Free The Mystic Masseur by V. S. Naipaul Page A

Leela said, ‘Man, you shoulda at least try to fix the hand first, and then you coulda start talking about God work. But you don’t care what you doing to me. It look as though you only want to drive away people now.’
    Ganesh continued to offend his patients by telling them that nothing was wrong with them; he spoke more and more about God’s work; and, if he was pressed, he gave out a mixture he had made from one of his father’s prescriptions, a green fluid made mostly from shining-bush and leaves of the neem tree.
    He said, ‘Facts is facts, Leela. I ain’t have a hand for massage.’

    There was another disappointment in his life. After a year it was clear that Leela couldn’t have children. He lost interest in her as a wife and stopped beating her. Leela took it well, but he expected no less of a good Hindu wife. She still looked after the house and in time became an efficient housekeeper. She cared for the garden at the back of the house and minded the cow. She never complained. Soon she was ruler in the house. She could order Ganesh about and he didn’t object. She gave him advice and he listened. He began to consult her on nearly everything. In time, though they would never had admitted it, they had grown to love each other. Sometimes, when he thought about it, Ganesh found it strange that the tall hard woman with whom he lived was the saucy girl who had once asked, ‘You could write too, sahib?’

    And always there was Ramlogan to be mollified. The newspaper cutting with his photograph hung, mounted and framed, in his shop, above Leela’s notice concerning the provision of chairs for female shop assistants. Already the paper was going brown at the edges. Whenever Ganesh went, for one reason or another to Fourways, Ramlogan was sure to ask, ‘How the Institute going, man?’
    ‘Thinking about it all the time,’ Ganesh would say. Or, ‘Is all in my head, you know. Don’t rush me.’

    Everything seemed to be going wrong and Ganesh feared that he had misread the signs of fate. It was only later that he saw the providential pattern of these disappointing months. ‘We never are what we want to be,’ he wrote, ‘but what we must be.’
    He had failed as a masseur. Leela couldn’t have children. These disappointments, which might have permanently broken another man, turned Ganesh seriously, dedicatedly, to books. He had always intended to read and write, of course, but one wonders whether he would have done so with the same assiduity if he had been a successful masseur or the father of a large family.
    ‘Going to write a book,’ he told Leela. ‘Big book.’
    There is a firm of American publishers called Street and Smith, versatile, energetic people who had pushed their publications as far as South Trinidad. Ganesh was deeply impressed by Street and Smith, had been since he was a boy; and, without saying a word to Beharry or Leela, he sat down one evening at the little table in the drawing room, turned up the oil lamp, and wrote a letter to Street and Smith. He told them that he was thinking of writing books and wondered whether either of them was interested.
    The reply came within a month. Street and Smith said they were very interested.
    ‘You must tell Pa,’ Leela said.
    Beharry said, ‘The Americans is nice people. You must write this book for them.’
    Ganesh framed the Street and Smith letter in passe-partout and hung it on the wall above the table where he had written his letter.
    ‘Is only the beginning,’ he told Leela.
    Ramlogan came all the way from Fourways and when he gazed on the framed letter his eyes filled with tears. ‘Sahib, this is something else for the papers. Yes, man, sahib, write the books for them.’
    ‘Is just what Beharry, Fuente Grove so-call shopkeeper, tell him,’ Leela said.
    ‘Never mind.’ Ramlogan said. ‘I still think he should write the books. But I bet it make you feel proud, eh, sahib, having the Americans begging you to write a book for