The Mystic Masseur

7. The Mystic Masseur

MANY YEARS AFTER the event, Ganesh wrote in The Years of Guilt: ‘Everything happens for the best. If, for instance, my first volume had been a success, it is likely that I would have become a mere theologian, writing endless glosses on the Hindu scriptures. As it was, I found my true path.’

In fact, when the war began, his path was none too clear.

‘Is a hell of a thing,’ he told Beharry. ‘I feel I make for something big, yet I can’t see what it is.’

‘Is just why you going to do something big. I still believe in you, and Suruj Mooma still believes in you.’

They followed the war news with interest and discussed it every Sunday. Beharry got hold of a war map of Europe and stuck red pins on it. He talked a lot about strategy and ta’tics, and this gave Ganesh the idea of publishing monthly surveys of the progress of the war, ‘as a sort of history book for later on’. The idea excited him for a little, then lingered and died at the back of his mind.

‘I wish Hitler would come over and start bombing up Trinidad,’ he exclaimed one Sunday.

Beharry nibbled, eager for argument. ‘Why, man?’

‘Bomb everything to hell. Then it going to have no more worries about massaging people and writing books and all that sort of nonsense.’

‘But you forgetting that we is just a tiny little dot on some maps. If you ask me, I think Hitler ain’t even know it have a place called Trinidad and that it have people like you and me and Suruj Mooma living on it.’

‘Nah,’ Ganesh insisted. ‘It have oil here and the Germans thirsty for oil. If you don’t look out, Hitler come here first.’

‘Don’t let Suruj Mooma hear you. She cousin join the Volunteers. The dentist follow I did tell you about. Dentistry stop paying, so he join up. He tell Suruj Mooma is a nice, easy work.’

‘Suruj Mooma cousin have a eye for that sort of thing.’

‘But what if the Germans land here tomorrow?’

‘The only thing I sure about is that Suruj Mooma cousin go start breaking all sort of world record for running.’

‘No, man. If the Germans come, what we going to use for money? What about my shop? And the court-house? Is things like that does worry me.’

So, discussing the implications of the war, they began to discuss war in general. Beharry was full of quotations from the Gita, and Ganesh read again, with fuller appreciation, the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna on the field of battle.

It gave a new direction to his reading. Forgetting the war, he became a great Indologist and bought all the books on Hindu philosophy he could get in San Fernando. He read them, marked them, and on Sunday afternoons made notes. At the same time he developed a taste for practical psychology and read many books on The Art of Getting On. But India was his great love. It became his habit, on examining a new book, to look first at the index to see whether there were any references to India or Hinduism. If the references were complimentary he bought the book. Soon he owned a curious selection.

‘Is a lot of book you getting, you know, Ganesh,’ Beharry said.

‘I was thinking. Suppose you didn’t know about me and you was just driving through Fuente Grove in your Lincoln Zephyr. You think you would guess that my house just full up with a hundred and one sort of book?’

‘Wouldn’t guess,’ said Beharry.

Leela’s pride in Ganesh’s books was balanced by her worry about money. ‘Man, all this book-buying go do,’ she said, ‘but it not going to pay. You got to start thinking of making some money now.’

‘Look, girl. I have enough worries and I don’t want you to make my head any hotter, you hear.’

Then two things happened almost at the same time, and his fortunes were changed for ever.

The Great Belcher, continually on circuit, called one day.

‘Is a blow, Ganesh,’ she began. ‘A big big blow. You can’t trust nobody these days.’

Ganesh respected his aunt’s sense of the dramatic. ‘What happen now so, then?’

‘King George do me a nasty trick.’

Ganesh showed his interest. She paused to belch and call for water. Leela brought it and she drank. ‘A nasty nasty trick.’

‘What she do so?’

She belched again. ‘Wait, you go hear.’ She rubbed her breasts. ‘God, this wind! King George leave me. She pick up a married man near Arouca. Is a blow, Ganesh.’

‘Oh God!’ Ganesh sympathized. ‘You telling me is a blow. But you mustn’t worry. You go get somebody else.’

‘She was nobody at all when I pick she up. All the clothes she had she had on she back. I buy she clothes. I take she round, show she to people. I get the Bombays to make she nice jewellery from my own gold.’

‘Is like what I do for this husband that God give me,’ Leela said.

The Great Belcher immediately laid her sorrow aside. ‘Yes, Leela? I hearing right? Is how you does always talk about your husband, girl?’ She nodded slowly up and down and put her right palm to her jaw as though she had toothache.

‘It shock me to hear about King George,’ Ganesh said, trying to make peace.

Leela became shrill. ‘Eh, eh, I have a husband who lose all sensa values and dragging my name in the mud, and still you don’t want me to complain?’

Ganesh stood between the women, but The Great Belcher moved him aside. ‘No, gimme a chance, boy. I want to hear this thing out to the end.’ She sounded more hurt than annoyed. ‘But, Leela, who you is to ask your husband what he doing or what he ain’t doing? Oho! This is the thing they call ed-u-ca-tion?’

‘What wrong with education? I educated, is true, but I don’t see why that should make everybody think they could insult me as they well want.’

Ganesh laughed unhappily. ‘Leela is a good girl. She don’t mean anything, really.’

The Great Belcher turned on him sharply. ‘What she say is the gospel truth, though. Everybody in Trinidad have the idea that you just sitting down here, scratching. Scratching not like hoeing, you know. It don’t grow food.’

‘I ain’t scratching, man. I reading and I writing.’

‘Is your story. I did come to let you know about King George, seeing as she did help you out so much at your wedding, but I really want to tell you, boy, that you have me worried. What you going to do about the future?’

Through her sobs Leela said, ‘I does keep on telling him that he could become a pundit. He know a lot more than most of the other pundits in Trinidad.’

The Great Belcher belched. ‘Is exactly what I come to tell him today. But Ganesh make to be a lot more than a ordinary pundit. If he is a Hindu he must realize by now that he have to use his learning to help out other people.’

‘What else you think I doing?’ Ganesh asked petulantly. ‘I sit down and spend my good good time writing a whole big book. Wasn’t for my benefit, you know.’

‘Man,’ Leela pleaded, ‘don’t start behaving so. Listen to what she have to tell you.’

The Great Belcher went on unperturbed. ‘It have a long time now I studying you, Ganesh. You have the Power all right.’

It was the sort of statement he had grown to expect from The Great Belcher. ‘What Power?’

‘To cure people. Cure the mind, cure the soul — chut! Man, you making me confuse, and you well know what I mean.’

Ganesh said acidly, ‘You want me to start curing people soul when you see me catching good hell to cure their toenail!’

Leela coaxed, ‘Man, the least you could do for me is to give it a try.’

‘She right, you know, Ganesh. Is the sort of Power you don’t even know you have until you start using it.’

‘All right, then. I have this great Power. How I go start using it? What I go tell people? “Your soul a little run down today: Here, take this prayer three times a day before meals.” ’

The Great Belcher clapped her hands. ‘Is exactly what I mean.’

‘You see, man. I did tell you you only had to listen a little bit.’

The Great Belcher went on, ‘Is the sort of thing your uncle, poor man, used to do until he dead.’ Leela’s face grew sad again at the mention of the dead, but The Great Belcher snubbed her by refusing to cry. ‘Ganesh, you have the Power. I could see it in your hands, your eyes, in the shape of your head. Just like your uncle, God bless him. He woulda be a great man today, if only he did live.’

Ganesh was interested now. ‘But how and where I go start, man?’

‘I go send you all your uncle old books. They have all the prayers and everything in it, and a lot more besides. Isn’t really the prayers that important, but the other things. Oh, Ganeshwa, boy, I too too glad now.’ In her relief she began to cry. ‘I carrying around these books like a weight on my chest, looking for the proper person to give them to, and you is the man.’

Ganesh smiled. ‘How you know that?’

‘Why else you think God make you live the sort of life you been living? Why else you think you been spending all these years doing nothing but reading and writing?’

‘Yes, is true.’ Ganesh said. ‘I did always feel I had something big to do.’

Then all three of them cried a little, Leela prepared a meal, they ate, and The Great Belcher took up her sorrow where she had left it. As she made ready to leave she began belching and rubbing her breasts and moaning, ‘Is a blow, Ganesh. King George do me a nasty trick. Ohh! Ohh! Ganesh, Ganesh, is a blow.’ And wailing, she left.

A fortnight later she brought a parcel wrapped in red cotton spattered with sandalwood paste and handed it over to Ganesh with appropriate ceremony. When Ganesh untied the parcel he saw books of many sizes and many types. All were in manuscript, some in Sanskrit, some in Hindi; some were of paper, some of palm strips. The palm strips bound together looked like folded fans.

Ganesh warned Leela off. ‘Don’t touch these books, girl, or I don’t know what going to happen to you.’

Leela understood and opened her eyes wide.

And at about the same time Ganesh discovered the Hollywood Hindus. The Hollywood Hindus are Hindus who live in or near Hollywood. They are holy, cultivated men who issue frequent bulletins about the state of their soul, the complexities and variations of which are endless and always worth description.

Ganesh was a little annoyed. ‘You think I could do this sort of thing in Trinidad and get away with it?’ he asked Beharry.

‘I suppose, if you really know, you only jealous them.’

‘Man, I could write a book like that every day if I put my mind to it.’

‘Ganesh, you is a big man now. The time come when you must forget other people and think about yourself.’

So he tried to forget the Hollywood Hindus and set about ‘preparing himself ‘, as he said. The process, it soon became clear, was going to take time.

Leela began to complain again. ‘Man, nobody seeing you go think that it have a war going on and that everywhere people making money. The Americans come to Trinidad now, and they giving away work, with all sort of big pay.’

‘Don’t approve of war,’ Ganesh said.

It was during this period of preparation that my mother took me to see Ganesh. I never knew how she got to know about him; but my mother was a sociable woman and I believe that she must have met The Great Belcher at some wedding or funeral. And, as I said at the beginning, if I had been more acute I would have paid more attention to the Hindi phrases Ganesh muttered over me while he thumped my foot about.

Thinking now about that visit I made to Ganesh as a boy, I am struck only by my egotism. It never crossed my mind then that the people I saw casually all around me had their own very important lives; that, for instance, I was as unimportant to Ganesh as he was amusing — and puzzling — to me. Yet when Ganesh published his autobiography, The Years of Guilt, I read it half hoping to find some reference to myself. Of course, there was none.

Ganesh devotes quite a third of The Years of Guilt to the comparatively short period of his preparation, and it is perhaps the most rewarding thing in the book. The anonymous critic of Letras (Nicaragua) wrote: ‘The section contains little of what is popularly conceived of as autobiography. What we get instead is a sort of spiritual thriller, handled with a technique which would not have disgraced the creator of Sherlock Holmes. All the facts are stated, the most important spiritual clues are widely and obviously laid, but the reader keeps guessing the outcome till the last revelation when it is clear that the outcome could only have been what it in fact was.’

Ganesh was undoubtedly inspired by the Hollywood Hindus but what he says owes nothing to them. It was quite a new thing when Ganesh said it, but the path that he followed has been trodden so often since that it has become a rut; and there is little point in going over it here.

Presently The Great Belcher came again. She appeared to have recovered from the defection of King George and she told Ganesh almost as soon as she saw him, ‘I want to talk to you in private now, to see how well you study your uncle books.’

After the examination she said she was satisfied. ‘It just have one thing you must remember all the time. Is something your uncle use to say. If you want to cure people, you must believe them, and they must know that you believe them. But first, people must get to know about you.’

‘Loudspeaker van in San Fernando and Princes Town?’ Ganesh suggested.

‘Nah, they might mistake it for the Borough Council elections. Why you don’t get some leaflets print and get Bissoon to give them out for you? He have a lot of experience and he wouldn’t go giving them away to any-and everybody.’

Leela said, ‘I wouldn’t let Bissoon touch a thing in this house. The man is a blight.’

‘Is strange,’ Ganesh said. ‘Last time he was a sign. Today he is a blight. Don’t worry with Leela. I go get Basdeo to print some leaflets and Bissoon to give them away.’

Basdeo was a little plumper when Ganesh went to see him about the folders — that was how, on Beharry’s advice, he had begun to call the leaflets — and the first thing he said to Ganesh was, ‘You still want me to keep the type for your first book?’

Ganesh didn’t reply.

‘You does give me a strange feeling,’ Basdeo said, scratching his neck below the collar. ‘Something tell me not to break up the type and I keeping it. Yes, you does give me a strange feeling.’

Still Ganesh didn’t speak, and Basdeo became gayer. ‘I have some news. You know so much wedding invitation I keep on printing and nobody at all invite me to a wedding. And, mark you, I does beat a damn good drum. So I think I would invite myself to a wedding. So I get married.’

Ganesh congratulated him and then coldly outlined his request for an illustrated folder — the illustration was his photograph — and when Basdeo read the copy, which was all about Ganesh’s spiritual qualifications, he shook his head and said, ‘Tell me, man, but tell me, how people does get so crazy in a small small place like Trinidad?’

And after all this, Bissoon refused to handle the folders, and made a long speech about it.

‘Can’t handle that sort of printed matter. I is a seller, not a give-awayer. Look, I go tell you. I start as a little boy in this business, giving away theatre handbills. Then I move up to San Fernando, selling kyalendars. Is not that I have anything against you or your wife. But is my reputation I got to be careful about. In the book business you got to be careful about your reputation.’

Leela was more displeased than Ganesh. ‘You see what I say? The man blight. Giving we all that amount of big talk. Is the trouble with Indians in Trinidad. They does get conceited too quickly, you hear.’

The Great Belcher looked on the bright side. ‘Bissoon ain’t what he used to be. He losing his hand, ever since his wife run away. She run away with Jhagru, the Siparia barber, some five six months, I think. And Jhagru is a married man, with six children! Bissoon shoot off a lot of big talk then about killing Jhagru, but he ain’t do nothing. He just start drinking. Too besides, Ganesh, you is a modern educated man and I think you should do things in a modern way. Put a advertisement in the papers, man.’

‘Coupon to full up?’ Ganesh asked.

‘If you want, but you must put a picture of yourself. Same picture you put in your book.’

‘Is just like I say in the beginning,’ Leela said. ‘Advertisement in the papers is the best thing. You wouldn’t waste any of the folders if you do that.’

Beharry and Ganesh worked on the copy and they produced that challenging advertisement which was to be so famous later on: WHO IS THIS GANESH? The ‘this’ was Beharry’s idea.

There was one other thing. Ganesh was not happy to be called simply a pundit. He felt he was more than that and he felt that he was entitled to a weightier word. So, remembering the Hollywood Hindus, he nailed a signboard on the mango tree: GANESH, Mystic.

‘Is nice,’ Beharry said, looking at it closely and nibbling, while he rubbed his belly under his vest. ‘Is very nice, but you think people go believe you is a mystic?’

‘But the advertisement in the papers –

‘That was two weeks back. People forget that long time. If you want people to believe you, you must start a advertising campaign. Yes, advertising campaign.’

‘So they won’t believe, eh? All right, let we see how much they won’t believe.’

He built a small shed in his front yard, thatched it with carat palm which he had to get all the way from Debe, and put up some stands in it. On these stands he displayed about three hundred of his books, including the Questions and Answers. Leela put out the books in the mornings and brought them in at night.

‘Won’t believe!’ Ganesh said.

Then he waited for clients, as he called them.

Suruj Mooma told Leela, ‘I feel sorry for you, Leela, girl. Ganesh gone mad this time.’

‘Well, is his books, and I don’t see why he shouldn’t let people see them. Other people does drive about in their big car to show it off.’

‘I so glad Suruj Poopa is not a big reader. I so glad nobody bother to educate me after Third Standard.’

Beharry shook his head. ‘Yes, man. This education and reading is a dangerous thing. Is one of the very first things I tell Ganesh.’

Ganesh waited for a month. No clients came.

‘Is another twenty dollars you throw away on that advertisement,’ Leela moaned. ‘And that sign and those books. You make me the laughing-stock in Fuente Grove.’

‘Well, girl, is only the country district here, and if plenty people ain’t see, plenty people ain’t here to laugh. Personally, I feel we want another advertisement in the papers. Proper advertising campaign.’

Leela began to sob. ‘No, man. Why you don’t give up and take a work? Look at Suruj Mooma cousin, look at Sookram. The boy give up dentistry and Sookram give up massaging and take a work like a brave man. Suruj Mooma tell me that Sookram getting more than thirty dollars a week from the Americans. Man, for my sake, why you don’t make up a brave mind and take a work?’

‘You looking at this thing from the wrong point of view. Your science of thought tell you that the war going to last for ever? And what go happen to Sookram and the other massagers when the Americans leave Trinidad?’

Leela still sobbed.

Ganesh forced a smile and became coaxing. ‘Look, Leela girl, we go put another advertisement in the papers, and we go have my picture and we go have your picture. Side by side. Husband and wife. Who is this Ganesh? Who is this Leela?’

She stopped crying and her face brightened for a moment, but then she began to cry in earnest.

‘God, woman! If man did listen to woman all the time, nothing at all woulda happen in this world. Beharry was right. A woman does keep a man back. All right, all right, leave me and run back to your father. Think I care?’

And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went to see Beharry.

‘No luck?’ Beharry queried, nibbling.

‘Why you have this thing about asking damn fool questions, eh? But don’t think I worried. What is for me I will get.’

Beharry put his hand under his vest. It was a warning, as Ganesh knew now, that Beharry was going to give advice. ‘I think you make a big big mistake in not writing the companion volume. That’s where you go wrong.’

‘Look, Beharry. It have a damn long time now you judging me like some blasted magistrate, and telling me where I go wrong. I read a lot of psychology book about people like you, you know. And what those book have to say about you ain’t nice, I can tell you.’

‘Is only for you I worried.’ Beharry pulled away his hand from his vest.

Suruj Mooma came into the shop. ‘Ah, Ganesh. How?’

‘How “how”?’ Ganesh snapped. ‘You can’t see?

Beharry said, ‘Is a suggestion I have to make to you.’

‘All right, I listening. But I ain’t responsible for what I do when I finish listening.’

‘Is really Suruj Mooma idea.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, Ganesh. Me and Suruj Poopa been thinking a lot about you. We thinking that you must stop wearing trousers and a shirt.’

‘It don’t suit a mystic,’ Beharry said.

‘You must wear proper dhoti and koortah. I was talking only last night to Leela about it when she come here to buy cooking-oil. She think is a good idea too.’

Ganesh’s annoyance began to melt. ‘Yes, is a idea. You feel it go bring me luck?’

‘Is what Suruj Mooma say.’

Next morning Ganesh involved his legs in a dhoti and called Leela to help him tie the turban.

‘Is a nice one,’ she said.

‘One of my father old ones. Make me feel funny wearing it.’

‘Something telling me it go bring you luck.’

‘You really think so?’ Ganesh cried, and almost kissed her.

She pulled away. ‘Look what you doing, man.’

Then Ganesh, a strange and striking figure in white, went to the shop.

‘You look like a real maharaj,’ Suruj Mooma said.

‘Yes, he look nice,’ said Beharry. ‘It make me wonder why more Indians don’t keep on wearing their own dress.’

Suruj Mooma warned, ‘You better not start, you hear. Your legs thin enough already and they look funny even in trousers.’

‘It look good, eh?’ Ganesh smiled.

Beharry said, ‘Nobody would believe now that you did go to the Christian college in Port of Spain. Man, you look like a pukka brahmin.’

‘Well, I have a feeling. I feel my luck change as from today.’

A child began crying inside. ‘My luck don’t change,’ Suruj Mooma said. ‘If it ain’t Suruj Poopa, is the children. Look at my hands, Ganesh. You see how smooth they is. They can’t even leave finger-prints now.’

Suruj came into the shop. ‘The baby crying, Ma.’

Suruj Mooma left and Beharry and Ganesh began a discussion about dress through the ages. Beharry was putting forward a daring view that dress wasn’t necessary at all in a hot place like Trinidad when he broke off suddenly and said, ‘Listen.’

Above the rustle of the wind through the sugar-cane came the rattle of a motor car bumping along the lumpy road.

Ganesh was excited. ‘Is somebody coming to see me.’ Then he became very calm.

A light green 1937 Chevrolet stopped in front of the shop. There was a woman at the back and she was trying to shout above the beat of the engine.

Ganesh said, ‘Go and talk to she, Beharry.’

The engine was turned off before Beharry could get down the shop steps. The woman said, ‘Who is this Ganesh?’

‘This is this Ganesh,’ Beharry said.

And Ganesh stood, dignified and unsmiling, in the centre of the shop doorway.

The woman looked at him carefully. ‘I driving all from Port of Spain to see you.’

Ganesh walked slowly towards the car. ‘Good morning,’ he said, but in his determination to be correct he was a little too curt and the woman was discomfited.

‘Good morning.’ She had to fumble for the words.

Speaking slowly, because he wanted to speak properly, Ganesh said, ‘I do not live here and I cannot talk to you here. I live down the road.’

‘Hop in the car,’ the taxi-driver said.

‘I prefer to walk.’

It was a strain for him to talk correctly and the woman noted, with obvious satisfaction, that he was moving his lips silently before every sentence, as though he were mumbling a prayer.

Her satisfaction turned to respect when the car stopped outside Ganesh’s house and she saw the GANESH, Mystic sign on the mango tree and the book-display in the shed.

‘Is books you selling on the side, or what?’ the taxi-driver asked.

The woman looked sideways at him and nodded towards the sign. She began to say something when the taxi-driver, for no apparent reason, blew his horn and drowned her words.

Leela came running out, but with a glance Ganesh told her to keep out of the way. To the woman he said, ‘Come into the study.’

The word had the desired effect.

‘But take off your shoes here in the verandah first.’

Respect turned to awe. And when the woman brushed through the Nottingham lace curtains into the study and saw all the books, she looked abject.

‘My only vice,’ Ganesh said.

The woman just stared.

‘I don’t smoke. I don’t drink.’

She sat awkwardly on a blanket on the floor. ‘Is a matter of life and death, mister, so whatever I say you mustn’t laugh.’

Ganesh looked straight at her. ‘I never laugh. I listen.’

‘Is about my son. A cloud following him.’

Ganesh didn’t laugh. ‘What sort of cloud?’

‘A black cloud. And every day is getting nearer. The cloud even talking to the boy now. The day the cloud reach him the boy go dead. I try everything. The real doctors and them want to put the boy in the mad-house in St Ann’s, but you know that once they put anybody there they does get mad for true. So what I do? I take him to the priest. The priest say the boy possess, and paying for his sins. It have a long time now I see your advertisement, but I didn’t know what you could do.’

As she spoke Ganesh scribbled in one of his note-books. He had written, Black boy under a black cloud; and he had drawn a great black cloud. ‘You mustn’t worry. Lots of people see clouds. How long your son has been seeing the cloud?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, the whole bacchanal begin not long after his brother dead.’

Ganesh added to the black cloud in his note-book and said, ‘Hmmh!’ Then he chanted a short Hindi hymn, snapped his notebook shut, and threw his pencil down. ‘Bring the boy tomorrow. And don’t worry about priests. Tell me, you see the cloud?’

The woman looked distressed. ‘No. That is the thing. None of we ain’t see the cloud, apart from the boy.’

‘Well, don’t worry. Things would be bad if you really did see the cloud.’

He led her to the taxi. The taxi-driver was sleeping with the Trinidad Sentinel over his face. He was awakened, and Ganesh watched the car drive away.

‘I did feel this coming, man,’ Leela said. ‘I did tell you that your luck change.’

‘We don’t know what going to happen yet, girl. Give me a chance to think this thing out.’

He remained a long time in the study consulting his uncle’s books. His ideas were slowly beginning to form, when Beharry came in a temper.

‘Ganesh, how you so ungrateful?’

‘What happening now?’

Beharry looked helpless in his anger. He nibbled so furiously that for a while he couldn’t speak. When he could, he stammered. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know. Why you couldn’t walk up to the shop to tell me what happen, eh? For a hundred and one weeks you coming up all the time, but today you prefer to make me leave my shop, leave only little Suruj in charge, and come to see you.’

‘But I was going to come later, man.’

‘Tell me, what go happen if somebody come to the shop and beat up little Suruj and Suruj Mooma and thief everything?’

‘Was going to come, Beharry. Only thing I was doing a little thinking first.’

‘No, you wasn’t. You just getting conceited now, that is all. Is the trouble with Indians all over the world.’

‘But this new thing I handling is something really big.’

‘You sure you could handle it? But look, you see how stupid I is, still letting myself be interested in your affairs! You could handle it?’

‘God will give me a little help.’

‘All right, all right. Give me all this flashy talk. But don’t come round begging me for anything, you hear.’

And Beharry left.

Ganesh read and thought deeply all that day and most of the night.

‘I don’t know why for you wasting all this time on one little black boy,’ Leela said. ‘Anybody would think you was a schoolchild doing homework.’

When Ganesh saw the boy next morning he felt he had never seen anyone so tormented. It was torment heightened by a deep sense of helplessness. Though the boy was thin now and his arms looked bony and brittle, it was clear that he had once been strong and healthy. His eyes were dead, lack-lustre. In them you could see not the passing shock of momentary fear, but fear as a permanent state, fear so strong that it had ceased to thrill.

The first thing Ganesh said to the boy was, ‘Look, son, you mustn’t worry. I want you to know that I can help you. You believe I can help you?’

The boy didn’t move but it seemed to Ganesh that he had recoiled a little. ‘How I know that you not laughing at me, just as everybody else laughing at the back of their mind?’

‘You see me laughing? I believe in you, but you must believe in me too.’

The boy looked down at Ganesh’s feet. ‘Something tell me you is a good man and I believe in you.’

Ganesh asked the boy’s mother to leave the room and when she left he asked, ‘You see the cloud now?’

The boy looked Ganesh in the face for the first time. ‘Yes.’ The voice was part whisper, part scream. ‘It here now and the hands it reaching out getting longer and longer.’

‘Oh, God!’ Ganesh gave a sudden shriek. ‘I see it now too. Oh, God!’

‘You see it? You see it?’ The boy put his arms around Ganesh. ‘You see how it chasing me? You see the hands it have? You hear what it saying?’

‘You and me is one,’ Ganesh said, still a little breathlessly, breaking into pure dialect. ‘God! Hear my heart beating. Only you and me see it because you and me is one. But, listen to something I going to tell you. You fraid the cloud, but the cloud fraid me. Man, I been beating clouds like he for years and years. And so long as you with me, it not going to harm you.’

The boy’s eyes filled with tears and he tightened his embrace on Ganesh. ‘I know you is a good man.’

‘It just can’t touch you with me around. I have powers over these things, you know. Look around at all these books in this room, and look at all those writings on the wall and all the pictures and everything. These things help me get the power I have and cloud fraid these things. So don’t frighten. And now tell me how it happen.’

‘Tomorrow is the day.’

‘What day?’

‘It coming to get me tomorrow.’

‘Don’t talk stupidness. It coming tomorrow all right, but how it could take you away if you with me?’

‘It saying so for a year.’

‘What, you seeing it for a whole year?’

‘And it getting bigger all the time.’

‘Now, look, man. We must stop talking about it as though we fraid it. These things know when you fraid them, you know, and then they does behave like real bad Johns. How you getting on at school?’

‘I stop.’

‘What about your brothers and sisters?’

‘I ain’t have no sisters.’

‘And your brothers?’

The boy broke into a loud cry. ‘My brother dead. Last year. I didn’t want him to dead. I never want Adolphus to dead.’

‘Eh, eh, but who saying you want him to dead?’

‘Everybody. But it ain’t true.’

‘He dead last year?’

Tomorrow go make one year exact.’

‘Tell me how he dead.’

‘A truck knock him down. Ram him against a wall, break him up and mash him up. But he was trying to get away even then. He try to pull hisself away and all he could do was take his foot out of the shoe, the left foot. He didn’t want to dead either. And the ice only melting in the hot sun and running down on the pavement next to the blood.’

‘You see this?’

‘I didn’t see it happen. But it was really me that shoulda go to buy the ice, not he. Ma ask me to go and buy some ice for the grapefruit juice and I ask my brother to go instead and he go and this thing happen to him. The priest and everybody else say was my fault and I have to pay for my sins.’

‘What sort of damn fool tell you that? Well, anyway, you mustn’t talk about it now. Remember, you wasn’t responsible. Wasn’t your fault. Is clear as anything to me that you didn’t want your brother to dead. As for this cloud, we go fix him tomorrow self, when he get so close to you I could reach him and settle him.’

‘You know, Mr Ganesh, I think he getting fraid of you now.’

‘Tomorrow we go make him run, you watch and see. You want to sleep here tonight?’

The boy smiled and looked a little perplexed.

‘All right. Go home. Tomorrow we go settle this Mister Cloud. What time you say he was coming to get you?’

‘I didn’t tell you. Two o’clock.’

‘By five past two you go be the happiest boy in the world, believe me.’

On the verandah the boy’s mother and the taxi-driver sat silently, the taxi-driver on the floor with his feet on the step.

‘The boy go be all right,’ Ganesh said.

The taxi-driver rose, dusting the seat of his trousers, and spat into the yard, just missing the display of Ganesh’s books. The boy’s mother also rose and put her arm around her son’s shoulders. She looked without expression at Ganesh.

After they had gone away Leela said, ‘Man, I hope you could help the lady out. I feel too sorry for she. She just sit down quiet all the time, not saying anything, she face small with sadness.’

‘Girl, this is the most important case anybody ever handle in the world. I know that that boy going to dead tomorrow unless I do something for him. It give you a funny feeling, you know. Is like watching a theatre show and then finding out afterwards that they was really killing people on the stage.’

‘I was thinking, man. I didn’t like the taxi-driver. He come here, he see all the books, he never mention them once. He ask for water and for this and that and he ain’t even say, “Thank you.” And he making a pile of money bringing these poor people here every day.’

‘Girl, but why you have to be like your father for? Why you have to try to take my mind off what I doing? You want me to start driving taxi now?’

‘I was just thinking.’

When he had washed his hands after eating, Ganesh said, ‘Leela, take out my clothes — the English clothes.’

‘Where you going?’

‘It have a man I want to see in the Oilfields.’

‘What for, man?’

‘Tonerre! But you full of questions today. You and Beharry is one.’

She asked no more questions and did as she was told. Ganesh changed from dhoti and koortah to trousers and shirt. Before he left he said, ‘You know, sometimes I glad I get a college education.’

He came back radiant later in the afternoon and immediately began clearing out the bedroom. He paid no attention to Leela’s objections. He placed the bed in the drawing-room, the study; and took the table from the study into the bedroom. He turned the table over on its top and arranged a three-sided screen round the legs. He made Leela hang a heavy curtain over the window, and he went over the wooden walls systematically, blocking up every chink and cranny that let in light. He rearranged the pictures and quotations, giving the goddess Lakshmi pride of place just above the screened and upturned table. Below the goddess he placed a candle-bracket.

‘It look frightening,’ Leela said.

He walked about the darkened room, rubbing his hands, and humming a song from a Hindi film. ‘It don’t matter if we have to sleep in the study.’

Then they agreed on arrangements for the next day.

All that night camphor and incense burned in the bedroom and in the morning Ganesh, rising early, went to see how the room smelled.

Leela was still asleep. He shook her by the shoulder. ‘It look all right and it smell all right, girl. Get up and milk the cow. I hear the calf bawling.’

He bathed while Leela milked the cow and cleaned out the cow-pen; did his puja while Leela made tea and roti; and when Leela started to clean the house, he went for a walk. The sun was not yet hot, the leaves of razor-grass still looked frosted with the dew, and the two or three dusty hibiscus shrubs in the village carried fresh pink flowers that were to quail before midday. ‘This is the big day,’ Ganesh said aloud, and prayed again for success.

Shortly after twelve the boy, his mother and father arrived, in the same taxi as before. Ganesh, dressed once more in his Hindu garments, welcomed them in Hindi, and Leela interpreted, as arranged. They took off their shoes in the verandah and Ganesh led them all to the darkened bedroom, aromatic with camphor and incense, and lit only by the candle below the picture of Lakshmi on her lotus. Other pictures were barely visible in the semi-darkness: a stabbed and bleeding heart, a putative likeness of Christ, two or three crosses, and other designs of dubious significance.

Ganesh seated his clients before the screened table, then he himself sat down out of view behind the screen. Leela, her long black hair undone, sat in front of the table and faced the boy and his parents. In the dark room it was hard to see more than the white shirts of the boy and his father.

Ganesh began to chant in Hindi.

Leela asked the boy, ‘He ask whether you believe in him.’

The boy nodded, without conviction.

Leela said to Ganesh in English, ‘I don’t think he really believe in you.’ And she said it in Hindi afterwards.

Ganesh spoke in Hindi again.

Leela said to the boy, ‘He say you must believe.’

Ganesh chanted.

‘He say you must believe, if only for two minutes, because if you don’t believe in him completely, he will dead too.’

The boy screamed in the darkness. The candle burned steadily. ‘I believe in him, I believe in him.’

Ganesh was still chanting.

‘I believe in him. I don’t want him to dead too.’

‘He say he go be strong enough to kill the cloud only if you believe in him. He want all the strength you could give him.’

The boy hung his head. ‘I don’t doubt him.’

Leela said, ‘He change the cloud. It not following you now. It chasing him. If you don’t believe, the cloud will kill him and then it will kill you and then me and then your mother and then your father.’

The boy’s mother shouted, ‘Hector go believe! Hector go believe!’

Leela said, ‘You must believe, you must believe.’

Ganesh suddenly stopped chanting and the room was shocked by the silence. He rose from behind his screen and, chanting once more, went and passed his hands in curious ways over Hector’s face, head, and chest.

Leela still said, ‘You must believe. You beginning to believe. You giving him your strength now. He getting your strength. You beginning to believe, he getting your strength, and the cloud getting frighten. The cloud still coming, but it getting frighten. As it coming it getting frighten.’

Ganesh went back behind the screen.

Leela said, ‘The cloud coming.’

Hector said, ‘I believe in him now.’

‘It coming closer. He drawing it now. It not in the room yet, but it coming. It can’t resist him.’

Ganesh’s chants were becoming more frenzied.

Leela said, ‘The fight beginning between them. It starting now. Oh, God! He get the cloud. It not after you. It after him. God! The cloud dying,’ Leela screamed, and as she screamed there seemed to be a muffled explosion, and Hector said, ‘Oh God, I see it leaving me. I can feel it leaving me.’

The mother said, ‘Look at the ceiling. At the ceiling. I see the cloud. Oh, Hector, Hector. It ain’t a cloud at all. Is the devil.’

Hector’s father said, ‘And I see forty little devils with him.’

‘Oh God,’ Hector said. ‘See how they kill the cloud. Look how it breaking up, Ma. You see it now?’

‘Yes, son. I see it. It getting finer and finer. It dead.’

‘You see it, Pa.’

‘Yes, Hector, I see it.’

And mother and son began to cry their relief, while Ganesh still chanted, and Leela collapsed on the floor.

Hector was crying, ‘Ma, it gone now. It really gone.’

Ganesh stopped chanting. He got up and led them to the room outside. The air was fresher and the light seemed dazzling. It was like stepping into a new world.

‘Mr Ganesh,’ Hector’s father said. ‘I don’t know what we could do to thank you.’

‘Do just what you want. If you want to reward me, I don’t mind, because I have to make a living. But I don’t want you to strain yourself.’

Hector’s mother said, ‘But you save a whole life.’

‘It is my duty. If you want to send me anything, send it. But don’t go around telling all sorts of people about me. You can’t take on too much of this sort of work. A case like this does tire me out for a whole week sometimes.’

‘I know how it is,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry. We go send you a hundred dollars as soon as we get home. Is what you deserve.’

Ganesh hurried them away.

When he came back to the little room the window was open and Leela was taking down the curtains.

‘You ain’t know what you doing, girl,’ he shouted. ‘You losing the smell. Stop it, man. Is only the beginning. In no time at all, mark my words, this place go be full of people from all over Trinidad.’

‘Man, I take back all the bad things I say and think about you. Today you make me feel really nice. Soomintra could keep she shopkeeper and she money. But, man, don’t again ask me to let down my hair and go through all that rigmarole again.’

‘We not going to do that again. I only wanted to make sure this time. It make them feel good, you know, hearing me talk a language they can’t understand. But it not really necessary.’

‘Manwa, I did see the cloud too, you know.’

‘The mother see one devil, the father forty little devil, the boy see one cloud, and you see one cloud. Girl, whatever Suruj Mooma say about education, it have it uses sometimes.’

‘Oh, man, don’t tell me you use a trick on them.’

Ganesh didn’t say.

There was no report of this incident in the newspapers, yet within two weeks all Trinidad knew about Ganesh and his Powers. The news went about on the local grapevine, the Niggergram, an efficient, almost clairvoyant, news service. As the Niggergram noised the news abroad, the number of Ganesh’s successes were magnified, and his Powers became Olympian.

The Great Belcher came from Icacos, where she had been mourning at a funeral, and wept on Ganesh’s shoulder.

‘At long last you find your hand,’ she said.

Leela wrote to Ramlogan and Soomintra.

Beharry came to Ganesh’s house to offer his congratulations and make up his quarrel. He conceded that it was no longer fitting that Ganesh should go to the shop to talk.

‘From the first Suruj Mooma believe that you had some sort of Powers.’

‘So I did feel too. But ain’t it strange though that for so long I did feel I had a hand for massaging people?’

‘But you was dead right, man.’

‘How you mean?’

Beharry nibbled. ‘You is the mystic massager.’