The Mystic Masseur

11. M.L.C

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?’

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.’

The dinner was a treat for the photographers. Ganesh came in dhoti and koortah and turban; the member for one of the Port of Spain wards wore a khaki suit and a sun helmet; a third came in jodhpurs; a fourth, adhering for the moment to his pre-election principles, came in short trousers and an open shirt; the blackest M.L.C. wore a three-piece blue suit, yellow woollen gloves, and a monocle. Everybody else, among the men, looked like penguins, sometimes even down to the black faces.

An elderly Christian Indian member didn’t bring a wife because he said he never had one; instead he brought along a daughter, a bright little thing of about four.

The Governor’s lady moved with assurance and determination among the members and their wives. The more disconcerting the man or woman, the more she was interested, the more she was charming.

‘Why, Mrs Primrose,’ she said brightly to the wife of the blackest M.L.C. ‘You look so different today.’

Mrs Primrose, all of her squeezed into floriferous print frock, adjusted her hat with the floral design. ‘Ah, ma’am. It ain’t the same me. The other one, the one you did see at the Mothers’ Union in Granadina, she at home. Making baby.’

Sherry, opportunely, passed.

Mrs Primrose gave a little giggle and asked the waiter, ‘Is a strong drink?’

The waiter nodded and looked down his nose.

‘Well, thanks. But I doesn’t uses it.’

‘Something else, perhaps?’ the Governor’s lady urged.

‘A little coffee tea, if you has it.’

‘Coffee. I am afraid coffee wouldn’t be ready for some time yet.’

‘Well, thanks. I doesn’t really want it. I was only being social.’ Mrs Primrose giggled again.

Presently they sat down to dinner. The Governor’s lady sat on the left of Mr Primrose. Ganesh found himself between the man in jodhpurs and the Christian Indian and his daughter; and he saw with alarm that the people from whom he had hoped to learn the eating drill were too far away.

The members looked at the waiters who looked away quickly. Then the members looked at each other.

The man in jodhpurs muttered, ‘Is why black people can’t get on. You see how these waiters behaving? And they black like hell too, you know.’

Nobody took up the remark.

Soup came.

‘Meat?’ Ganesh asked.

The waiter nodded.

‘Take it away,’ Ganesh said with quick disgust.

The man in jodhpurs said, ‘You was wrong there. You shoulda toy with the soup.’

‘Toy with it?’

‘Is what the book say.’

No one near Ganesh seemed willing to taste the soup.

The man in jodhpurs looked about him. ‘Is a nice room here.’

‘Nice pictures,’ said the man with the open shirt who sat opposite.

The man in jodhpurs sighed wearily. ‘Is a funny thing, but I ain’t so hungry today.’

‘Is the heat,’ the man with the open shirt said.

The Christian Indian placed his daughter on his left knee, and, ignoring the others, dipped a spoon in his soup. He tested it with his tongue for warmth and said, ‘Aah.’ The girl opened her mouth to receive the soup. ‘One for you,’ the Christian said. He took a spoonful himself. ‘And one for me.’

The other members saw. They became reckless and ate.

Unoriginal disaster befell Mr Primrose. His monocle fell into his soup.

The Governor’s lady quickly looked away.

But Mr Primrose drew her attention to the monocle. ‘Eh, eh,’ he chuckled, ‘but see how it fall down!’

The M.L.C.s looked on with sympathy.

Mr Primrose turned on them. ‘What all you staring at? All you ain’t see nigger before?’

The man in jodhpurs whispered to Ganesh, ‘But we wasn’t saying anything.’

‘Eh!’ Mr Primrose snapped. ‘Black people don’t wear monocle?’

He fished out the monocle, wiped it, and put it in his coat pocket.

The man with the open shirt tried to change the subject. ‘I wonder how much car expenses they go pay we for coming here. I ain’t ask to dine with the Governor, you know.’ He jerked his head in the Governor’s direction and quickly jerked it back.

The man with jodhpurs said, ‘But they got to pay we, man.’

The meal was torture to Ganesh. He felt alien and uncomfortable. He grew sulkier and sulkier and refused all the courses. He felt as if he were a boy again, going to the Queen’s Royal College for the first time.

He was in a temper when he returned late that night to Fuente Grove. ‘Just wanted to make a fool of me,’ he muttered, ‘fool of me.’

‘Leela!’ he shouted. ‘Come, girl, and give me something to eat.’

She came out, smiling sardonically. ‘But, man, I thought you was dining with the Governor.’

‘Don’t make joke, girl. Done dine. Want to eat now. Going to show them,’ he mumbled, as his fingers ploughed through the rice and dal and curry, ‘going to show them.’