The Mystic Masseur

by V. S. Naipaul

  Everything seemed to be going wrong and Ganesh feared that he had misread the signs of fate. It was only later that he saw the providential pattern of these disappointing months. ‘We never are what we want to be,’ he wrote, ‘but what we must be.’

  He had failed as a masseur. Leela couldn’t have children. These disappointments, which might have permanently broken another man, turned Ganesh seriously, dedicatedly, to books. He had always intended to read and write, of course, but one wonders whether he would have done so with the same assiduity if he had been a successful masseur or the father of a large family.

  ‘Going to write a book,’ he told Leela. ‘Big book.’

  There is a firm of American publishers called Street and Smith, versatile, energetic people who had pushed their publications as far as South Trinidad. Ganesh was deeply impressed by Street and Smith, had been since he was a boy; and, without saying a word to Beharry or Leela, he sat down one evening at the little table in the drawing room, turned up the oil lamp, and wrote a letter to Street and Smith. He told them that he was thinking of writing books and wondered whether either of them was interested.

  The reply came within a month. Street and Smith said they were very interested.

  ‘You must tell Pa,’ Leela said.

  Beharry said, ‘The Americans is nice people. You must write this book for them.’

  Ganesh framed the Street and Smith letter in passe-partout and hung it on the wall above the table where he had written his letter.

  ‘Is only the beginning,’ he told Leela.

  Ramlogan came all the way from Fourways and when he gazed on the framed letter his eyes filled with tears. ‘Sahib, this is something else for the papers. Yes, man, sahib, write the books for them.’

  ‘Is just what Beharry, Fuente Grove so-call shopkeeper, tell him,’ Leela said.

  ‘Never mind.’ Ramlogan said. ‘I still think he should write the books. But I bet it make you feel proud, eh, sahib, having the Americans begging you to write a book for them?’

  ‘Nah,’ Ganesh said quickly. ‘You wrong there. It don’t make me feel proud at all at all. You know how it make me feel? It make me feel humble, if I tell the truth. Humble humble.’

  ‘Is the sign of a great man, sahib.’

  The actual writing of the book worried Ganesh and he kept putting it off. When Leela asked, ‘Man, why you ain’t writing the book the American people begging you to write?’ Ganesh replied, ‘Leela, is talk like that that does break up a man science of thought. You mean you can’t see that I thinking, thinking about it all all the time?’

  He never wrote the book for Street and Smith.

  ‘I didn’t promise anything,’ he said. ‘And don’t think I waste my time.’

  Street and Smith had made him think about the art of writing. Like many Trinidadians Ganesh could write correct English but it embarrassed him to talk anything but dialect except on very formal occasions. So while, with the encouragement of Street and Smith, he perfected his prose to a Victorian weightiness he continued to talk Trinidadian, much against his will.

  One day he said, ‘Leela, is high time we realize that we living in a British country and I think we shouldn’t be shame to talk the people language good.’

  Leela was squatting at the kitchen chulha, coaxing a fire from dry mango twigs. Her eyes were red and watery from the smoke. ‘All right, man.’

  ‘We starting now self, girl.’

  ‘As you say, man.’

  ‘Good. Let me see now. Ah, yes. Leela, have you lighted the fire? No, just gimme a chance. Is “lighted” or “lit”, girl?’

  ‘Look, ease me up, man. The smoke going in my eye.’

  ‘You ain’t paying attention, girl. You mean the smoke is going in your eye.’

  Leela coughed in the smoke. ‘Look, man. I have a lot more to do than sit scratching, you hear. Go talk to Beharry.’

  Beharry was enthusiastic. ‘Man, is a master idea, man! Is one of the troubles with Fuente Grove that it have nobody to talk good to. When we starting?’

  ‘Now.’

  Beharry nibbled and smiled nervously. ‘Nah, man, you got to give me time to think.’

  Ganesh insisted.

  ‘All right then,’ Beharry said resignedly. ‘Let we go.’

  ‘It is hot today.’

  ‘I see what you mean. It is very hot today.’

  ‘Look, Beharry. This go do, but it won’t pay, you hear. You got to give a man some help, man. All right now, we going off again. You ready? The sky is very blue and I cannot see any clouds in it. Eh, why you laughing now?’

  ‘Ganesh, you know you look damn funny.’

  ‘Well, you look damn funny yourself, come to that.’

  ‘No, what I mean is that it funny seeing you so, and hearing you talk so.’

  Rice was boiling on the chulha when Ganesh went home. ‘Mr Ramsumair,’ Leela asked, ‘where have you been?’

  ‘Beharry and me was having a little chat. You know, Beharry did look real funny trying to talk good.’

  It was Leela’s turn to laugh. ‘I thought we was starting on this big thing of talking good English.’

  ‘Girl, you just cook my food good, you hear, and talk good English only when I tell you.’

  This was the time when Ganesh felt he had to respond to every advertiser’s request to fill in coupons for free booklets. He came across the coupons in American magazines at Beharry’s shop; and it was a great thrill for him to send off about a dozen coupons at once and await the arrival, a month later, of a dozen bulging packets. The Post Office people didn’t like it and Ganesh had to bribe them before they sent a postman cycling down with the packets to Fuente Grove in the evenings, when it was cool.

  Beharry had to give the postman a drink.

  The postman said, ‘The two of all you getting one set of big fame in Princes Town. Everywhere I turn it have people asking me, “Who is these two people? They come just like Americans, man.” ’ He looked down at his emptied glass and rocked it on the counter. ‘And guess what I does do when they ask me?’

  It was his manner of asking for a second drink.

  ‘What I does do?’ He downed his second glass of rum at a gulp, made a wry face, asked for water, got it, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, ‘Man, I does tell them straight off who you is!’

  Both Beharry and Ganesh were excited by the booklets and handled them with sensuous reverence. ‘That America, boy, is the place to live in,’ Beharry said. ‘They does think nothing of giving away books like this.’

  Ganesh shrugged a knowing shoulder. ‘Is nothing at all for them, you know. Before you twist and turn three times – bam! – a book done print.’

  ‘Ganesh, you is a man with a college education. How much book they does print every year in America, you think?’

  ‘About four five hundred so.’

  ‘You crazy, man. Is more about a million. So I read somewhere the other day.’

  ‘Why you ask me then?’

  Beharry nibbled. ‘Just to make sure.’

  Then they had a long discussion whether one man could ever get to know everything about the world.

  Beharry annoyed Ganesh one day by showing a folder. He said casually, ‘Look what these people in England send me.’

  Ganesh frowned.

  Beharry sensed trouble. ‘Didn’t ask for it, you know. You mustn’t think I setting up in competition with you. They just send it, just like that.’

  The folder was too beautiful for Ganesh’s annoyance to last.

  ‘I don’t suppose they go just send it to me like that, though.’

  ‘Take it, man,’ Beharry said.

  ‘Yes, take it before I burn it up.’ The voice of Suruj Mooma, inside. ‘I don’t want any more rubbish in my house.’

  It was a folder from the Everyman Library.

  Ganesh said, ‘Nine hundred and thirty book at two shilling a book. Altogether that make –’

  ‘Four hundred and sixty dollars.’

/>   ‘Is a lot of money.’

  Beharry said, ‘Is a lot of book.’

  ‘If a man read all those book, it go have nobody at all to touch him in the line of education. Not even the Governor.’

  ‘You know, is something I was talking about to Suruj Mooma about only the other day. I don’t think Governor and them is really educated people.’

  ‘How you mean, man?’

  ‘If they was really educated they wouldn’t want to leave England where they printing books night and day and come to a place like Trinidad.’

  Ganesh said, ‘Nine hundred and thirty book. Every book about one inch thick, I suppose.’

  ‘Make about seventy-seven feet.’

  ‘So with shelf on two walls you could find room for all.’

  ‘I prefer big books myself.’

  The walls of Ganesh’s drawing-room were subject to a good deal of scrutiny that evening.

  ‘Leela, you got a ruler?’

  She brought it.

  ‘You thinking of alterations, man?’

  ‘Thinking of buying some book.’

  ‘How much, man?’

  ‘Nine hundred and thirty.’

  ‘Nine hundred!’ She began to cry.

  ‘Nine hundred and thirty.’

  ‘You see the sort of idea Beharry putting in your head. You just want to make me a pauper. It ain’t enough for you to rob my own father. Why you don’t send me straight off to the Poor House?’

  So Ganesh didn’t buy all the Everyman Library. He bought only three hundred volumes and the Post Office delivered them in a van late one afternoon. It was one of the biggest things that had happened to Fuente Grove, and even Leela was impressed, though reluctantly. Suruj Mooma alone remained indifferent. The books were still being taken into Ganesh’s house when she told Beharry loudly, so that everybody could hear, ‘Now, you don’t start copying anybody and making a fool of yourself, you hear. Leela could go to the Poor House. Not me.’

  But Ganesh’s reputation, lowered by his incompetence as a masseur, rose in the village; and presently peasants, crumpling their grimy felt hats in their hands, came to ask him to write letters for them to the Governor, or to read letters which the Government, curiously, had sent them.

  For Ganesh it was only the beginning. It took him about six months to read what he wanted of the Everyman books; after that he thought of buying more. He made regular trips to San Fernando and bought books, big ones, on philosophy and history.

  ‘You know, Beharry, sometimes I does stop and think. What those Everyman people did think when they was parcelling up those books for me? You think they did ever guess that it had a man like me in Trinidad?’

  ‘I ain’t know about that but, Ganesh, you beginning to get me vex now. You always forgetting nearly all what you read. You can’t even end what you was beginning to remember sometimes.’

  ‘What to do, then?’

  ‘Look, I have a copy-book here. I can’t sell it because the cover get oily – is that boy Suruj playing the fool with the candles – and I go give you this copy-book. When you reading a book, make notes here of the things you think is important.’

  Ganesh had never liked copy-books, since his school days; but the idea of note-books interested him. So he made another trip to San Fernando and explored the stationery department of one of the big stores in the High Street. It was a revelation. He had never before realized that paper could be so beautiful, that there were so many kinds of paper, so many colours, so many glorious smells. He stood still, marvelling and reverent, until he heard a woman’s voice.

  ‘Mister.’

  He turned to see a fat woman, traces of white powder on her black face, wearing a dress of a most splendidly floriferous design.

  ‘Mister. How you selling the’ – she fished out a piece of paper from her purse and read from it – ‘Nelson Introductory reading-book?’

  ‘Me?’ Ganesh said in surprise. ‘I ain’t a seller here.’

  She began to laugh all over the place. ‘Kee! Kee! Kyah! I did take you for the clurkist!’

  And she went in search of the clerk, laughing and shaking and bending forward to hide her laughter.

  Left alone, Garesh began taking surreptitious sniffs at the paper, and, closing his eyes, passed his hands over many papers, the better to savour their texture.

  ‘What you think you feeling?’

  It was a boy, wearing a white shirt, a tie, unmistakable badge of authority, and blue serge shorts.

  ‘What you think you feeling? Yam or cassava in the market?’

  Ganesh in a panic bought a ream of light blue paper.

  Now, with the desire to write on his paper strong within him, he decided to have another look at Basdeo’s printing shop. He went to the narrow, sloping street and was surprised to find that the building he knew had been replaced by a new one, all glass and concrete. There was a new sign: ELITE ELECTRIC PRINTERY; and a slogan: When Better Printing is Printed We Will Print It. He heard the clatter of machinery and pressed his face against a glass window to look in. A man was sitting at a machine that looked like a huge typewriter. It was Basdeo, long-trousered, moustached, adult. There could be no doubt that he had risen in the world.

  ‘Got to write my book,’ Ganesh said aloud. ‘Got to.’

  There were diversions, however. Presently he developed a passion for making note-books. When Leela complained he said, ‘Just making them now and putting them away. You never know when they go be useful.’ And he became a connoisseur of paper-smells. He told Beharry, ‘You know, I could just smell a book and tell how old it is.’ He always held that the book with the best smell was the Harrap’s French and English dictionary, a book he had bought, as he told Beharry, simply for the sake of its smell. But paper-smelling was only part of his new passion; and when he bribed a policeman at Princes Town to steal a stapling-machine from the Court House, his joy was complete.

  In the beginning, filling the note-books was frankly a problem. At this time Ganesh was reading four, sometimes five, books a week; and as he read he scored a line, a sentence, or even an entire paragraph, in preparation for his Sunday. This had become for him a day of ritual and perfect joy. He got up early, bathed, did his puja, ate; then, while it was still cool, he went to Beharry’s. He and Beharry read the newspaper and talked, until Suruj Mooma pushed an angry head through the shop door and said, ‘Suruj Poopa, your mouth always open. If it ain’t eating, is talking. Well, talk done now. Is time to eat.’

  Ganesh would take the hint and leave.

  The least pleasant part of Sunday was that walk back to his own house. The sun was wicked and the lumps of crude asphalt on the road were soft and hot underfoot. Ganesh played with the idea of covering all Trinidad with a huge canvas canopy to keep out the sun and to collect the water when it rained. This thought occupied him until he got home. Then he ate, bathed again, put on his good Hindu clothes, dhoti, vest, and koortah, and attended to his note-books.

  He brought out the whole pile from a drawer in the bedroom bureau and copied out the passages he had marked during the week. He had evolved a system of note-taking. It had appeared simple enough in the beginning – white paper for notes on Hinduism, light blue for religion in general, grey for history, and so on – but as time went on the system became hard to maintain and he had allowed it to lapse.

  He never used any note-book to the end. In each he began with the best of intentions, writing in a fine, sloping hand, but by the time he had reached the third or fifth page he lost interest in the note-book, the handwriting became a hasty, tired squiggle, and the note-book was abandoned.

  Leela complained about the waste. ‘You go make we all paupers. Just as Beharry making Suruj Mooma a pauper.’

  ‘Girl, what you know about these things? Is not a shop-sign I copying out here, you know. Is copying right enough, but it have a lot of thinking I doing at the same time.’

  ‘I getting too tired hearing you talking, talking. You say you come here to write your precious bo
oks. You say you come here to massage people. How much people you massage? How much book you write? How much money you make?’

  The questions were rhetorical and all Ganesh could say was: ‘You see! You getting to be just like your father, talking like a lawyer.’

  Then, in the course of a week’s reading, he came upon the perfect reply. He made a note of it there and then, and the next time Leela complained he said, ‘Look, shut up and listen.’

  He hunted about among his books and note-books until he got a pea-green note-book marked Literature.

  ‘Just let me sit down, man, before you start reading.’

  ‘And when you listen don’t fall asleep. Is one of your nasty habits, you know, Leela.’

  ‘Can’t help it man. The moment you start reading to me you does make me feel sleepy. I know some people does feel sleepy the moment they see a bed.’

  ‘They is people with clean mind. But listen, girl. A man may turn over half a library to make one book. It ain’t me who make that up, you know.’

  ‘How I know you ain’t fooling me, just as how you did fool Pa?’

  ‘But why for I go want to fool you, girl?’

  ‘I ain’t the stupid little girl you did married, you know.’

  And when he brought the book and revealed the quotation on the printed page, Leela fell silent in pure wonder. For however much she complained and however much she reviled him, she never ceased to marvel at this husband of hers who read pages of print, chapters of print, why, whole big books; this husband who, awake in bed at nights, spoke, as though it were nothing, of one day writing a book of his own and having it printed!

  But it was hard for her when she went to her father’s, as she did on most of the more important holidays. Ramlogan had long ago come to regard Ganesh as a total loss and a crook besides. And then there was Soomintra to be faced. Soomintra had married a hardware merchant in San Fernando and she was rich. More than that, she looked rich. She was having child after child, and growing plump, matronly, and important. She had a son whom she had called Jawaharlal, after the Indian leader; and her daughter was called Sarojini, after the Indian poetess.