The Mystic Masseur Read Free

there was the scene in the principal’s office: his father gesticulating with his white cap and umbrella; the English principal patient, then firm, and finally exasperated; the old man enraged, muttering, ‘ Gaddaha! Gaddaha!’

    Ganesh never lost his awkwardness. He was so ashamed of his Indian name that for a while he spread a story that he was really called Gareth. This did him little good. He continued to dress badly, he didn’t play games, and his accent remained too clearly that of the Indian from the country. He never stopped being a country boy. He still believed that reading by any light other than daylight was bad for the eyes, and as soon as his classes were over he ran home to Dundonald Street and sat on the back steps reading. He went to sleep with the hens and woke before the cocks. ‘That Ramsumair boy is a real crammer,’ boys laughed; but Ganesh never became more than a mediocre student.
    A fresh mortification awaited him. When he went home for his first holidays and had been shown off again, his father said, ‘It is time for the boy to become a real brahmin.’
    The initiation ceremony was held that very week. They shaved his head, gave him a little saffron bundle, and said, ‘All right, off you go now. Go to Benares and study.’
    He took his staff and began walking away briskly from Fourways.
    As arranged, Dookhie the shopkeeper ran after him, crying a little and begging in English, ‘No, boy. No. Don’t go away to Benares to study.’
    Ganesh kept on walking.
    ‘But what happen to the boy?’ people asked. ‘He taking this thing really serious.’
    Dookhie caught Ganesh by the shoulder and said, ‘Cut out this nonsense, man. Stop behaving stupid. You think I have all day to run after you? You think you really going to Benares? That is in India, you know, and this is Trinidad.’
    They brought him back home. But the episode is significant.
    His head was still practically bald when he went back to school, and the boys laughed so much that the principal called him and said, ‘Ramsumair, you are creating a disturbance in the school. Wear something on your head.’
    So Ganesh wore his khaki toupee in the classroom until his hair grew again.
    There was another Indian boy, called Indarsingh, living in the house at Dundonald Street. He was also at the Queen’s Royal College, and although he was six months younger than Ganesh he was three forms ahead. He was a brilliant boy and everybody who knew him said he was going to be a great man. At sixteen Indarsingh was making long speeches in the Literary Society Debates, reciting verses of his own at Recitation Contests, and he always won the Impromptu Speech Contests. Indarsingh also played all games, not very well, but he had the sportsman’s instincts and it was this that caused him to be held up to the boys as an ideal. Indarsingh once persuaded Ganesh to play fooball. When Ganesh bared his pale, jaundiced legs, a boy spat in disgust and said, ‘Eh, eh, your foot don’t see sun at all at all!’ Ganesh played no more football, but he remained friendly with Indarsingh. Indarsingh, for his part, found Ganesh useful. ‘Come for a little walk in the Botanical Gardens,’ he would say to Ganesh, and during the whole of the walk Indarsingh would talk non-stop, rehearsing his speech for the next debate. At the end he would say, ‘Good eh? Demn good.’ This Indarsingh was a short, square boy, and his walk, like his talk, had the short man’s jauntiness.
    Indarsingh was Ganesh’s only friend, but the friendship was not to last. At the end of Ganesh’s second year Indarsingh won a scholarship and went to England. To Ganesh, Indarsingh had achieved a greatness beyond ambition.
    In due course Ganesh wrote the Cambridge School Certificate and surprised everybody by passing in the second grade. Mr Ramsumair sent his congratulations to Ganesh, offered an annual prize to the college, and told Ganesh that he had found a nice girl for him to marry.
    ‘The old