Untouchables

THE MASK OF A LION (305 pp.)--A. T.W. Simeons--Knopf ($3.50).

Life was good for Govind, the little Hindu tailor. His shop, "The Handsome Gent's Tailoring Mart," buzzed with the profitable whir of a double row of sewing machines. His workmen were fond of him. He had a lovely, loving wife, two healthy babies and a third on the way. Good Hindu that he was, he tried to be a good man, gave alms to fakirs and lepers, never ate meat, and hoped for his soul's betterment in a new reincarnation.

Then one day, working on a customer's coat, Govind was horrified to discover that he had sewed his fingertip to the cloth and didn't even feel it. Another day he smelled burning flesh, saw his own toes pressed against a flatiron, yet felt no pain. When the doctors cleared up the mystery, Govind had to swap his tradesman's heaven-on-earth for what he was sure would be leper's hell.

In The Mask of a Lion, Author A. T. W. Simeons shows that the life of a leper is not always as hellish as Govind had supposed. Simeons is a London-born, Heidelberg-trained doctor who spent about 20 years in India. Now a consultant at Rome's International Hospital, he has written a novel that makes amateurish fiction but has the fascination of its grisly material. If the book is read simply as a knowing, colorful report on the lepers' way of life, its inadequacies as a novel can be comfortably ignored.

Govind, of course, became a social outcast. Like most lepers in India he joined a traveling gang of his fellows, moved about the country begging and stealing. After the first shock wore off, he began to like the life. At times his band all but starved, but there were other times when the begging was good and the lepers had tremendous feasts. Author Simeon is at his best describing this weird life in which sudden death, plague and all sorts of violence are regarded as quite normal. He knows his leprosariums, too, and can make it clear why even intelligent lepers often prefer beggars' freedom to the routine of hospitals. Govind finally reaches an asylum where lepers live as a community, raising all they need and living normal lives. He is cured and returns to his family. But what matters in The Mask of a Lion is not the happy ending; it is the sympathy and shrewdness with which Author Simeons introduces his unusual characters.

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