He wanted to do things properly. He went to Port of Spain — his courage failed him at the last moment and he wore English clothes — to the Registrar-General’s Office in the Red House. There he registered Ganesh Publishing Company, Limited. The insignia of the firm was an open lotus.
Then he began to write again and found, to his delight, that the desire to write had not died, but was only submerged. He worked hard at his book, sitting up late at night after treating clients all day; and often Leela had to call him to bed.
Beharry rubbed his hands. ‘Oh, this Narayan going to get it good.’
The book, when it came out two months later, was a surprise to Beharry. It looked like a real book. It had hard covers; the type was big and the paper thick; and the whole thing looked substantial and authoritative. But Beharry was dismayed at the subject. The book was called The Guide to Trinidad.
‘Basdeo do a nice job this time,’ Ganesh said.
Beharry agreed, but looked doubtful.
‘It go knock hell out of Narayan. It go do you a lot of good and it go do Leela a lot of good.’
Beharry dutifully read The Guide to Trinidad. He found it good. The history, geography, and population of Trinidad were described in a masterly way. The book spoke about the romance of Trinidad’s many races. In a chapter called The East in the West, readers were told that they would be shocked to find a mosque in Port of Spain; and even more shocked to find, in a village called Fuente Grove, a genuine Hindu temple which looked as if it had been bodily transported from India. The Fuente Grove Hindu temple was considered well worth a visit, for spiritual and artistic reasons.
The anonymous author of the Guide was enthusiastic about the island’s modernity. The island, he stressed, had three up-to-date daily newspapers, and foreign advertisers could consider them good investments. But he deplored the absence of any influential weekly or monthly paper, and he warned foreign advertisers to be wary of the mushroom monthlies which claimed to be organs of certain sections of the community.
Ganesh sent free copies of the Guide to all the American Army camps in Trinidad, ‘to welcome’, as he wrote, ‘our brave brothers-in-arms’. He also sent copies to export agencies and advertising agencies in America and Canada which dealt with Trinidad.
Beharry did his best to hide his bewilderment.
Leela said, ‘It are beat me, if I see why for you doing all this.’
He left her to her worries; ordered her to get tablecloths, lots of knives, forks, and spoons; and warned her to look after the restaurant properly. He told Beharry it would be wise for him to lay in large stocks of rum and lager.
Presently the American soldiers began to pour into Fuente Grove and the village children had their first chew of gum. The soldiers came in jeeps and army lorries, some in taxis with girl-friends. They saw elephants in stone and were reassured, if not satisfied, but when Ganesh took them on a tour of his temple — he used the word ‘tour’ — they felt they had their money’s worth.
Leela counted more than five thousand Americans.
Beharry had never been so busy in all his life.
‘Is like what I did think,’ Ganesh said. ‘Trinidad is a small place and it ain’t have much for the poor Americans to do.’
Many of them asked for spiritual advice and all who asked received it.
‘Sometimes,’ Ganesh said, ‘I does feel that these Americans is the most religious people in the world. Even more than Hindus.’
‘Hollywood Hindus,’ muttered Beharry, but he nibbled so badly Ganesh didn’t catch what he was saying.
After three months The Hindu announced that it had to cut the number of its pages because it wished to help the war effort. Not many people besides Ganesh noticed that there were fewer advertisements for patent medicines and other internationally known products. The Hindu lost the glamour of illustrated advertisements; and Narayan was making money only from plain statements about small shops here and there in Trinidad.
But The Little Bird still twittered.
9. Press Pundit
GANESH FOUND HIMSELF now a philosopher and arbiter. Indian villages in Trinidad still had panchayats, councils of elders, and he was often invited by them to give judgement in a case of minor theft or assault, or to settle a quarrel between husband and wife. Often, too, he was asked to address prayer-meetings.
His arrival at such a meeting was impressive. He came out of his taxi with dignity, tossed his green scarf over his shoulder, and shook hands with the officiating pundit. Then two more taxis came up with his books. Helpers fell upon these taxis, grabbed armfuls of books, and took them to the platform. The helpers were proud and busy people then, and looked almost as solemn as Ganesh. They ran from taxi to platform and back again, frowning, never saying a word.
Seated on the platform under a tasselled red canopy, and surrounded by his books, Ganesh looked the picture of authority and piety. His gaily-dressed audience rippled out from the platform in widening circles of diminishing splendour, from well-dressed businessmen and shopkeepers just below the platform to ragged labourers at the back, from extravagantly bedecked children sleeping on blankets and cushions to naked, spidery-limbed children sprawling on sugar-sacks.
People came to hear him not only because of his reputation but also because of the novelty of what he said. He spoke about the good life, about happiness and how to get it. He borrowed from Buddhism and other religions and didn’t hesitate to say so. Whenever he wished to strengthen a point he snapped his fingers and a helper held a book open towards the audience so that they could see that Ganesh wasn’t making it all up. He spoke in Hindi but the books he showed in this way were in English, and people were awed by this display of learning.
His main point was that desire was a source of misery and therefore desire ought to be suppressed. Occasionally he went off at a tangent to discuss whether the desire to suppress desire wasn’t itself a desire; but usually he tried to be as practical as possible. He spoke with fervour about the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Sometimes from that he moved on naturally to the war, and war in general, and to the quotation from Dickens’s Child’s History of England that ‘war is a dreadful thing’. At other times he said that happiness was only possible if you cleared your mind of desire and looked upon yourself as part of Life, just a tiny link in the vast chain of Creation. ‘Lie down on the dry grass and feel Life growing out from the rocks and earth beneath you, through you, and upwards. Look at the clouds and sky when it isn’t hot and feel that you are part of all that. Feel that everything else is an extension of you. Therefore you, who are all this, can never die.’
People sometimes understood and when they got up they felt a little nobler.
And it was precisely for this that now, in 1944, The Little Bird began attacking Ganesh. It seemed to have reconciled itself to his ‘so-called mysticism’.
The Little Bird said: ‘I am just a little birdie but I think it is surely a retrograde step for any community these days to look up to a religious visionary …’
The Great Belcher told Ganesh, ‘And, boy, Narayan start copying you. He start giving lectures now — in the towns. And he showing his own books and thing too. Something about religion and the people.’
‘Opium,’ Beharry said.