Collected Short Fiction by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online

and cheering and shouting.
    I never knew what happened to Dolly. Edward said one day that she was living in Sangre Grande. Hat said he saw her selling in the George Street Market. But she had left the street, left it for good.
    As the months went by, the women began to disappear and the numbers of jeeps that stopped outside George’s house grew smaller.
    ‘You gotta be organized,’ Hat said.
    Bogart nodded.
    Hat added, ‘And they have lots of nice places all over the place in Port of Spain these days. The trouble with George is that he too stupid for a big man.’
    Hat was a prophet. Within six months George was living alone in his pink house. I used to see him then, sitting on the steps, but he never looked at me any more. He looked old and weary and very sad.
    He died soon afterwards. Hat and the boys got some money together and we buried him at Lapeyrouse Cemetery. Elias turned up for the funeral.

4 HIS CHOSEN CALLING
    AFTER MIDNIGHT THERE were two regular noises in the street. At about two o’clock you heard the sweepers; and then, just before dawn, the scavenging-carts came and you heard the men scraping off the rubbish the sweepers had gathered into heaps.
    No boy in the street particularly wished to be a sweeper. But if you asked any boy what he would like to be, he would say, ‘I going be a cart-driver.’
    There was certainly a glamour to driving the blue carts. The men were aristocrats. They worked early in the morning and had the rest of the day free. And then they were always going on strike. They didn’t strike for much. They struck for things like a cent more a day; they struck if someone was laid off. They struck when the war began; they struck when the war ended. They struck when India got independence. They struck when Gandhi died.
    Eddoes, who was a driver, was admired by most of the boys. He said his father was the best cart-driver of his day, and he told us great stories of the old man’s skill. Eddoes came from a low Hindu caste, and there was a lot of truth in what he said. His skill was a sort of family skill, passing from father to son.
    One day I was sweeping the pavement in front of the house where I lived, and Eddoes came and wanted to take away the broom from me. I liked sweeping and I didn’t want to give him the broom.
    ‘Boy, what you know about sweeping?’ Eddoes asked, laughing.
    I said, ‘What, it have so much to know?’
    Eddoes said, ‘This is my job, boy. I have experience. Wait until you big like me.’
    I gave him the broom.
    I was sad for a long time afterwards. It seemed that I would never never grow as big as Eddoes, never have that thing he called experience. I began to admire Eddoes more than ever; and more than ever I wanted to be a cart-driver.
    But Elias was not that sort of boy.
    When we who formed the Junior Miguel Street Club squatted on the pavement, talking, like Hat and Bogart and the others, about things like life and cricket and football, I said to Elias, ‘So you don’t want to be a cart-driver? What you want to be then? A sweeper?’
    Elias spat neatly into the gutter and looked down. He said very earnestly, ‘I think I going be a doctor, you hear.’
    If Boyee or Errol had said something like that, we would all have laughed. But we recognized that Elias was different, that Elias had brains.
    We all felt sorry for Elias. His father George brutalized the boy with blows, but Elias never cried, never spoke a word against his father.
    One day I was going to Chin’s shop to buy three cents’ worth of butter, and I asked Elias to come with me. I didn’t see George about, and I thought it was safe.
    We were just about two houses away when we saw George. Elias grew scared. George came up and said sharply, ‘Where you going?’ And at the same time he landed a powerful cuff on Elias’s jaw.
    George liked beating Elias. He used to tie him with rope, and then beat him with rope he had soaked in the gutters of his cow-pen. Elias didn’t cry even then. And