Any donkey can do V.S. Naipaul? A Manchester-based attempt Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan) Date: Spring 2026 I imagine someone's reading V.S. Naipual's Miguel Street and concluding that any donkey could do what he does here. Let's try, but set in Manchester, not Trinidad. Oh, it sounds more like R.K. Narayan, I suppose, but who can tell the difference? He was an old man now and an old man was supposed pull down his trousers in front of the council-housed children: that is what he had heard so many years ago, as a young scholar in his 20s, or he had heard that an old man did that, and really ought there to be any significant difference between one old man and another? But his hand always became shaky as it approached the zip and he gave up. "Come children, let me tell you a story." The children looked at him irritably but felt that they had no option but to listen. "Once I ran a department, just over there in the university." Across the road, the university seemed to gleam with pride. It had seen many bright sparks, such as himself, come and go, and yet it remained, century after century. "What story?" said one of the children, who had a frog-like look to the old man, but he wore a black t-shirt with a cartoon rabbit upon it. "Before I ran a department, I used to live in student accommodation here. My friend and I would watch television together, would watch the comedian Richard Blackwood." "Never heard of him," said another child. They were eager to get back to their ball game. "My friend was a poor soul from Malaysia, a Chinese Malaysian, and I gave him a place to stay, on our sofa. We would watch Mr. Blackwood and one day my friend passed on some wisdom to me: this man always needs a good joke to get a laugh. He doesn't really know what he is doing yet. But I myself could never accept the wisdom: I quite like a man who with every joke, or what he does, has to prove himself anew, who never quite settles down to comfort in a field." A child let out a sigh. "It was years later that I ran a department. A philosophy department here. It was in the 2010s." "My parents were not even born then," said the sighing one. "Every day I would drive my colleagues to do their best. This is not good enough, that too. I would demand better definitions, weed out logical errors, check every inference. Some left of course. Others wondered: why can't we be like Cambridge?" He waited, expecting the name "Cambridge" to make a sparkling impact, but the children looked on impatiently. "The Cambridge department of the early 20th century was a stellar place indeed: Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, the genius Wittgenstein, and C.D. Broad too. McTaggart was once there, before, and Sidgwick even earlier." He rolled off the names, like the names of Greek gods. "But in the early 21st the Cambridge department was worse than ours in many respects. We were teaching better, we were producing publications of a higher level. Nevertheless, they were ranked so far above us. And they set a bad example for staff in my department. 'If only you knew what you were doing, if only we had Cambridge management, we could top the rankings with so much less effort,' they all more or less said. It reminded me of my Malaysian friend, my Chinese Malaysian friend, criticizing that wonderful comedian Richard Blackwood." "So?" said the sighing one, the politician-to-be, of this group. If there is one thing I cannot stand, thought the old man, it is a politician. But he lacked the energy to work on the boy's character now. "So I had to figure out a way to put Cambridge out of business: philosophy department anyway. I would hardly sleep thinking about the matter. Until finally it occurred to me: on their list of staff, there was no mention of Arif Ahmed, the most famous of the Cambridge philosophers of that time, or else second most." The old man hesitated over some issue regarding this matter. He then dug into his bag. There were several books and, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, out came a withered copy of Ahmed's book on Saul Kripke. "I used my influence to kick up an enormous fuss about this. Controversy raged. How could Cambridge rely so much on him and yet omit him? Many of us professionals complained. People from distant departments: from Canada, not just from Canada, from the very Western tip of Canada. It was surely racist! In those days there were many more white people, by the way, proper white people, and they manned almost all philosophy departments. But then the Cambridge department was shut for good." "That's a lie," said the politician and the children wandered off with their ball. "It is no lie," shouted the old man after them. The boy with the frog-like appearance but rabbit t-shirt turned and walked towards him. "There was the Bertrand Russsell professorship. If you had offered me such a thing, I dare not take it and yet there was someone who took it, someone so inexperienced in letters compared to myself. I suppose they will say: I lack bravery!" The old man did not know what to say next. "Go off with your friends. Life is short." He made his way, with his walking stick, wondering whether he had made the right decision, not to indecently expose himself. Surely the authorities would take him for a dotard and overlook the matter. References Ahmed, Arif. Saul Kripke. London: Bloomsbury Academic. V.S. Naipaul. 1959. Miguel Street. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/3595939/Miguel_street