 An enthusiastic young man in Trinidad in the 1940s rises to local fame after leaving a teaching post in the capital to live in his father s village where he writes books and takes up his father s trade as a masseur. Showmanship informs his innocent exuberance to make him "mystic." He s Ganesh, a Trinidadian of Indian descent, called The Pundit by his followers, who with Leela, his childless wife, ascends to success in a flashback that begins in Oxford in 1954 when a student volunteers to give a day s guided tour to a visiting West Indian. The visitor is Ganesh, whom the student recognizes from childhood: the memory, as well as the student s rite of passage, begins.