Word: ganesh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story concrete mansion in Fuente Grove, Trinidad, Mystic Ganesh Ramsumair, B.A., sat in the lavatory pondering his future. When he plucked nervously at the toilet paper, a cunning mechanism tripped, and a music box tinkled out Yankee Doodle Dandy. In that moment of revelation, the book that was to secure Ganesh's fame was born. He thought of the title later: Profitable Evacuation...
...heroes who have their feet firmly planted in the muck of local tradition and their heads lifted to the sweet smell of Western excess. But where such literary antecedents as E.M. Forster's Dr. Aziz and Evelyn Waugh's Emperor Seth burned with a hard heathen shame, Ganesh shoulders the white-collar burden with the happy ease of a born...
Like Novelist Naipaul, a Trinidad-born Hindu, Ganesh glows with a Messianic conviction that "the day go come when you go be proud to tell people that you did know Ganesh." Dazzled by the arcane wonders of the printed word, he embarks on a brief but disastrous career teaching in a district school, goes on to write a book: 101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion. ("Q. What is Hinduism? A. Hinduism is the religion of the Hindus. Q. Why am I a Hindu? A. Because my parents and grandparents were Hindus.") Eventually Ganesh stumbles on his true mission...
Soon he is doing such a brisk business exorcising evil spirits that he has to buy his own fleet of taxis to ferry his patients over the rutted dirt roads. When Ganesh writes a book called What God Told Me ("On Thursday, May 12, at nine o'clock in the morning, just after I had had breakfast, I saw God . . ."), half the island of Trinidad burns with celestial visions. His Profitable Evacuation (approved by island authorities in the mistaken belief that it is a book on civil defense) becomes a bestseller. Ganesh tops his career by representing his country...
Novelist Naipaul's leisurely plot is often too clotted with local color, and he rings too many changes on a basically simple theme. But his picture of Ganesh, the huckster Hindu, is the best job of its kind since Joyce Gary looked through the wambly brown eyes of Mister Johnson...