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Samuel Selvon, from Ways of Sunlight (1957)
A sharp, funny short story about Caribbean migrants outwitting, and out-bluffing, the racism of the 1950s London housing market. This guide covers the plot, the characters, Selvon's pioneering creole narrative voice, the Windrush-era context, key phrases for analysis, and exam preparation for the Edexcel IGCSE anthology.
The story opens with Ramkilawansingh, whom the narrator immediately and cheerfully renames Ram, studying the notice boards of west London in search of a room to rent. The boards advertise vacancies, but the small print of 1950s London is everywhere: lodgings are routinely closed to Black and Caribbean tenants, and Ram trudges through the familiar humiliations of the colour bar. The comedy of the opening (a man making a scholarly “study” of rental adverts) sits deliberately on top of something bitter: finding a room is a campaign that requires research, strategy, and cunning.
Ram learns how the game works: some English landlords who refuse West Indian tenants hold a sentimental, exoticised respect for “real” Indians from the subcontinent. He presents himself at the house of a landlord who once lived in India and reveres Indian culture, and lets himself be taken for a genuine Indian. The irony is layered: Ram's name marks him as Indo-Caribbean, descended from Indian indentured labourers shipped to Trinidad in the nineteenth century, so he is “Indian” by ancestry but Trinidadian through and through. He gets the room by performing a version of himself that exists only in the landlord's colonial imagination.
Inside the house Ram discovers he is not the only performer. Another tenant, an older man with a beard and turban whom the narrator nicknames Chan (his full mouthful of a name, Chandrilaboodoo, gets the same comic shortening treatment as Ram's), enjoys the landlord's special veneration as a wise, holy figure from the East. Ram quickly begins to suspect that Chan's mystical Indian act is exactly that: an act, and that underneath the turban is a fellow Trinidadian who spotted the same opportunity first and has been working it for longer.
What follows is the contest the title promises: a sly, escalating duel between the two masqueraders. Each man watches the other for slips in language, custom, and religious observance; each probes the other's disguise while guarding his own. Neither can denounce the other without inviting questions about himself, so the war is fought through hints, tests, and performances of ever more elaborate authenticity for the landlord's benefit. The comedy comes from the audience knowing what the landlord cannot see: that his house contains not one genuine mystic but two Trinidadian improvisers locked in competition.
The story resolves not with exposure but with recognition. The two men come to understand each other perfectly: each knows what the other is, each knows the other knows, and each knows that betrayal would destroy them both. The title glosses the ending: the old proverb runs “when Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war”, meaning that when two equally matched schemers collide, neither can simply win. The fragile balance the men settle into is the story's real punchline, and its quiet moral: in a city rigged against them, the migrants' tricks are matched only by each other's.
Key Moments