Collected Short Fiction by V. S. Naipaul

exam, failed it, and flew back.
    Hat said, ‘I meet a man from Grenada the other day—’
    Elias said, ‘Shut your arse up, before it have trouble between we in this street.’
    A few years later I sat the Cambridge Senior School Certificate Examination myself, and Mr Cambridge gave me a second grade. I applied for a job in the Customs, and it didn’t cost me much to get it. I got a khaki uniform with brass buttons, and a cap. Very much like the sanitary inspector’s uniform.
    Elias wanted to beat me up the first day I wore the uniform.
    ‘What your mother do to get you that?’ he shouted, and I was going for him when Eddoes put a stop to it.
    Eddoes said, ‘He just sad and jealous. He don’t mean anything.’
    For Elias had become one of the street aristocrats. He was driving the scavenging carts.
    ‘No theory here,’ Elias used to say. ‘This is the practical. I really like the work.’

5 MAN-MAN
    EVERYBODY IN MIGUEL STREET said that Man-man was mad, and so they left him alone. But I am not so sure now that he was mad, and I can think of many people much madder than Man-man ever was.
    He didn’t look mad. He was a man of medium height, thin; and he wasn’t bad-looking, either. He never stared at you the way I expected a mad man to do; and when you spoke to him you were sure of getting a very reasonable reply.
    But he did have some curious habits.
    He went up for every election, city council or legislative council, and then he stuck posters everywhere in the district. These posters were well printed. They just had the word ‘Vote’ and below that, Man-man’s picture.
    At every election he got exactly three votes. That I couldn’t understand. Man-man voted for himself, but who were the other two?
    I asked Hat.
    Hat said, ‘I really can’t say, boy. Is a real mystery. Perhaps is two jokers. But they is funny sort of jokers if they do the same thing so many times. They must be mad just like he.’
    And for a long time the thought of these two mad men who voted for Man-man haunted me. Every time I saw someone doing anything just a little bit odd, I wondered, ‘Is he who vote for Man-man?’
    At large in the city were these two men of mystery.
    Man-man never worked. But he was never idle. He was hypnotized by the word, particularly the written word, and he would spend a whole day writing a single word.
    One day I met Man-man at the corner of Miguel Street.
    ‘Boy, where you going?’ Man-man asked.
    ‘I going to school,’ I said.
    And Man-man, looking at me solemnly, said in a mocking way, ‘So you goes to school, eh?’
    I said automatically, ‘Yes, I goes to school.’ And I found that without intending it I had imitated Man-man’s correct and very English accent.
    That again was another mystery about Man-man. His accent. If you shut your eyes while he spoke, you would believe an Englishman – a good-class Englishman who wasn’t particular about grammar – was talking to you.
    Man-man said, as though speaking to himself, ‘So the little man is going to school.’
    Then he forgot me, and took out a long stick of chalk from his pocket and began writing on the pavement. He drew a very big s in outline and then filled it in, and then the c and the H and the o . But then he started making several o ’s, each smaller than the last, until he was writing in cursive, o after flowing o .
    When I came home for lunch, he had got to French Street, and he was still writing o ’s, rubbing off mistakes with a rag.
    In the afternoon he had gone round the block and was practically back in Miguel Street.
    I went home, changed from my school-clothes into my home-clothes and went out to the street.
    He was now halfway up Miguel Street.
    He said, ‘So the little man gone to school today?’
    I said, ‘Yes.’
    He stood up and straightened his back.
    Then he squatted again and drew the outline of a massive L and filled that in slowly and lovingly.
    When it was finished, he stood up and said, ‘You finish your work.