Three of Naipaul's stories written before The Mystic Masseur feature Ganesh Pundit to varying degrees. He appears in "Man-Man" of Miguel Street (1959) as a person who has a relation to God that the title character imitates, but it is merely a passing reference of less than a paragraph. In "How I Left Miguel Street," the last story in the collection, the narrator's mother bribes Ganesh, now a popular politician, to give her son a scholarship to study in London. The story depicts Ganesh in a comic crying contest between the narrator's mother and Ganesh over the size of the bribe. "My Aunt's Gold Teeth," published in A Flag on the Island (1967), shows an ineffective younger Ganesh who hastens the death of one of his patients, but who also consoles the patient's widow, who feels guilty for offering Christian prayers.

Interestingly, each of these views of Ganesh...