“No Colours, Please, or Sorry, No Kolors”
Narration, the opening paragraph: the notices Ram keeps finding on the boards along Westbourne Grove
Selvon sets the landlords’ notices into the narration without comment, as ordinary as the addresses around them, and that flatness is the point. The polite Please and the apologetic Sorry dress exclusion in good manners: a racism so respectable that it apologises while it shuts the door. The misspelling Kolors turns the joke on the people who make the rules, and the word itself reduces a whole population to a colour.
“them English people so foolish they believe every Indian come from India”
Fraser, at Bradley’s Corner, telling Ram about the landlord up the road
Fraser turns the prejudice round: the English, not the migrants, are the foolish ones. His creole grammar, with them as a pointing word and come without an ending, carries a sharp idea, that the landlord cannot picture a person of Indian descent born anywhere but India. Fraser treats Ram as exactly that, an Indian who is also a born Trinidadian, as Selvon himself was. The whole plot grows from this one sentence.
“I am a born Trinidadian, a real Creole”
Ram, answering Fraser’s advice to put on a turban
Ram’s first instinct is to refuse the disguise and to name himself by his birthplace. The word he chooses is loaded: in Trinidad, Creole has traditionally meant any Trinidadian not of Asian origin, so a man with an Indian name and ancestry claims the label that usually leaves Indians out. One reading is that he is proud of a mixed Caribbean identity no English category can hold. Another is that need wins at once, since in the same breath he asks for the address anyway.
“I am an Untouchable from the heart of India”
Ram, answering the landlord’s first question, about what part of the world he comes from
Ram’s credential is comic in two directions. He claims the lowest place in India’s caste system, perhaps without knowing what it means, and the landlord, who knows no more, accepts it. The inflated phrase “the heart of India”, and the talk of the banks of the Ganges that follows, is interrupted by a practical request that the room should not be too expensive. That bathos exposes the performance: the romance is for the landlord, the rent is for Ram.
“making it sound like an original statement”
Narration, as Ram answers the landlord’s remark that he is not wearing his national garments
Ram replies with the stock proverb about doing as the Romans do, and the narrator quietly lets the reader know it is second-hand. The irony is gentle: the narrator stands a little apart from Ram, admiring his nerve while showing the seams in his costume. The line also explains why the trick works. Ram needs no real Indian wisdom, only the tone of it, because the landlord cannot tell the difference.
“Acha, pilau, papadom, chickenvindaloo”
Ram, answering Chan’s greeting on the front steps
Chan greets him in what sounds like Hindi, and Ram, who has none, answers with the names of dishes: desperately, the narration says, with nothing but hope behind them. It sounds like a restaurant menu read aloud, with chickenvindaloo run together as though he has only ever seen it printed on a card. It works, which is the joke. After the ending the moment turns again: Chan is a Jamaican, so his greeting may be as hollow as Ram’s reply, two men bluffing each other on the steps.
“passes into the hands of Allah”
Ram, telling the landlord that every man is a student, just before he is given the room
Having claimed a place in the Hindu caste system, Ram now invokes Allah, the Arabic word for God used by Muslims. The religions are jumbled together, perhaps because to Ram and to the landlord alike anything Eastern will do, and the landlord does not seem to notice. Selvon’s satire is aimed at the belief that there is one Indian identity to be worn or recognised. The narration adds that Ram is warming to his part, as if identity were a role an actor grows into.
“This house too small for the two of we”
Ram, to himself, after days of hiding from Chan
Ram’s line echoes the stock showdown of the cowboy film, the town not big enough for two, shrunk to a lodging house. The mock-heroic effect makes the rivalry absurd, a gunfight over a rented room, while the creole “two of we” keeps it in Ram’s own voice. It is also the title in miniature: two equally matched schemers who cannot share one space, which is what the proverb about Greek meeting Greek describes.
“falling back on the good old West Indian dialect”
Narration, when the landlord accuses Ram of deceiving him
Once the landlord has accused him, Ram drops the borrowed English of his performance and pleads in plain West Indian speech. The narrator’s “good old” is affectionate: dialect is home, what a man falls back on when the act is over, and the language the whole story is told in. It is too late to help him, since the landlord has already decided, but the reader has been enjoying that voice since the first line, so the story quietly takes Ram’s side against the landlord’s formal English.
“that is a fellar from Jamaica”
Fraser, the last line of the story
The twist lands in the final line: Chan, the landlord’s model Indian, is a Jamaican whom Fraser sent to the same house. Everything is reread at once. The greeting on the steps was a bluff, the turban and incense a costume, and the landlord who vowed never to take anyone from the West Indies has housed two West Indians in a row. Ram lost not to a real Indian but to a better performer who got there first, which is what the title’s contest of equals means.
“we calling this man Chan”
Narration, when Chandrilaboodoo first appears on the steps
The narrator shortens Chan’s long name with exactly the formula he used for Ram in the first sentence. The we reads as a storyteller’s we, taking in the teller and his listeners, which is how a story told in the third person can still say we. The repetition also plants a clue: the narration treats the two men as the same kind of man from the moment they meet, and the ending proves it. One reading sees affectionate convenience; another sees names, like identities, as things that can be changed at will.
“You do not burn incense like Mr. Chan”
The landlord, in Ram’s room, just before he tells Ram to go
The landlord’s test of Indianness is a checklist of props, incense, dress and speech, each measured against Mr Chan in three matching clauses. The patterned sentence sounds like a verdict, but what it judges is costume. The irony is complete once the reader learns that his standard of a real Indian is a Jamaican. Selvon suggests that the landlord’s prejudice contains no knowledge of India at all, only stage properties, which is why two men from the Caribbean can both satisfy it.