Ganesh
Malcolm Bosse
© Malcolm Bosse 1982
Malcolm Bosse has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1982 by Chatto & Windus.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
To C. G. Vasudevan
My student, my teacher, my friend —
Om Sri Ganeshaya Namah
Part I
Stopping outside the Mission School grounds, he wrapped a long piece of cloth in a turban’s shape around his blond head. Although Jeffrey had lived all of his fourteen years in India, his fair skin was still vulnerable to the Indian sun. Without something covering his head, he could easily get sunstroke. In the hot season everyone he saw had some kind of protection: a turban, an umbrella, a handkerchief, even a newspaper draped over the head.
The Mission School was a few kilometers from his village, so Jeffrey headed down the paved road, swinging from his shoulder a packet of books secured with an old belt. Heat waves were snaking up from the macadam into the sunlight, causing his light blue eyes to squint in the glare. Even in sandals the soles of his feet became so hot that soon he had to stop and cool off. He stood under a scarred old banyan tree, near a flock of white egrets who posed motionlessly at the edge of a paddy. They would not approach the rice shoots, even though hungry for the ripening kernels, because a tattered scarecrow kept watch in the middle of the field. Jeffrey leaned for a few minutes against the tree trunk and stared at a sluggish stream that ran parallel to the road; the water was polka-dotted with lotus buds ready to burst into white and purple blossoms, like a liquid orchard under the blaze of summer. Adjusting the turban, he then proceeded into the outskirts of his village.
Plaster-and-thatch huts lined the way; inside their dark interiors men sipped tea or repaired bicycles or sold turmeric powder. At one entrance four men played cards on a bamboo mat, while behind them a radio was blaring film music. One of the men, smiling, waved at Jeffrey, who waved back. “Do you ever open those books, Ganesh?” the man asked with a grin. Ganesh was Jeffrey’s nickname. “Play,” another man said irritably and threw down a card. They spoke in Tamil, a language that Jeffrey knew as well as English.
As he entered the village, Jeffrey was buffeted in traffic choking the main road. Everything was in motion: bikes, scooters, cows, dogs, goats, and people. And everywhere there was sound: the metallic gnashing of gears, braying and mooing and barking, the strident hawker’s voice of a scissors grinder. Jeffrey soon turned off the paved road into a dirt lane, on either side of which stood plantain, palm trees, and plaster walls fronting the courtyards of private houses. He stopped at an iron gate, unlatched it, and went inside a compound. The two-story house had once been yellow, but incessant monsoon rains had turned its sides gray with mud. There were a half-dozen mango trees in the yard, and at this time of year they were shedding leaves and the sticky petals of small yellow flowers. Looking at the littered ground, he sighed: there was plenty of work for him today. Setting his books on the porch, he could hear a voice giving brisk commands inside the house.
“Higher. Higher! Now, hold the breath. Higher! Now — hold the position!”
A broom was propped against the side of the house — an Indian broom, without a handle, consisting of bamboo strips tied together at one end. Holding this end, Jeffrey bent low and started to clean the yard. He swept with long, quick, vigorous strokes; a passerby might have thought he liked nothing better than sweeping. It was the impression Jeffrey hoped to give. The Master might have a glimpse of him from a window. If he did a slovenly, halfhearted job of sweeping, the Master would retaliate by giving him a slovenly, halfhearted lesson in Yoga. That had happened once, about a year ago, shortly after the Master had agreed to give Jeffrey lessons in exchange for work around the yard. That day, feeling lazy, Jeffrey had done a quick, indifferent job of sweeping. In turn, the Master had given him an uninspiring class for a few minutes, then sent him home.
Finished at last, Jeffrey wiped the sweat from his eyes, hearing the Master yell more commands at a student. Jeffrey smiled. At this time of day — late afternoon — the student in there would be a government official, overweight and sedentary, who had begun Yoga a few months ago on doctor’s orders.
Jeffrey gathered the leaves and flower petals into a reed basket, once more appraising his work. The broom had stitched long arcs across the clay yard. He hoped more leaves wouldn’t fall until the Master had seen his good job. Taking the full basket behind the house, he dumped the contents into a refuse pile. At the end of the week he would burn it. Then from a well he drew up a bucket of water and took it into a shed, where, removing all his clothes, he washed thoroughly. It would not be permissible to appear rumpled and sweaty for class. In order to look neat after his chores, Jeffrey kept a supply of cotton shorts in the shed. Putting on a pair, he walked barefooted to the front porch and took up a cross-legged position on it. In the cool shade of the porch he tried to calm his mind. Under his breath, softly, he chanted a mantra, Om Namah Shivaya — Hail to Lord Shiva — again, again, and again. By fixing on each syllable of the three words, he was gradually able to exclude many thoughts of the day. For example, he had done only middling in a history test; his friend Rama broke a cricket bat during recess; the Schoolmaster, nursing a summer cold, had been snappish. Om Namah Shivaya…his mind steadied like a boat catching the wind in its sails. Om Namah Shivaya…his breath was slowing down, drawing out like a fine thread. Om Namah Shivaya…he was prepared for his Yoga class.
There were heavy footsteps on the floorboards of the doorway. Then out came a portly man, wearing a white shirt and a white dhoti — a long skirt of cloth. He was puffing and sweaty, his eyes bulged, his lips quivered. Jeffrey averted his eyes. It would not do to stare at the official, who was obviously exhausted. Waiting until the thickset figure had vanished into the lane, Jeffrey rose from the porch and knocked at the door, three times, faintly.
“Come in!”
Jeffrey opened the door, stepped inside, and without looking up fell to his knees, bending forward from the waist until his forehead touched the floor.
“Guruji,” he said softly in Tamil, “I have come to beg humbly for a small portion of your time, though I have done nothing to deserve your generosity.”
He made the same request every day. His father had taught him the exact words, and Jeffrey never varied them. He waited, knowing full well that the Master, as if considering the request carefully, would not reply for some moments. This too was the same every day.
Jeffrey kept his forehead pressed to the floor, his hands outspread on either side of his face, his feet and knees together. He knew the Master was studying his posture.
“Ganesh, come!” The command came with the sound of a whip cracking. In response, Jeffrey leapt instantly to his feet. The Master, a small, wiry man dressed in cotton shorts, was sipping a glass of water and fanning himself with a newspaper. It was cooler in the dim room than outside, but the heat even here was formidable.
Student and teacher went into a practice room spread with reed mats. After bowing to the Master, who sat at one end of the room, Jeffrey did some warming-up exercises. Then, on command, he performed asanas — Yoga poses — both standing and sitting. Poses that a year ago had been uncomfortable, often impossible for his body to control, were now executed with ease. Today, however, Jeffrey was apprehensive, because he was learning a difficult new asana — the Vrishchikasana. Vrishchik meant scorpion, the killer who arches its stinging tail to strike over and beyond its head. The pose therefore resembled a scorpion in the attitude of striking at its victim
: body raised, balanced on forearms lying parallel on the mat; legs arched far enough backward for the feet to rest on the crown of the head. In such a position the chest, spine, and abdomen were stretched intensely until breathing became fast, labored. Jeffrey did Parivrtta Trikonasana, Paschimottanasana, Halasana, Parsvaikapada Sarvangasana, and Salamba Sirsasana under the watchful eye of his guru, who made only slight corrections: “Hands forward,” “Bring the left heel back.”
Then came the order: “Now — the Vrishchikasana!”
On his first try Jeffrey lost his balance and fell on the mat. A quick glance at the Master assured him that the failure was unimportant. But then his Master never scoffed at honest failure. There would be a reprimand only if the Master sensed that his effort had been incomplete.
Jeffrey tried again, this time balancing on his forearms long enough to get his legs arched over until his feet touched the top of his head. He held the pose for a few seconds before falling out of it. Although the exertion had not seemed great, he was breathing heavily.
“Take rest,” the Master said.
Instantly he lay full length on his back like a corpse, his hands palms-up a little distance from his hips, eyes closed, legs apart. He tried to loosen tension from each bundle of muscle in his body. Long practice had enabled him to relax totally within a few seconds, so that lying there he felt as though his body were elongating, lengthening into a new shape.
He was awaiting the order to perform another asana, when a new voice — young and shrill — broke the hot silence.
“Ganesh! Ganesh! Your father!”
Opening his eyes, Jeffrey saw a neighborhood boy standing in the doorway, glancing fearfully at the Master, then staring again at him.
“Ganesh!” the small boy cried. “Your father’s sick! The doctor’s there!”
Jeffrey would not remember how he left the room — had he even nodded respectfully to his guru? — or how he rushed into the lane. But he would remember how his legs carried him with the frustrating reluctance of a dream toward the house a kilometer away and how people turned in surprise to watch someone racing through the sweltering heat of the afternoon. Most of all he would remember the fear.
At the end of a dusty lane Jeffrey turned into the entrance of a walled little compound and collided head-on with a tall, thin man, whose breath was expelled in a grunt at the impact.
Jeffrey had nearly knocked down the village doctor.
The tall, skinny man steadied himself with one hand against the wall and moved his foot back into a sandal that had slipped off, while Jeffrey, mumbling “I’m sorry,” retrieved the black medical bag that had fallen to the ground.
“Sorry…sorry.” He gripped the satchel so tightly that the doctor had difficulty removing his hand from it. “What has happened — my father?” Jeffrey asked breathlessly.
The doctor brushed dirt from the satchel. “I haven’t the equipment for tests, Ganesh, but I think your father has a little flare-up of heart trouble.”
“Serious?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “We can’t be sure, but I don’t think it’s serious. What your father needs is to take rest. A lot of rest.” The doctor grimaced. “Your father takes so little of it.”
“I’ll make him take rest,” Jeffrey claimed eagerly. “What else must I do?”
The doctor shrugged and wiped some beads of sweat from his brow. “Just try to make him take rest.”
“I will. I will! And thank you, doctor, thank you!” Jeffrey felt a rush of gratitude, as if he had been given a formula to cure anything. “Thank you!” he called at the tall man’s back.
Out of a nearby tree a cascade of crows poured, their black wings swooping violently through the air. They startled Jeffrey; for a moment he felt a black tide of fear sweep through him, just as the crows swept through the afternoon.
He turned toward the house. It was a tiny building of plaster with a red-tiled roof. Once yellow, like the guru’s house, it too was streaked gray from monsoon rains. There had been a small flower garden in the yard, but a brutal summer had wilted all the blossoms. Today the house itself looked small — dark and ugly. Jeffrey hesitated before going inside. He must not seem anxious. Taking a deep breath, he climbed two crumbling brick steps and entered the small front room that was sparsely furnished, with one picture on the wall: that of his deceased mother, a small blonde woman with delicate features and a shy smile. Jeffrey tossed his bundle of books on the table and went into his father’s bedroom, where the man lay on a narrow bed, a single lumpy pillow behind his neck. Mr. Moore was slim, angular, with hawklike features and eyes even lighter blue than Jeffrey’s. The overhead fan ruffled the tufts of his sandy hair. His bare chest, moving in short, rapid gusts, was freckled. The circles of his glasses glinted in light slanting through a tiny open window.
“How is the Vrishchikasana?” his father asked in English, the language they always used with each other.
“It’s hard. I stayed in it a few seconds today.”
“You’ll master it.” Father had encouraged him to study Yoga.
“I — just bumped into the doctor. I mean, I almost knocked him down.”
Mr. Moore smiled wanly. “What did he say?”
“He said maybe you had a flare-up of, you know, a kind of heart trouble. That’s all. He said you’re okay.”
“Well, I am.”
“But you must take rest. You don’t take enough.”
Moore waved his hand feebly through the air. “Doctors always tell you the same thing. Take plenty of liquids and rest. It’s the same throughout the world.”
“Maybe you should go to Madras for a checkup.”
“Maybe you should go take a bath. I figure what you’re drenched in — and I smell — is sweat, not pure lake water.”
Jeffrey knew his father would not go to Madras, yet it was worth another try. “If you have a flare-up, Dad, you must see a good doctor.”
“Are there good doctors in Madras? Are there good doctors anywhere? I think our doctor here is correct. What I need is rest.”
“But will you take it?”
“You go take a bath, Ganesh, while I handle my end of things by taking rest.”
They smiled at each other. Jeffrey left, carrying with him an image of his father’s ashen face and weak gestures. For a moment, heading into the bathroom, he felt a surge of panic. Whom could he ask for help? Vani, their old housekeeper, would have probably influenced his father to do something more than count on a village doctor, but Vani had been dead now a year. There was the Swami himself, and Father would do what that holy man said. Except that the Swami was someone whom Jeffrey could not write. How could he ask such a holy man to come here? The Swami had renounced this world long ago, had even conducted his own death rites, for in his view he was already dead to the society of men, even though he wandered ceaselessly throughout India, visiting temples and answering the questions of people who flocked around him. The Swami would not concern himself with such an earthbound problem as sickness. A couple of years ago one of his devotees had fallen seriously ill and the Swami had never gone to him. The Swami had said, “If I am not with him now, at this moment where he is, then I cannot be with him by traveling a hundred kilometers to his bedside.” Father and others had liked these words, although to Jeffrey they sounded disloyal or disinterested. At any rate, the Swami could not be counted on. Then what about the Hindu priest of the village? Father did not think much of him. And the old Irish Catholic priest who ran the Mission School would scarcely speak to Father, considering him a traitor to Christianity. So who was there to help?
In the bathroom Jeffrey removed his sweat-soaked clothes to take his second bath within an hour. Who was there to help? No one. A small house lizard, pale, almost translucent, cocked its spade-shaped head at him before vanishing like smoke into a hole near the ceiling.
*
Jeffrey Moore had lived his first nine years in the large city of Madras on the southeast coast of India. His parents had f
irst gone there on business, but then, shaken by the plight of India’s poor, had remained to work for organizations that helped the downtrodden. They traveled a lot in this service, and Jeffrey could vividly recall his mother, a frail woman, carrying a heavy knapsack into villages, somehow keeping pace with his tall, athletic father. No matter how difficult their assignment, Jeffrey accompanied them — lived in tents, mud huts, and along with them ate the poorest food of outcasts. But he remembered it all with pleasure; he remembered his parents laughing and talking and never leaving him out of their discussions. What he remembered of those first nine years of his life was so good that sometimes he wanted to go backward in time and relive them. Because not long after his ninth birthday his mother died. During a religious festival, where she went to administer anti-cholera shots to countless thousands of pilgrims, his mother contracted not cholera but encephalitis and died in a week. In the wake of that tragedy his father had brought him to this village in the south. Through the years his father had learned a lot about agriculture, applying this knowledge to the problems of district farmers. For this work an international welfare organization paid him a pittance, just enough to maintain a tiny house and hire a housekeeper-cook. After his wife’s death, Mr. Moore turned to religion. He read Hindu philosophy, went to Hindu temples, practiced Hindu rituals, and after meeting the Swami became a devotee of the holy man. He followed the Swami across the face of India, often disappearing for many weeks at a time. During those periods Jeffrey had been left in Vani’s care; the old woman had been like a grandmother to him. After her death, Jeffrey could not count on the loyalty of new housekeepers, who came and went quickly, sometimes stealing what little there was to steal or disappearing when they could wheedle an advance on their salary out of Mr. Moore, who was generous to a fault. When his father went on a pilgrimage, Jeffrey somehow managed. Everyone in the village knew him. Out of their respect for his father’s spiritual travels, the villagers looked after Jeffrey, invited him to eat at their homes, and often repaired his own little house for free. Jeffrey got along; he felt capable of always getting along, just so his father returned from the pilgrimages and told him strange tales of distant places, of the Swami and the flocks of devotees who walked from sacred temple to sacred river, living on handfuls of parched grain, drinking from streams.
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