhagwat, on the eve of polling day.

Leela told Suruj Mooma and The Great Belcher, ‘Is just what I are expecting from that husband of mine. Sometimes these man and them does behave as if they lose their senses.’

Suruj Mooma stirred the cauldron of dal with a ladle a yard long. ‘Ah, my dear. But what we go do without them?’

Indarsingh came in an Oxford blazer and Swami, as organizer of the Bhagwat, introduced him to the audience. ‘I got to talk English to introduce this man to you, because I don’t think he could talk any Hindi. But I think all of all you go agree with me that he does talk English like a pukka Englishman. That is because he have a foreign education and he only just come back to try and help out the poor Trinidad people. Ladies and gentlemen — Mr Indarsingh, Bachelor of Arts of Oxford University, London, England.’

Indarsingh gave a little hop, fingered his tie, and, stupidly, talked about politics.

Indarsingh lost his deposit and had a big argument with the secretary of the PPU who had also lost his. Indarsingh said that the PPU had promised to compensate members who lost their deposits. He found he was talking to nobody; for after the election results the Party for Progress and Unity just disappeared.

It was Beharry’s idea that the people of Fuente Grove should refer to Ganesh as the Hon’ble Ganesh Ramsumair, M.L.C.

‘Who you want?’ he asked visitors. ‘The Onble Ganesh Ramsumair, Member of the Legislative Council?’

Here it might be well to pause awhile and consider the circumstances of Ganesh’s rise, from teacher to masseur, from masseur to mystic, from mystic to M.L.C. In his autobiography, The Years of Guilt, which he began writing at this time, Ganesh attributes his success (he asks to be pardoned for using the word) to God. The autobiography shows that he believed strongly in predestination; and the circumstances which conspired to elevate him seem indeed to be providential. If he had been born ten years earlier it is unlikely, if you take into account the Trinidad Indian’s attitude to education at that time, that his father would have sent him to the Queen’s Royal College. He might have become a pundit, and a mediocre pundit. If he had been born ten years later his father would have sent him to America or Canada or England to get a profession — the Indian attitude to education had changed so completely — and Ganesh might have become an unsuccessful lawyer or a dangerous doctor. If, when the Americans descended on Trinidad in 1941, Ganesh had taken Leela’s advice and got a job with the Americans or become a taxi-driver, like so many masseurs, the mystic path would have been closed to him for ever and he would have been ruined. Today these masseurs, despite their glorious American interlude, are finding it hard to make a living. Nobody wants the quack dentist or the unqualified masseur in Trinidad now; and Ganesh’s former colleagues of the world of massage have had to keep on driving taxis, but at three cents a mile now, so great is the competition.

‘It is clear,’ Ganesh wrote, ‘that my Maker meant me to be a mystic.’

He was served even by his enemies. Without Narayan’s attacks Ganesh would never have taken up politics and he might have remained a mystic. With unfortunate results. Ganesh found himself a mystic when Trinidad was crying out for one. That time is now past. But some people haven’t realized it and today in odd corners of Trinidad there is still a backwash of penurious mystics. Providence indeed seemed to have guided Ganesh. Just as it told him when to take up mysticism, so it told him when to give it up.

His first experience as an M.L.C. was a mortifying one. The members of the new Legislative Council and their wives were invited to dinner at Government House and although a newly-founded scurrilous weekly saw the invitation as an imperialist trick all the members turned up. But not all the wives.

Leela was shy but she made out that she couldn’t bear the thought of eating off other people’s plates. ‘It are like going to a restaurant. You don’t know what the food are and you don’t know who cook it.’

Ganesh was secretly relieved. ‘I have to go. But none of this nonsense about knife and fork for me, you hear. Going to eat with my fingers, as always, and I don’t care what the Governor or anybody else say.’

But the morning before the dinner he consulted Swami.

‘The first idea to knock out of your head, sahib, is that you going to like what you eat. This eating with a knife and fork and spoon is like a drill, man.’ And he outlined the technique.

Ganesh said, ‘Nah, nah. Fish knife, soup spoon, fruit spoon, tea spoon — who sit down and make up all that?’

Swami laughed. ‘Do what I use to do, sahib. Just watch everybody else. And eat a lot of good rice and dal before you go.’