The Mystic Masseur by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

to believe that the woman with the children hanging about her was the same cousin who was only a child herself when he first went to Port of Spain.
    The children treated Ganesh with contempt.
    A small boy with a running nose said to him one day, ‘They tell me is you who getting married.’
    ‘Yes, is me.’
    The boy said, ‘Ahaha!’ and ran away laughing and jeering.
    The boy’s mother said, ‘Is something we have to face these days. The children getting modern.’
    Then one day Ganesh discovered his aunt among the women, she who had been one of the principal mourners at his father’s funeral. He learnt that she had not only arranged everything then, but had also paid for it all. When Ganesh offered to pay back the money she became annoyed and told him not to be stupid.
    ‘This life is a funny thing, eh,’ she said. ‘One day somebody dead and you cry. Two days later somebody married, and then you laugh. Oh, Ganeshwa boy, at a time like this you want your own family around you, but what family you have? Your father, he dead; your mother, she dead too.’
    She was so moved she couldn’t cry; and for the first time Ganesh realized what a big thing his marriage was.
    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.
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