The woman with the cocoye broom came so quickly I fancied she was waiting to be called.
‘Leela,’ Ganesh said, ‘the boy want to know how much book it have here.’
‘Let me see,’ Leela said, and hitched up the broom to her waistband. She started to count off the fingers of her left hand. ‘Four hundred Everyman, two hundred Penguin — six hundred. Six hundred, and one hundred Reader’s Library, make seven hundred. I think with all the other book it have about fifteen hundred good book here.’
The taxi-driver whistled, and Ganesh smiled.
‘They is all yours, pundit?’ I asked.
‘Is my only vice,’ Ganesh said. ‘Only vice. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. But I must have my books. And, mark you, every week I going to San Fernando to buy more, you know. How much book I buy last week, Leela?’
‘Only three, man,’ she said. ‘But they was big books, big big books. Six to seven inches altogether.’
‘Seven inches,’ Ganesh said.
‘Yes, seven inches,’ Leela said.
I supposed Leela was Ganesh’s wife because she went on to say, with mock irritation, ‘That is all he good for. You know how much I does tell him not to read all the time. But you can’t stop him from reading. Night and day he reading.’
Ganesh gave a short laugh and signalled to Leela and the taxi-driver to leave the room. He made me lie down on a blanket on the floor and began feeling my leg all over. My mother remained in a corner, watching. From time to time Ganesh thumped my foot and I gave a great yelp of pain and he said, ‘Ummh,’ very thoughtfully.
I tried to forget Ganesh thumping my leg about and concentrated on the walls. They were covered with religious quotations, in Hindi and English, and with Hindu religious pictures. My gaze settled on a beautiful four-armed god standing in an open lotus.
When Ganesh had done examining me, he rose and said, ‘Nothing wrong with the boy at all, maharajin. Nothing at all. Is the trouble with so much people who does come to me. Nothing really wrong with them. The only thing I could say about the boy is that he have a little bad blood. That is all. It have nothing I could do.’
And he began mumbling a Hindi couplet over me while I lay on the floor. If I had been sharper I would have paid more attention to that, for it showed, I am convinced, the incipient mystical leanings of the man.
My mother came and looked down at me and asked Ganesh in a barely querulous way, ‘You sure nothing wrong with the boy? The foot look very bad to me.’
Ganesh said, ‘Don’t worry. I giving you something here that will get the boy foot better in two two’s. Is a little mixture I make up myself. Give it to the boy three times a day.’
‘Before or after meals?’ my mother asked.
‘Never after!’ Ganesh warned.
My mother was satisfied.
‘And,’ Ganesh added, ‘you can mix a little bit with the boy food. You never know what good could come of that.’
After seeing all those books in Ganesh’s hut I was ready to believe in him and quite prepared to take his mixture. And I respected him even more when he gave my mother a little booklet, saying, ‘Take it. I giving it to you free although it cost me a lot to write it and print it.’
I said, ‘Is really you who write this book, pundit?’
He smiled and nodded.
As we drove away I said, ‘You know, Ma, I really wish I did read all those books Ganesh Pundit have in his house.’
It was hurtful and surprising, therefore, when two weeks later my mother said, ‘You know, I have a good mind to leave you alone and let you get better by yourself. If you did only go with a good mind to see Ganesh, you woulda be better and walking about by now.’
In the end I went to a doctor in St Vincent Street who took one look at my foot, said, ‘Abscess. Will have to cut it.’ And charged ten dollars.
I never read Ganesh’s booklet, 101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion; and although I had to take his terrible mixture three times a day (I refused to have it in my food), I held no ill-will towards him. On the contrary, I often thought with a good deal of puzzled interest about the little man locked away with all those fifteen hundred books in the hot and dull village of Fuente Grove.
‘Trinidad full of crazy people,’ I said.
‘Say that if it make you happy,’ my mother snapped back. ‘But Ganesh ain’t the fool you think he is. He is the sorta man who woulda be a rishi in India. The day go come when you go be proud to tell people that you did know Ganesh. Now shut your mouth up so that I could dress the foot for you.’
Less than a year later Trinidad woke up to find page three of the Trinidad Sentinel carrying a column advertisement with a photograph of Ganesh and the caption:
Interested people were urged to reply to Fuente Grove for a free, illustrated folder giving full particulars.
I don’t imagine many people wrote in for further information about Ganesh. We were used to advertisements like that, and Ganesh’s caused little comment. None of us foresaw that advertisement’s astounding consequences. It was only later on, when Ganesh had won the fame and fortune he deserved so well, that people remembered it. Just as I have.
Nineteen forty-six was the turning-point of Ganesh’s career; and, as if to underline the fact, in that year he published his autobiography, The Years of Guilt (Ganesh Publishing Co. Ltd, Port of Spain. $2.40). The book, variously described as a spiritual thriller and a metaphysical whodunit, had a considerable success of esteem in Central America and the Caribbean. Ganesh, however, confessed that the autobiography was a mistake. So, in the very year of publication it was suppressed and the Ganesh Publishing Company itself wound up. The wider world has not learnt of Ganesh’s early struggles, and Trinidad resents this. I myself believe that the history of Ganesh is, in a way, the history of our times; and there may be people who will welcome this imperfect account of the man Ganesh Ramsumair, masseur, mystic, and, since 1953, M.B.E.
2. Pupil and Teacher
GANESH WAS NEVER really happy during the four years he spent at the Queen’s Royal College. He went there when he was nearly fifteen and he was not as advanced as the other boys of his own age. He was always the oldest boy in his class, with some boys three or even four years younger than himself. But he was lucky to go to the college at all. It was by the purest chance that his father got the money to send him there. For years the old man had held on to five acres of waste land near Fourways in the hope that the oil companies would sink a well in it, but he could not afford to bribe the drillers and in the end he had to be content with a boundary well. It was disappointing and unfair, but opportune; and the royalties were enough to keep Ganesh in Port of Spain.
Mr Ramsumair made a lot of noise about sending his son to the ‘town college’, and the week before the term began he took Ganesh all over the district, showing him off to friends and acquaintances. He had Ganesh dressed in a khaki suit and a khaki toupee and many people said the boy looked like a little sahib. The women cried a little and begged Ganesh to remember his dead mother and be good to his father. The men begged him to study hard and help other people with his learning.
Father and son left Fourways that Sunday and took the bus to Princes Town. The old man wore his visiting outfit: dhoti, koortah, white cap, and an unfurled umbrella on the crook of his left arm. They knew they looked important when they got into the train at Princes Town.
‘Careful with your suit now,’ the old man said loudly, and his neighbours heard. ‘Remember you are going to the town college.’