to stroke the goat. I stroked it. He closed his eyes and went on chewing. When I stopped stroking him, he opened his eyes.
Every afternoon at about five an old man drove a donkey-cart through Miguel Street where we lived. The cart was piled with fresh grass tied into neat little bundles, so neat you felt grass wasn’t a thing that grew but was made in a factory somewhere. That donkey-cart became important to my mother and me. We were buying five, sometimes six bundles a day, and every bundle cost six cents. The goat didn’t change. He still looked sullen and bored. From time to time Mr Hinds asked me with a smile how the goat was getting on, and I said it was getting on fine. But when I asked my mother when we were going to get milk from the goat she told me to stop aggravating her. Then one day she put up a sign:
RAM FOR SERVICE
Apply Within For Terms
and got very angry when I asked her to explain it.
The sign made no difference. We bought the neat bundles of grass, the goat ate, and I saw no milk.
And when I got home one lunch-time I saw no goat.
‘Somebody borrow it,’ my mother said. She looked happy.
‘When it coming back?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
It came back that afternoon. When I turned the corner into Miguel Street I saw it on the pavement outside our house. A man I didn’t know was holding it by a rope and making a big row, gesticulating like anything with his free hand. I knew that sort of man. He wasn’t going to let hold of the rope until he had said his piece. A lot of people were looking on through curtains.
‘But why all-you want to rob poor people so?’ he said, shouting. He turned to his audience behind the curtains. ‘Look, all-you, just look at this goat!’
The goat, limitlessly impassive, chewed slowly, its eyes half-closed.
‘But how all you people so advantageous? My brother stupid and he ain’t know this goat but I know this goat. Everybody in Trinidad who know about goat know this goat, from Icacos to Mayaro to Toco to Chaguaramas,’ he said, naming the four corners of Trinidad. ‘Is the most uselessest goat in the whole world. And you charge my brother for this goat? Look, you better give me back my brother money, you hear.’
My mother looked hurt and upset. She went inside and came out with some dollar notes. The man took them and handed over the goat.
That evening my mother said, ‘Go and tell your Mr Hinds that I don’t want this goat here.’
Mr Hinds didn’t look surprised. ‘Don’t want it, eh?’ He thought, and passed a well-trimmed thumb-nail over his moustache. ‘Look, tell you. Going to buy him back. Five dollars.’
I said, ‘He eat more than that in grass alone.’
That didn’t surprise him either. ‘Say six, then.’
I sold. That, I thought, was the end of that.
One Monday afternoon about a month before the end of my last term I announced to my mother, ‘That goat raffling again.’
She became alarmed.
At tea on Friday I said casually, ‘I win the goat.’
She was expecting it. Before the sun set a man had brought the goat away from Mr Hinds, given my mother some money and taken the goat away.
I hoped Mr Hinds would never ask about the goat. He did, though. Not the next week, but the week after that, just before school broke up.
I didn’t know what to say.
But a boy called Knolly, a fast bowler and a favourite victim of Mr Hinds, answered for me. ‘What goat?’ he whispered loudly. ‘That goat kill and eat long time.’
Mr Hinds was suddenly furious. ‘Is true, Vidiadhar?’
I didn’t nod or say anything. The bell rang and saved me.
At lunch I told my mother, ‘I don’t want to go back to that school.’
She said, ‘You must be brave.’
I didn’t like the argument, but went.
We had Geography the first period.
‘Naipaul,’ Mr Hinds said right away, forgetting my first name, ‘define a peninsula.’
‘Peninsula,’ I said, ‘a piece of land entirely surrounded by water.’
‘Good. Come up here.’ He went to the locker and took out the soaked leather strap. Then he fell on me. ‘You sell my goat?’ Cut. ‘You kill my goat?’ Cut. ‘How you so damn ungrateful?’ Cut, cut, cut. ‘Is the last time you win anything I raffle.’
It was the last day I went to that school.
1957
A Christmas Story
THOUGH IT IS CHRISTMAS Eve my mind is not on