The Mystic Masseur (6 page)

Ganesh thought it almost a miracle that so many people could live happily in one small house without any sort of organization. They had left him the bedroom, but they swarmed over the rest of the house and managed as best they could. First they had made it into an extended picnic site; then they had made it into a cramped camping site. But they looked happy enough and Ganesh presently discovered that the anarchy was only apparent. Of the dozens of women who wandered freely about the house there was one, tall and silent, whom he had learnt to call King George. It might have been her real name for all he knew: he had never seen her before. King George ruled the house.

‘King George got a hand,’ his aunt said.

‘A hand?’

‘She got a hand for sharing things out. Give King George a little penny cake and give she twelve children to share it out to, and you could bet your bottom dollar that King George share it fair and square.’

‘You know she, then?’

‘Know she! Is I who take up King George. Mark you, I think I was very lucky coming across she. Now I take she everywhere with me.’

‘She related to us?’

‘You could say so. Phulbassia is a sort of cousin to King George and you is a sort of cousin to Phulbassia.’

The aunt belched, not the polite after-dinner belch, but a long, stuttering thing. ‘Is the wind,’ she explained without apology. ‘It have a long time now – since your father dead, come to think of it – I suffering from this wind.’

‘You see a doctor?’

‘Doctor? They does only make up things. One of them tell me – you know what? – that I have a lazy liver. Is something I asking myself a long time now: how a liver could be lazy, eh?’

She belched again, said, ‘You see?’ and rubbed her hands over her breasts.

Ganesh thought of this aunt as Lady Belcher and then as The Great Belcher. In a few days she had a devastating effect on the other women in the house. They all began belching and rubbing their breasts and complaining about the wind. All except King George.

Ganesh was glad when the time came for him to be anointed with saffron. For those days he was confined to his room, where his father’s body had lain that night, and where now The Great Belcher, King George, and a few other anonymous women gathered to rub him down. When they left the room they sang Hindi wedding songs of a most pessimistic nature, and Ganesh wondered how Leela was putting up with her own seclusion and anointing.

All day long he remained in his room, consoling himself with
The Science of Thought Review
. He read through all the numbers Mr Stewart had given him, some of them many times over. All day he heard the children romping, squealing, and being beaten; the mothers beating, shouting, and thumping about on the floor.

On the day before the wedding, when the women had come in to rub him down for the last time, he asked The Great Belcher, ‘I never think about it before, but what those people outside eating? Who paying for it?’

‘You.’

He almost sat up in bed, but King George’s strong arm kept him down.

‘Ramlogan did say that we mustn’t get you worried about that,’ The Great Belcher said. ‘He say your head hot with enough worries already. But King George looking after everything. She got a account with Ramlogan. He go settle with you after the wedding.’

‘Oh God! I ain’t even married the man daughter yet, and already he start!’

Fourways was nearly as excited at the wedding as it had been at the funeral. Hundreds of people, from Fourways and elsewhere, were fed at Ramlogan’s. There were dancers, drummers, and singers, for those who were not interested in the details of the night-long ceremony. The yard behind Ramlogan’s shop was beautifully illuminated with all sorts of lights, except electric ones; and the decorations – mainly fruit hanging from coconut-palm arches – were pleasing. All this for Ganesh, and Ganesh felt it and was pleased. The thought of marriage had at first embarrassed him, then, when he spoke with his aunt, awed him; now he was simply thrilled.

All through the ceremony he had to pretend, with everyone else, that he had never seen Leela. She sat at his side veiled from head to toe, until the blanket was thrown over them and he unveiled her face. In the mellow light under the pink blanket she was as a stranger. She was no longer the giggling girl simpering behind the lace curtains. Already she looked chastened and impassive, a good Hindu wife.

Shortly afterwards it was over, and they were man and wife. Leela was taken away and Ganesh was left alone to face the kedgeree-eating ceremony the next morning.

Still in all his bridegroom’s regalia, satin robes, and tasselled crown, he sat down on some blankets in the yard, before the plate of kedgeree. It looked white and unpalatable, and he knew it would be easy to resist any temptation to touch it.

Ramlogan was the first to offer money to induce Ganesh to eat. He was a little haggard after staying awake all night, but he looked pleased and happy enough when he placed five twenty-dollar bills in the brass plate next to the kedgeree. He stepped back, folded his arms, looked from the money to Ganesh to the small group standing by, and smiled.

He stood smiling for nearly two minutes; but Ganesh didn’t even look at the kedgeree.

‘Give the boy money, man,’ Ramlogan cried to the people around. ‘Give him money, man. Come on, don’t act as if you is all poor poor as church-rat.’ He moved among them, laughing, and rallying them. Some put down small amounts in the brass plate.

Still Ganesh sat, serene and aloof, like an over-dressed Buddha.

A little crowd began to gather.

‘The boy have sense, man.’ Anxiety broke into Ramlogan’s voice. ‘When you think a college education is these days?’

He put down another hundred dollars. ‘Eat, boy, eat it up. I don’t want you to starve. Not yet, anyway.’ He laughed, but no one laughed with him.

Ganesh didn’t eat.

He heard a man saying, ‘Well, this thing was bound to happen some day.’

People said, ‘Come on, Ramlogan. Give the boy money, man. What you think he sitting down there for? To take out his photo?’

Ramlogan gave a short, forced laugh, and lost his temper. ‘If he think he going to get any more money from me he damn well mistaken. Let him don’t eat. Think I care if he starve? Think I care?’

He walked away.

The crowd grew bigger; the laughter grew louder.

Ramlogan came back and the crowd cheered him.

He put down two hundred dollars on the brass plate and, before he rose, whispered to Ganesh, ‘Remember your promise, sahib. Eat, boy; eat, son; eat, sahib; eat, pundit sahib. I beg you, eat.’

A man shouted, ‘No! I not going to eat!’

Ramlogan stood up and turned around. ‘You, haul your tail away from here quick, quick, before I break it up for you. Don’t meddle in what don’t concern you.’

The crowd roared.

Ramlogan bent down again to whisper. ‘You see, sahib, how you making me shame.’ This time his whisper promised tears. ‘You see, sahib, what you doing to my cha’acter and sensa values.’

Ganesh didn’t move.

The crowd was beginning to treat him like a hero.

In the end Ganesh got from Ramlogan: a cow and a heifer, fifteen hundred dollars in cash, and a house in Fuente Grove. Ramlogan also cancelled the bill for the food he had sent to Ganesh’s house.

The ceremony ended at about nine in the morning; but Ramlogan was sweating long before then.

‘The boy and I was only having a joke,’ he said again and again at the end. ‘He done know long time now what I was going to give him. We was only making joke, you know.’

Ganesh returned home after the wedding. It would be three days before Leela could come to live with him and in that time The Great Belcher tried to restore order to the house. Most of the guests had left as suddenly as they had arrived; though from time to time Ganesh still saw a straggler who wandered about the house and ate.

‘King George gone to Arima yesterday,’ The Great Belcher told him. ‘Somebody dead there yesterday. I going tomorrow myself, but I send King George ahead to arrange everything.’

Then she decided to give Ganesh the facts of life.

‘These modern girls is hell self,’ she said. ‘And from what I see and hear, this Leela is a modern girl. Anyway, you got to make the best of what is yours.’

She paused to belch. ‘All she want to make she straight as a arrow is a little blows every now and then.’

Ganesh said, ‘You know, I think Ramlogan really vex with me now after the kedgeree business.’

‘Wasn’t a nice thing to do, but it serve Ramlogan right. When a man start taking over woman job, match-making, he deserve all he get.’

‘But I go have to leave here now. You know Fuente Grove? It have a house there Ramlogan give me.’

‘But what you want in a small outa the way place like that? All the work it have doing there is work in the cane-field.’

‘It ain’t that I want to do.’ Ganesh paused, and added hesitantly, ‘I thinking of taking up massaging people.’

She laughed so much she belched. ‘This wind, man, and then you – you want to kill me or what, boy? Massaging people! What you know about massaging people?’

‘Pa was a good massager and I know all he did know.’

‘But you must have a hand for that sort of thing. Think what go happen if any-and everybody start running round saying, “I thinking of taking up massaging people.” It go have so much massagers in Trinidad they go have to start massaging one another.’

‘I feel I have a hand for it. Just like King George.’

‘She have her own sort of hand. She born that way.’

Ganesh told her about Leela’s foot.

She twisted her mouth. ‘It sound good. But a man like you should be doing something else. Bookwork, man.’

‘I going to do that too.’ And then it came out again. ‘I thinking of writing some books.’

‘Good thing. It have money in books, you know. I suppose the man who write the
Macdonald Farmer’s Almanac
just peeling money. Why you don’t try your hand at something like the
Napoleon Book of Fate
? I just
feel
you could do that sort of thing good.’

‘People go want to buy that sort of book?’

‘Is exactly what Trinidad want, boy. Take all the Indians in the towns. They ain’t have any pundit or anything near them, you know. How they go know what to do and what not to do, when and not when? They just have to guess.’

Ganesh was thoughtful. ‘Yes, is that self I go do. A little bit of massaging and a little bit of writing.’

‘I know a boy who could make anything you write sell as hot cakes all over Trinidad. Let we say, you selling the book at two shillings, forty-eight cents. You give the boy six cents a book. Let we say now, you print four five thousand –’

‘It make about two thousand dollars, but – wait, man! I ain’t even write the book yet.’

‘I know you, boy. Once you put your mind to it, you go write nice nice books.’

She belched.

As soon as Leela had come to live with Ganesh and the last guest had left the village, Ramlogan declared war on Ganesh and that very evening ran through Fourways crying out, chanting, his declaration. ‘See how he rob me. Me with my wife dead, me now without children, me a poor widow. See how he forget everything I do for him. He forget all that I give him, he forget how I help burn his father, he forget all the help I give him. See how he rob me. See how he shame me. Watch me here now, so help me God, if I don’t here and now do for the son of a bitch.’