HAD you wandered in 1950 past Sealdah railway station in Kolkata, weaving through the newspaper-hawkers, basket-carriers and mule-drivers, you might have spotted Manohar Aich sitting under a tree. He was selling green coconuts from a great pile beside him, their tops chopped off to expose the white meat. You might have haggled with him, as with any street merchant. What you could not have ignored, if you came close, was the 46-centimetre bicep that rippled under his shirt, and the perfect V-shaped chest that gleamed as he tossed the waste rind aside. For Mr Aich had started his day at the wrestlers’ training ground, doing thousands of press-ups, sit-ups and leg-raises, and the rupees he was now accumulating were to pay for his trip to the Mr Universe contest in London—which, in 1952, he won.

In the short-height category, to be sure. He was only 4 feet 11 inches (1.5 metres) tall, and weighed seven stone (44.5kg); but he could break a spring of 275lb tension, and rip up a 1,500-page book with his small bare hands. After winning the Mr Hercules title in 1950, he had become “the pocket Hercules”. He was neat for a bodybuilder, nothing freakish, because his diet and training were all natural. No carb-loading or miracle supplements: just rice, pulses, milk, fish and vegetables. (“A small amount of rice doubles up power,” he declared; “a full portion may bring doom.”) As for equipment, he had almost none, extolling instead the jack-knifing press-ups and deep knee-bends of dand baithak on an earth floor. He shook his head over modern gyms and fitness clubs with their motorised treadmills, even though his sons eventually ran two of them out of his house in Kolkata. Young bodybuilders, he thought, were just lazy.

Discipline and exercise were the mantra of his life. At 12 he had black fever; his parents, being poor villagers of Bengal, could not afford medicine for him, so he began to do exercises instead, feebly copying the older boys with their dumb-bells. That was the start of it. At the end of his school career, to make some sort of living, he joined forces with P.C. Sorcar, the great magician; so after Sorcar had mysteriously filled the stage with birds, silk scarves and chairs, cut a lady in two with a buzz-saw and vanished a Ford car full of passengers, the bodybuilding boy would come in to bend metal bars with his neck and recline on the points of swords. That show went all round India, and made him famous.

Still, he could barely afford the London trip in 1951; an awful lot of coconuts had to be shifted to finance it. So when he came second in the contest that year, he stayed on to try again, “annealing myself in the flame of my strong will”, and working as a guard for British Rail to get by. (To his delight, when he secured the title, BR paid for his ticket home.) And so it went. When he was Mr Universe and touring everywhere, it was still a struggle to put his four children through school. There was no money in bodybuilding, he would sigh.

What he found instead was respect. The body—though illusory, changeable and subject to decay, as the “Bhagavad Gita” taught him—was nonetheless the holy shrine in which the spirit lived. As such, he worshipped it. By improving his body with every stretch and squat, tearing muscle to increase it, he built a perfect temple around his true Self. Moreover, by controlling the body he controlled the equally unruly mind, keeping it pure from “ignoble strife”. By repeating “Strong, and strong, and strong” he was ill no more than twice in his life, and never lost his cool.

Except once. That happened when he had joined the Indian Air Force, an arm of Britain’s Royal Air Force, in 1941, as a physical-training instructor. He was well-liked by the officers, but the Quit India movement was already stirring in him; and when one of the Britishers made some comment about Indians needing their colonial rulers, he slapped him. The result was a five-year spell in jail. Yet even prison, once he had accepted it, could be used to advantage: he discovered weights there, and trained with them for 12 hours a day. The man who emerged from the Alipore Presidency Jail was no starveling, but glistened and bulged with perfect tone.

Chants to the drum

The stardom that soon arrived was greeted with the same equanimity. Posters of him posing filled his simple house, together with his gold medals from three Asian championships. When not touring, he taught, passing on his techniques to future champions. As a national hero, he could have eased up; instead, the discipline continued unsparingly, with bodybuilding until he was 93 and, as a centenarian, 90 minutes’ exercise each morning. And first things first: he began each day at 4am with songs or chants to the shoulder drum.

On his 100th birthday he was given an award, as he had long hoped he might be, by the state of West Bengal. If anyone asked—and many did—he would roll up his sleeves and mischievously flex his biceps for them. He had loved his bodybuilder’s life, and in his next one hoped to do the same thing again. But this particular body, so exhaustively perfected, he would now leave to the R.G. Kar Medical College to make what use they could of it before it was thrown away; as the green coconut grew to perfection, gave up its goodness and ended in the gutter, with the rest.