The Mystic Masseur

5. Trials

FOR MORE THAN two years Ganesh and Leela lived in Fuente Grove and nothing big or encouraging happened.

Right from the start Fuente Grove looked unpromising. The Great Belcher had said it was a small, out of the way place. That was only half true. Fuente Grove was practically lost. It was so small, so remote, and so wretched, it was marked only on large maps in the office of the Government Surveyor; the Public Works Department treated it with contempt; and no other village even thought of feuding with it. You couldn’t really like Fuente Grove. In the dry season the earth baked, cracked, and calcined; and in the rainy season melted into mud. Always it was hot. Trees would have made some difference, but Ganesh’s mango tree was the only one.

The villagers went to work in the cane-fields in the dawn darkness to avoid the heat of day. When they returned in the middle of the morning the dew had dried on the grass; and they set to work in their vegetable gardens as if they didn’t know that sugar-cane was the only thing that could grow in Fuente Grove. They had few thrills. The population was small and there were not many births, marriages, or deaths to excite them. Two or three times a year the men made a noisy excursion to a cinema in distant, wicked San Fernando. Little happened besides. Once a year, at the ‘crop-over’ harvest festival, when the sugar-cane had been reaped, Fuente Grove made a brave show of gaiety. The half-dozen bullock carts in the village were decorated with pink and yellow and green streamers made from crêpe paper; the bullocks themselves, sad-eyed as ever, wore bright ribbons in their horns; and men, women, and children rattled the piquets on the carts and beat on pans, singing about the bounty of God. It was like the gaiety of a starving child.

Every Saturday evening the men gathered in Beharry’s shop and drank a lot of bad rum. They became sufficiently enthusiastic about their wives to beat them that night. On Sunday they woke sick, cursing Beharry and his rum, continued sick all day, and rose fresh and strong early Monday morning, ready for the week’s work.

It was only this Saturday drinking that kept Beharry’s shop going. He himself never drank because he was a good Hindu and because, as he told Ganesh, ‘it have nothing like a clear head, man’. Also, his wife didn’t approve.

Beharry was the only person in Fuente Grove with whom Ganesh became friendly. He was a little man, scholarly in appearance, with a neat little belly and thin, greying hair. He alone in Fuente Grove read the newspapers. A day-old copy of the Trinidad Sentinel came to him every day by cyclist from Princes Town and Beharry read it from end to end, sitting on a high stool in front of his counter. He hated being behind the counter. ‘It does make me feel I is in a pen, man.’

The day after he arrived in Fuente Grove Ganesh called on Beharry and found that he knew all about the Institute.

‘Is just what Fuente Grove want,’ Beharry said. ‘You going to write books and thing, eh?’

Ganesh nodded and Beharry shouted, ‘Suruj!’

A boy of about five ran into the shop.

‘Suruj, go bring the books. They under the pillow.’

‘All the books, Pa?’

‘All.’

The boy brought the books and Beharry passed them one by one to Ganesh: Napoleon’s Book of Fate, a school edition of Eothen which had lost its covers, three issues of the Booker’s Drug Stores Almanac, the Gita, and the Ramayana.

‘People can’t fool me,’ Beharry said. ‘Tom is a country-bookie but Tom ain’t a fool. Suruj!’

The boy ran up again.

‘Cigarette and match, Suruj.’

‘But they on the counter, Pa.’

‘You think I can’t see that? Hand them to me.’

The boy obeyed, then ran out of the shop.

‘What you think of the books?’ Beharry asked, pointing with an unlighted cigarette.

When Beharry spoke he became rather like a mouse. He looked anxious and worked his small mouth nervously up and down as though he were nibbling.

‘Nice.’

A big woman with a tired face came into the shop. ‘Suruj Poopa, you ain’t hear me calling you to eat?’

Beharry nibbled. ‘I was just showing the pundit the books I does read.’

‘Read!’ Her tired face quickened with scorn. ‘Read! You want to know how he does read?’

Ganesh didn’t know where to look.

‘He does close up the shop if I don’t keep a eye on him, and he does jump into bed with the books. I ain’t know him read one book to the end yet, and still he ain’t happy unless he reading four five book at the same time. It have some people it dangerous learning them how to read.’

Beharry replaced the cigarette in the box.

‘This world go be a different and better place the day man start making baby,’ the woman said, sweeping out of the shop. ‘Life hard enough with you one, leave alone your three worthless children.’

There was a short silence after she had gone.

‘Suruj Mooma,’ Beharry explained.

‘They is like that,’ Ganesh agreed.

‘But she right, you know, man. If everybody did start behaving like me and you it would be a crazy kinda world.’

Beharry nibbled, and winked at Ganesh. ‘I telling you, man. This reading is a dangerous thing.’

Suruj ran into the shop again. ‘She calling you, Pa.’ His tone carried his mother’s exasperation.

As Ganesh left he heard Beharry saying, ‘She? Is how you does call your mother? Who is she? The cat mother?’

Ganesh heard a slap.

He went often to Beharry’s shop. He liked Beharry and he liked the shop. Beharry made it bright with coloured advertisements for things he didn’t stock; and it was as dry and clean as Ramlogan’s shop was greasy and dirty.

‘It beat me what you does see in this Beharry,’ Leela said. ‘He think he could run shop, but he does only make me laugh. I must write and tell Pa about the sort of shop it have in Fuente Grove.’

‘It have one thing you must write and tell your father to do. Tell him to go and open a stall in San Fernando market.’

Leela cried. ‘You see the sort of thing Beharry putting in your head. The man is my father.’ And she cried again.

But Ganesh still went to Beharry’s.

When Beharry heard that Ganesh was going to set himself up as a masseur he nibbled anxiously and shook his head. ‘Man, you choose a hard hard thing. These days nearly everybody you bouncing up is either massager or dentist. One of my own cousin — really Suruj Mooma cousin, but Suruj Mooma family is like my own family — a really nice boy he is, he too starting in this thing.’

‘As another massager?’

‘Wait, you go hear. Last Christmas Suruj Mooma take up the children by their grandmooma and this boy just come up to she cool cool and say he taking up dentistry. You could imagine how Suruj Mooma was surprise. And the next thing we hear is that he borrow money to buy one of them dentist machine thing and he start pulling out people teeth, just like that. The boy killing people left and right, and still people going. Trinidad people is like that.’

‘It ain’t people teeth I want to pull out. But the boy doing all right, eh?’

‘For the time, yes. He done pay back for the machine. But Tunapuna is a busy place, remember. Eh, I see the time coming when quack go find it hard getting two cent to buy a bread and some cheap red butter.’

Suruj Mooma came in hot and dusty from the yard with a cocoye broom. ‘I was coming with a good good mind to sweep out the shop — eh! — and look at the first thing I hearing. Why for you must call the boy quack? It ain’t as if he not trying.’ She looked at Ganesh. ‘You know what wrong with Suruj Poopa? He just jealous the boy. He can’t even cut toenail, and a little boy pulling out big people teeth. Is just jealous he jealous the boy.’

Ganesh said, ‘You have something there, maharajin. Is like me and my massaging. I ain’t just rushing into it like that, you know. I learn and stop and study a lot about it, from my own father. It ain’t quack work.’

Beharry, on the defensive, nibbled. ‘Wasn’t that I did mean at all. I was just telling the pundit here that if he set hisself up as a massager in Fuente Grove he go have it hard.’

It didn’t take Ganesh long to find out that Beharry was right. There were too many masseurs in Trinidad, and it was useless to advertise. Leela told her friends, The Great Belcher told hers, Beharry promised to write to all the people he knew; but few cared to bring their ailments to a place as far away as Fuente Grove. The villagers themselves were very healthy.

‘Man,’ Leela said. ‘I don’t think you really make for massage.’

And the time came when he himself began to doubt his own powers. He could cure a nara, a simple stomach dislocation, as well as any masseur, and he could cure stiff joints. But he could never bring himself to risk bigger operations.

One day a young girl with a twisted arm came to see him. She looked happy enough but her mother was weeping and miserable. ‘We try everybody and everything, pundit. Nothing happen. And every day the girl getting older, but who go want to married she?’

She was a pretty girl, too, with lively eyes in an impassive face. She looked only at her mother, not once at Ganesh.

‘Twenty time people break over the girl hand, if they break it over one time,’ the mother continued. ‘But still the hand can’t set.’

He knew what his father would have done. He would have made the girl lie down, he would have placed his foot on her elbow, levered the arm upwards till it broke, then set it again. But all Ganesh said, after examining the hand, was, ‘It have nothing wrong with the girl, maharajin. She only have a little bad blood, that is all. And too besides, God make she that way and is not for me to interfere in God work.’

The girl’s mother stopped sobbing and pulled her pink veil over her head. ‘Is my fate,’ she said, without sadness.

The girl never spoke a word.

Afterwards Leela said, ‘Man, you shoulda at least try to fix the hand first, and then you coulda start talking about God work. But you don’t care what you doing to me. It look as though you only want to drive away people now.’

Ganesh continued to offend his patients by telling them that nothing was wrong with them; he spoke more and more about God’s work; and, if he was pressed, he gave out a mixture he had made from one of his father’s prescriptions, a green fluid made mostly from shining-bush and leaves of the neem tree.

He said, ‘Facts is facts, Leela. I ain’t have a hand for massage.’

There was another disappointment in his life. After a year it was clear that Leela couldn’t have children. He lost interest in her as a wife and stopped beating her. Leela took it well, but he expected no less of a good Hindu wife. She still looked after the house and in time became an efficient housekeeper. She cared for the garden at the back of the house and minded the cow. She never complained. Soon she was ruler in the house. She could order Ganesh about and he didn’t object. She gave him advice and he listened. He began to consult her on nearly everything. In time, though they would never had admitted it, they had grown to love each other. Sometimes, when he thought about it, Ganesh found it strange that the tall hard woman with whom he lived was the saucy girl who had once asked, ‘You could write too, sahib?’

And always there was Ramlogan to be mollified. The newspaper cutting with his photograph hung, mounted and framed, in his shop, above Leela’s notice concerning the provision of chairs for female shop assistants. Already the paper was going brown at the edges. Whenever Ganesh went, for one reason or another to Fourways, Ramlogan was sure to ask, ‘How the Institute going, man?’

‘Thinking about it all the time,’ Ganesh would say. Or, ‘Is all in my head, you know. Don’t rush me.’

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 books. 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.

‘The third one, the one coming, if he is a boy, I go call him Motilal; if she is a girl I go call she Kamala.’

Admiration for the Nehru family couldn’t go much farther.

More and more Soomintra and her children looked out of place in Fourways. Ramlogan himself grew dingier and the shop grew dingier with him. Left alone, he seemed to have lost interest in housekeeping. The oilcloth on the table in the back room was worn, crinkled, and cut about; the flour sack hammock had become brown, the Chinese calendars fly-blown. Soomintra’s children wore clothes of increasing cost and fussiness, and they made more noise; but when they were about Ramlogan had time for no one else. He petted them and pampered them, but they soon made it clear that they considered his attempts at pampering elementary. They wanted more than a sugar-coated sweet from one of the jars in the shop. So Ramlogan gave them lollipops. Soomintra got plumper and looked richer, and it was a strain for Leela not to pay too much attention when Soomintra crooked her right arm and jangled her gold bracelets or when, with the licence of wealth, she complained she was tired and needed a holiday.

‘The third one come,’ Soomintra said at Christmas. ‘I wanted to write and tell you, but you know how it hard.’

‘Yes, I know how it hard.’

‘Was a girl, and I call she Kamala, like I did say. Eh, girl, but I forgetting. How your husband? I ain’t see any of the books he writing. But then, you see, I isn’t a big reader.’

‘He ain’t finish the book yet.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is a big big book.’

Soomintra jangled her gold bracelets and at the same time coughed, hawked, but didn’t spit — another mannerism of wealth, Leela recognized. ‘Jawaharlal father start reading the other day too. He always say that if he had the time he would do some writing, but with all the coming and going in the shop he ain’t really have the time, poor man. I don’t suppose Ganesh so busy, eh?’

‘You go be surprise how much people does come for massage. If you hear anybody wanting a massage you must tell them about him. Fuente Grove not so hard to reach, you know.’

‘Child, you know I go do anything at all to help you out. But you go be surprise the number of people it have these days who going around calling theyself massagers. Is people like that who taking the work from really good people like Ganesh. But the rest of these little boys who taking up massaging, I feel they is only a pack of good-for-nothing idlers.’

Kamala, in the bedroom, began to cry; and little Jawaharlal, wearing a brand-new sailor suit, came and lisped, ‘Ma, Kamala wet sheself.’

‘Children!’ Soomintra exclaimed, thumping out of the room. ‘Leela girl, you ain’t know how lucky you is, not having any.’

Ramlogan came in from the shop with Sarojini on his hip. She was partly sucking a lemon lollipop, partly investigating its stickiness with her fingers.

‘I been listening,’ Ramlogan said. ‘Soomintra don’t mean anything bad. She just feeling a little rich and she got to show off a little.’

‘But he going to write the book, Pa. He tell me so heself. He reading and writing all the time. One day he go show all of all you.’

‘Yes, I know he going to write the book.’ Sarojini was dragging the lollipop over Leela’s uncovered head, and Ramlogan was making unsuccessful efforts to stop her. ‘But stop crying. Soomintra coming back.’

‘Ah, Leela! Sarojini take a liking to you. First person she take a liking to, just like that. Ah, you mischeevyus little girl, why for you playing with your auntie hair like that?’

Ramlogan surrendered Sarojini.

‘Looking prettish girlish,’ Soomintra said, ‘wif prettish namish. We having a famous family, you know, Leela. This little girl name after a woman who does write nice nice poetry and again it have your husband writing a big big book.’

Ramlogan said, ‘No, when you think about it, I think we is a good family. Once we keep cha’acter and sensa values, is all right. Look at me. Supposing people stop liking me and stop coming to my shop. That harm me? That change my —’

‘All right, Pa, but take it easy,’ Soomintra interrupted. ‘You go wake up Kamala again if you walk up and down like that and talk so loud.’

‘But still, man, the truth is the truth. It does make a man feel good to have all his family around him, and seeing them happy. I say that every family must have a radical in it, and I proud that we have Ganesh.’

‘So is that what Soomintra saying, eh?’ Ganesh was trying to be calm. ‘What else you expect? Money is all she and she father does think about. She don’t care about books and things. Is people like that did laugh at Mr Stewart, you know. And they call theyself Hindus! Now, if I was in India, I woulda have people coming from all over the place, some bringing me food, some bringing me clothes. But in Trinidad — bah!’

‘But, man, we got to think about money now. The time coming when we won’t have a cent remaining.’

‘Look, Leela. Look at this thing in a practical way. You want food? You have a little garden in the back. You want milk? You have a cow. You want shelter? You have a house. What more you want? Chut! You making me talk like your father now.’

‘Is all right for you. You ain’t have no sisters to face and hear them laughing at you.’

‘Leela, is the thing everybody who want to write have to face. Poverty and sickness is what every writer have to suffer.’

‘But you ain’t writing, man.’

Ganesh didn’t reply.

He kept on reading. He kept on making notes. He kept on making note-books. And he began to acquire some sensitivity to typefaces. Although he owned nearly every Penguin that had been issued he disliked them as books because they were mostly printed in Times, and he told Beharry that it looked cheap, ‘like a paper’. The works of Mr Aldous Huxley he could read only in Fournier; in fact, he had come to regard that type as the exclusive property of Mr Huxley.

‘But is just the sort of type I want my book to be in,’ he told Beharry one Sunday.

‘You think they have that sort of type in Trinidad. All they have here is one sort of mash-up type, ugly as hell.’

‘But this boy, this man I was telling you about, Basdeo, he have a new printing machine. It like a big typewriter.’

‘Line of type.’ Beharry passed his hand over his head and nibbled. ‘It does just show you how backward this Trinidad is. When you look at those American magazines, you don’t wish people in Trinidad could print like that?’

Ganesh couldn’t say anything because just then Suruj Mooma put her head through the door and gave Ganesh his hint to leave.

He found his food neatly laid out for him in the kitchen, as usual. There was a brass jar of water and a little plate of fresh coconut chutney. When he was finished he lifted up the brass plate to lick it and found a short note below it, written on one of his best sheets of light blue paper.

I, cannot; live: here. and, put; up: with. the, insult; of: my. Family!