The Mystic Masseur

by V. S. Naipaul

  Ganesh frowned.

  ‘Sahib, wasn’t a trick I was working back on you.’

  ‘Working back? Trick? What trick you have to work back? Anybody passing in the road this hot Sunday afternoon and hearing you talk like this go swear I work some trick on you.’

  Ramlogan placed the palms of his hands on the counter. ‘Sahib, you know you getting me vex now. I ain’t like other people, you know. I know you is a mystic, but don’t provoke me, sahib. When I get vex, I don’t know what I could do.’

  Ganesh waited.

  ‘If you wasn’t my son-in-law, you know I take up your little tail and fling it through that door?’

  ‘Ramlogan, ain’t you does ever get a little tired of being smart smart all the time, even in your old age?’

  Ramlogan thumped the counter. ‘When at your wedding you rob me, we didn’t get any of this damn mystical stupidness. Look, move out of here before I lose my temper. And too besides, is Government road and anybody can run taxi to Fuente Grove. Ganesh, you just try and do anything and I put you in the papers, you hear.’

  ‘Put me in the papers?’

  ‘One time you did put me in the papers. Remember? But it ain’t going to be nice for you, I guarantee you. Oh, God! But I take enough from you in my lifetime! Just just because you married one daughter I did have. If you was a reasonable man, we coulda sit down, open a tin of salmon, and talk this thing over. But you too greedy. You want to rob the people yourself.’

  ‘Is a favour I want to do you, Ramlogan. I giving you money for the taxis. If I buy my own, you think you could find people to drive your taxis from Princes Town and San Fernando to Fuente Grove? Tell me.’

  Ramlogan became insulting. Ganesh only smiled. Then, when it was too late, Ramlogan appealed to Ganesh’s good nature. Ganesh only smiled.

  Ramlogan sold, in the end.

  But when Ganesh was leaving, he burst out. ‘All right, Ganesh, you making me a pauper. But watch. Watch and see if I don’t put you in the papers and tell everybody everything about you.’

  Ganesh got into his taxi.

  ‘Ganesh!’ Ramlogan shouted. ‘Is war now!’

  He might have run the taxis as part of his service to the public, and not charge for it; but Leela made difficulties and he had to give in. It was her idea, after all. He charged four shillings for the trip from Princes Town and San Fernando to Fuente Grove; and if this was a little more than it ought to have been, it was because the roads were bad. At any rate the fare was cheaper than Ramlogan’s, and the clients were grateful.

  Leela tried to explain away Ramlogan’s threats. ‘He getting old now, man, and it ain’t have much for him to live for. You mustn’t mind all the things he say. He don’t mean it.’

  But Ramlogan was good as his word.

  One Sunday, when The Great Belcher had called at Fuente Grove, Beharry came with a magazine, ‘Pundit, you see what they write about you in the papers?’

  He passed the magazine to Ganesh. It was a ragged thing called The Hindu, printed atrociously on the cheapest paper. Advertisements took up most of the space, but there were lots of quotations from the Hindu scriptures in odd corners, stale Information Office hand-outs about the British War Effort, repeated urgings to ‘Read The Hindu’; and a column of original scandal headed A Little Bird Tells Us. It was to this that Beharry drew Ganesh’s attention.

  ‘Suruj Mooma bring it back from Tunapuna. She say you should hear the amount of scandal it causing.’

  There was one item that began, ‘A little bird tells us that the so-called mystic in South Trinidad has taken up driving taxis. The little bird also twittered into our ears that the said so-called mystic was party to a hoax played on the Trinidad public concerning a certain so-called Cultural Institute …’

  Ganesh passed the paper to The Great Belcher. ‘Leela father,’ he said.

  The Great Belcher said, ‘Is why I come, boy. People talking about it. He call you the business Man of God. But you mustn’t get worried, Ganesh. Everybody know that Narayan, the man who edit it, just jealous you. He think he is a mystic too.’

  ‘Yes, pundit. Suruj Mooma say that Narayan went up to Tunapuna and start telling people that with just a little bit of practice he could be just as good as you in the mystic business.’

  The Great Belcher said, ‘Is the thing about Indians here. They hate to see another Indian get on.’

  ‘I ain’t worried,’ Ganesh said.

  And, really, he wasn’t. But there were things in The Hindu that people remembered, such as the description of Ganesh as the business Man of God; and the accusation was parroted about by people who didn’t know better.

  He didn’t have the business mind. In fact, he despised it. The taxi-service was Leela’s idea. So was the restaurant, and that could hardly be called a business idea. Clients had to wait so long now when they came to see Ganesh that it seemed only considerate to give them food. So Leela had built a great bamboo tent at the side of the house where she fed people; and since Fuente Grove was so far from anywhere else, she had to charge a little extra.

  And then people made a lot of fuss about Beharry’s shop.

  To understand the affair – some people made it the scandal – of Beharry’s shop, you must remember that for years most of Ganesh’s clients had been used to fake spirit-charmers who made them burn camphor and ghee and sugar and rice, and kill cocks and goats. Ganesh had little use for that sort of silly ritual. But he found that his clients, particularly the women, loved it; so he too ordered them to burn things two or three times a day. They brought the ingredients and begged him, and sometimes paid him, to offer them up on their behalf.

  He wasn’t really surprised when, one Sunday morning, Beharry said, ‘Pundit, sometimes me and Suruj Mooma does stop and think and get worried about the things people bringing to you. They is poor people, they don’t know whether the stuff they getting is good or not, whether it clean or not. And I know that it have a lot of shopkeepers who wouldn’t mind giving them the wrong sort of stuff.’

  Leela said, ‘Yes, man. Is something Suruj Mooma been telling me she worried about for a long long time.’

  Ganesh smiled. ‘Suruj Mooma doing a lot of worrying these days.’

  ‘Yes, pundit. I know you woulda see my point. The poor people ain’t educated up to your standard and is up to you to see that they getting the right stuff from the proper shopkeeper.’

  Leela said, ‘I think it would make the poor people feel nicer if they could buy the stuff right here in Fuente Grove.’

  ‘Why you don’t keep it by you then, maharajin?’

  ‘It wouldn’t look nice, Beharry. People go start thinking we working a trick on them. Why not at your shop? Suruj Mooma done tell me that it wouldn’t be any extra work. In fact, I think that you and Suruj Mooma is the correctest people to handle the stuff. And I so tired these days, besides.’

  ‘You overworking yourself, maharajin. Why you don’t take a rest?’

  Ganesh said, ‘Is nice for you to help me out this way, Beharry.’

  So clients bought the ingredients for offerings only from Beharry’s shop. ‘Things not cheap there,’ Ganesh told them. ‘But is the only place in Trinidad where you sure of what you getting.’

  Nearly everything Beharry sold came to Ganesh’s house. A fair amount was used for ritual. ‘And even that,’ Ganesh said, ‘is a waste of good good food.’ Leela used the rest in her restaurant.

  ‘I want to give the poor people only the best,’ she said.

  Fuente Grove prospered. The Public Works Department recognized its existence and resurfaced the road to a comparative evenness. They gave the village its first stand-pipe. Presently the stand-pipe, across the road from Beharry’s shop, became the meeting-place of the village women; and children played naked under the running water.

  Beharry prospered. Suruj was sent as a boarder to the Naparima College in San Fernando. Suruj Mooma started a fourth baby and told Leela about her plans for rebuilding the shop.

  Gan
esh prospered. He pulled down his old house, carried on business in the restaurant, and put up a mansion. Fuente Grove had never seen anything like it. It had two stories; its walls were of concrete blocks; the Niggergram said that it had more than a hundred windows and that if the Governor got to hear, there was going to be trouble because only Government House could have a hundred windows. An Indian architect came over from British Guiana and built a temple for Ganesh in proper Hindu style. To make up for the cost of all this building Ganesh was forced to charge an entrance fee to the temple. A professional sign-writer was summoned from San Fernando to rewrite the GANESH, Mystic sign. At the top he wrote, in Hindi, Peace to you all; and below, Spiritual solace and comfort may be had here at any time on every day except Saturday and Sunday. It is regretted, however, that requests for monetary assistance cannot be entertained. In English.

  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 a
bout 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.

  Beharry did his best to hide his bewilderment.

  Leela said, ‘It are beat me, if I see why for you doing all this.’

  He left her to her worries; ordered her to get tablecloths, lots of knives, forks, and spoons; and warned her to look after the restaurant properly. He told Beharry it would be wise for him to lay in large stocks of rum and lager.

  Presently the American soldiers began to pour into Fuente Grove and the village children had their first chew of gum. The soldiers came in jeeps and army lorries, some in taxis with girl-friends. They saw elephants in stone and were reassured, if not satisfied, but when Ganesh took them on a tour of his temple – he used the word ‘tour’ – they felt they had their money’s worth.

  Leela counted more than five thousand Americans.

  Beharry had never been so busy in all his life.

  ‘Is like what I did think,’ Ganesh said. ‘Trinidad is a small place and it ain’t have much for the poor Americans to do.’

  Many of them asked for spiritual advice and all who asked received it.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Ganesh said, ‘I does feel that these Americans is the most religious people in the world. Even more than Hindus.’

  ‘Hollywood Hindus,’ muttered Beharry, but he nibbled so badly Ganesh didn’t catch what he was saying.