Collected Short Fiction by V. S. Naipaul Page A

I finish mine.’
    Or it was like this. If you told Man-man you were going to the cricket, he would write CRICK and then concentrate on the E ’s until he saw you again.
    One day Man-man went to the big café at the top of Miguel Street and began barking and growling at the customers on the stools as though he were a dog. The owner, a big Portuguese man with hairy hands, said, ‘Man-man, get out of this shop before I tangle with you.’
    Man-man just laughed.
    They threw Man-man out.
    Next day, the owner found that someone had entered his café during the night and had left all the doors open. But nothing was missing.
    Hat said, ‘One thing you must never do is trouble Man-man. He remember everything.’
    That night the café was entered again and the doors again left open.
    The following night the café was entered and this time little blobs of excrement were left on the centre of every stool and on top of every table and at regular intervals along the counter.
    The owner of the café was the laughing-stock of the street for several weeks, and it was only after a long time that people began going to the café again.
    Hat said, ‘Is just like I say. Boy, I don’t like meddling with that man. These people really bad-mind, you know. God make them that way.’
    It was things like this that made people leave Man-man alone. The only friend he had was a little mongrel dog, white with black spots on the ears. The dog was like Man-man in a way, too. It was a curious dog. It never barked, never looked at you, and if you looked at it, it looked away. It never made friends with any other dog, and if some dog tried either to get friendly or aggressive, Man-man’s dog gave it a brief look of disdain and ambled away, without looking back.
    Man-man loved his dog, and the dog loved Man-man. They were made for each other, and Man-man couldn’t have made a living without his dog.
    Man-man appeared to exercise a great control over the movements of his dog’s bowels.
    Hat said, ‘That does really beat me. I can’t make that one out.’
    It all began in Miguel Street.
    One morning, several women got up to find that the clothes they had left to bleach overnight had been sullied by the droppings of a dog. No one wanted to use the sheets and the shirts after that, and when Man-man called, everyone was willing to give him the dirty clothes.
    Man-man used to sell these clothes.
    Hat said, ‘Is things like this that make me wonder whether the man really mad.’
    From Miguel Street Man-man’s activities spread, and all the people who had suffered from Man-man’s dog were anxious to get other people to suffer the same thing.
    We in Miguel Street became a little proud of him.
    *    *    *
    I don’t know what it was that caused Man-man to turn good. Perhaps the death of his dog had something to do with it. The dog was run over by a car, and it gave, Hat said, just one short squeak, and then it was silent.
    Man-man wandered about for days, looking dazed and lost.
    He no longer wrote words on the pavement; no longer spoke to me or to any of the other boys in the street. He began talking to himself, clasping his hands and shaking as though he had ague.
    Then one day he said he had seen God after having a bath.
    This didn’t surprise many of us. Seeing God was quite common in Port of Spain and, indeed, in Trinidad at that time. Ganesh Pundit, the mystic masseur from Fuente Grove, had started it. He had seen God, too, and had published a little booklet called
What God Told Me
. Many rival mystics and not a few masseurs had announced the same thing, and I suppose it was natural that since God was in the area Man-man should see Him.
    Man-man began preaching at the corner of Miguel Street, under the awning of Mary’s shop. He did this every Saturday night. He let his beard grow and he dressed in a long white robe. He got a Bible and other holy things and stood in the white light of an acetylene lamp and preached. He was an impressive