Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  At something dull; fathers had never known

  Success so huge and wholly farcical;

  The women shared

  The secret like a happy funeral ...

  Vidia had referred to Nadira’s “reputation and her work,” and had said, “She is very famous.” But surely Nadira’s celebrity was similar to that which I had enjoyed when I had been famous in Kampala and in Bundibugyo. Nadira had been famous in Bahawalpur, a small town on the Sutlej River about two hundred miles south of Lahore. She wrote a “Letter from Bahawalpur,” which appeared each week in The Nation (Lahore). Her picture accompanied the column, a passport-quality full-face halftone of a vague, unsmiling woman with bobbed hair and dark raised brows like diacritical marks over her staring eyes.

  To verify Vidia’s high opinion, I got hold of a sequence of Nadira’s dispatches from Bahawalpur.

  In “Pardon Sir, Your Slip Is Showing!” she wrote, “Words are wonderful things. They are extremely useful, even indispensable at times; you can use them to communicate, to beguile, to frustrate, to berate, to admire, to flatter, to fool...” And she ended, “If words loose [sic] their meaning, life looses [sic] its meaning.”

  “Remembering the Old of the Sadiqians” was Nadira’s lament for the fact that the retired teachers of Sadiq Public School in Bahawalpur had small pensions or none at all. Conclusion: “No wonder our education system is in shambles.”

  A week later, in “Computer Blues,” Nadira deplored the rise of computer technology. Her then husband made an appearance in this piece: “The early days of his computer mania were quite a strain on our marriage.” Nadira hated her computer. Nothing worked as it should—disks, printer, fonts, spell checker; power outages in Bahawalpur did not help. Also, “I keep loosing [sic] articles from the disks, sometimes loosing [stc] the disks,” and so on.

  Lovable, ungrammatical, clumsy, audacious—had such pieces turned Vidia’s head? Nadira had been married to a man who was living the more or less feudal existence of a wealthy Pakistani farmer-landlord. That sort of life—you see it in India also—is like a glimpse of old Russia, something Tolstoyan in the landlord’s experimental farm, with his many peasants and tenants and his money, for this man lived on the same premises with Nadira and his first wife, a German woman, and the children from both marriages.

  The rest of the story, too, is like a Russian novel. Nadira acquires some local fame as a columnist. She revolts. She leaves for Lahore. She is squired around town by several men, who woo her but stop short of being suitors. She has no money except for the insignificant fees for her “Letter from Bahawalpur,” and she no longer lives in her town. On her divorce, it is said that her husband does not even return her dowry. She is living precariously when she receives an invitation to meet Sir Vidia Naipaul.

  She says to my friend in Lahore, “Who is he? Has he written anything?”

  It is impossible not to admire her pluck.

  Later, people said, “Have you heard about Vidia? He got married.”

  Vidia had sounded happy in the piece describing his wedding curry lunch. It did not surprise me that I hadn’t been invited. I was in Hawaii, half a world away, and I had still not gotten over the death of Pat or the sad news that there had been only a handful of people at her funeral.

  A month after Vidia’s wedding, I had a call from Bill Buford, the literary editor of The New Yorker, telling me that the magazine was sponsoring an event at Hay-on-Wye, a well-known literary festival, in a pretty part of the Welsh border country.

  “We want you and Vidia to appear,” Buford said. “Do a sort of literary dialogue.”

  “Vidia hates literary festivals,” I said. “He has never been to one. And they seem like dog shows to me. Have you asked him?”

  “We were hoping that you would, Paul.”

  “Never. He’ll just scream.”

  “He’s been very mellow since he got married. It’s a new Vidia, honestly.”

  “He won’t do it,” I said.

  “We figure he might if you ask him. He’ll listen to you. You’re his friend.”

  “Believe me, he does what he wants.”

  “Salman Rushdie will be there.”

  “That’s no incentive to Vidia. He laughed when the ayatollah announced his fatwa. I tell you, he won’t want to go.”

  “But Vidia’s new wife might.”

  “I don’t know Vidia’s new wife.”

  “Paul, if you ask Vidia to attend it will mean a lot to us.”

  “He’ll want to be paid.”

  “We’ll pay him. Within reason, of course. Will he want a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Paul, please...”

  I cannot bear it when people plead with me. Perhaps they know that. Pleading always has the intended effect.

  It was a deep-voiced woman who answered the telephone at Dairy Cottage. I knew just where she was: on the white sofa by the window, which gave onto the western side of the hedge, the green shrubs, the green trees, the red maple. It was where Pat always sat, because Vidia disliked answering the phone.

  “And who is speaking?” she asked.

  I told her my name.

  As she passed the phone to Vidia, I heard her say, “It’s Paul Theroux. I want to meet him.”

  I should have known that would be enough, but even then, I was not certain that Vidia would say yes to the festival.

  18

  Literature Is for the Wounded and the Damaged

  IT HAPPENS TO BE a tic of mine as a traveler, on returning to any distant city, to take the same walk, make the same stops, eat the same meals at the same restaurants, look into the same stores, verify the faces of clerks or doormen, even touch the same posts and gates—go through a ritualistic renewal of familiarity along a known route before striking out and doing anything new. It is not compulsive. It eases my spirit. And in any new city I make a route and remember it.

  It was a sunny morning at the end of May in England’s never-disappointing springtime. I was just a tourist now. Christie’s salesrooms were on my London trail. I walked from Brown’s Hotel to King Street in time to see the “Visions of India” pre-auction show.

  “Your friend Naipaul was just here,” a Christie’s man said, greeting me. He knew me as a sometime bidder and Naipaul as a connoisseur. “He might still be somewhere in the building.”

  We looked among the pictures but didn’t see him. I had wanted to surprise him, perhaps have lunch. He had agreed to go to Hay-on-Wye to do the staged dialogue. I would have enjoyed looking at these pictures with Vidia, who had a discerning eye for paintings of Indian landscapes. But he had gone.

  I continued on my quasi-Tourettic walk, feeling like a practitioner of advanced mazecraft. I had arrived in London that morning and was happy with my first-class rail ticket to Newport, Wales, in my pocket. I left the next day from Paddington station, first reading the newspaper and then looking over the first chapter of Kowloon Tong, which I had just started to write. I had spent part of the winter in Hong Kong.

  If things had been different in my life, I might have been writing the book in one of those Oxfordshire or Somersetshire houses—the Old Vicarage or Stride Manor, say. The house filled with the aromas of log fires and baking bread. “Dad’s working in the library.” It had been a dream of mine to end up in the West Country as a solvent escapee from London and part-time patriarch, my kids coming down with girlfriends or wives, maybe even grandchildren, on weekends. Wearing muddy Wellingtons, I would meet them at the local railway station with the other parents and country squires, leaning against our Land Rovers and listening for the train. I would be known as “the American” in the village and greeted with insincere and resentful jollity by the gruff locals in the pub, the Black Horse—“Evenin’, squire.” They would patronize me with archaisms and bore me stiff with country lore they’d got out of books. Behind my back I’d be called “the Yank.”

  No matter! The West Country was one of the prettiest places in the world. I knew that now. I had b
een looking at it, off and on, for thirty-four years, but now I knew it would never happen. Just thinking of the word “never” and seeing these blue remembered hills made my eyes prickle with regret.

  A taxi met me at Newport. The driver, a former teacher and Welsh speaker, took me to Abergavenny and across the Black Mountains past jumbled villages. Too far from London to be within commuting distance, the countryside looked unmodernized, like the England of the sixties and seventies. The village of Hay was on a hill, the river Wye below it. I dropped my bag at the innlike hotel and after lunch, on that afternoon of June 1, 1996, went to the festival.

  Vidia and Nadira had arrived, having left Dairy Cottage that morning.

  “Paul, this is Nadira.”

  The skinny, scowling seven-year-old girl in her little princess sari on the Nairobi verandah had become a big woman. She was dark and tall—taller than Vidia—and watchful, with the sort of frank sizing-you-up stare that is never seen on the faces of Pakistani women. Her sari was loose at the hips, as if she had just lost some weight. She was waiting for me to say something. I spoke to Vidia.

  “I just missed you at that Indian show at Christie’s yesterday.”

  Before Vidia could reply, Nadira slapped his shoulder and said, “You bad man! You did not tell me you went there!”

  She slapped his arm again and scolded him. This seemed a trifle presumptuous in a woman who had been married only a month. I had never seen anyone touch Vidia before.

  “You will not buy any more pictures!”

  “You’re telling my secrets, Paul,” Vidia said quietly, looking a little grim.

  Salman Rushdie was being introduced to Vidia as I stepped up to a table to get myself a cup of coffee, and then I saw Bill Buford from The New Yorker beckoning, and we all headed to a big white circus tent.

  As I passed Salman, he was smiling and shaking his head. He said, “I have never met him before.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Are you all right?’ I told him yes, I am all right. He said, ‘Good, good, good.’” Salman began to laugh.

  We took our seats, Vidia, Bill Buford, and I, on the stage in the big circus tent. The audience was large, but still the atmosphere was that of a dog show. We were being asked to perform, to walk on our hind legs, jump through hoops, create a spectacle for the readers. Buford said, “What about questions afterwards?”

  “No questions,” Vidia said. I felt sure he hated doing this, but he had agreed; I had not twisted his arm. His general philosophy was “The writer should never precede the work.” Or even: “The writer should remain invisible.” Books were the things. But there were no books in sight, only goggling faces in the sold-out tent and the sense of scrutiny, all those faces like light bulbs.

  In his rambling introduction—Vidia fidgeting irritatedly as my new book was mentioned—Bill said, “Paul, you’re two decades younger than Vidia,” and finally asked, “What did Vidia give you as a writer?”

  I thanked him and said, “A couple of corrections, Bill. I am not two decades younger than Vidia. I am fifty-five, Vidia’s sixty-four. And we met over thirty years ago, when I actually did feel more than twenty years younger. I felt very young. I felt that I was meeting a much older, much wiser, much more experienced person. A person much more than nine or ten years older than I was.”

  Vidia sat looking meditative. He had not said a word, and we had hardly spoken beforehand. He was wearing a dark jacket and a sweater under it, dark wool trousers, dark shoes. He seemed to be listening carefully, and I was grateful to have this chance to pay tribute to him.

  “And you ask what he gave me?” I said. “I feel that he gave me everything. The main thing that he gave me was the confidence that I was a writer. He said that every writer was different, and if you were great, you were a new man. I had to write my own book, but that it would not resemble anyone else’s book. My writing had to come from inside me, and that every book needed a reason to be written.”

  To my left, I could see Vidia nodding. I was annoyed that I had had to speak first, and I felt I was rambling.

  “In 1966 in Kampala, when I met Vidia, I had not published a book. Vidia was the first writer I had met who had a total sense of mission, a total sense of self, an uncompromising attitude towards himself, towards the novel. If he made a rule, he kept to the rule. He said that a writer has to make his own way in the world. He asked me once or twice, Are you sure you’re up for it? Are you sure you want to be a writer? Are you sure you want to live this terrible life?’ I was twenty-four years old. I said, ‘I’m up for it.’”

  Vidia was sitting next to me, near enough for me to hear him sighing in impatience—or perhaps he was simply breathing asthmatically. Near as he was, he was not looking at me or at the audience. He sat at an angle and stared into space while, on his other side, Bill Buford spoke to him—spoke to his shoulder, for Vidia remained turned away. His body language said bluntly that he wished he was elsewhere.

  Bill began to ask me another question when, out of self-consciousness—for Vidia, the star of this show, still had not spoken—I turned to Vidia and asked, “You once wrote, ‘To be a victim is to be absurd.’ What did you mean by this?”

  Vidia cleared his throat and said, “Well, I think the word ‘victim’ has probably been extended. I was thinking about people who were utterly helpless politically and had no rights, no one to turn to, and I thought: They were always absurd. This was in a note to a study of slavery and revolution that I spent some years in working on. The slaves had no rights—and I am thinking about the Caribbean slavery—and to be a victim is to be absurd. Slaves are absurd people. That is the truth. The current use of the word is an extension of that. I haven’t thought about it like that. I was thinking about it in a very practical, realistic way. I don’t make generalizations.”

  “So you don’t mean it in the modern sense,” I said.

  “No, not in the sense of someone in a university who can’t get a job,” Vidia said with the sort of snappish energy he had when he was irritable. I had noticed the awkward way he sat and could see that he had something on his mind. “No, that’s another kind of victim.”

  People in the audience laughed at his seeming to mock universities, and over their laughter I persisted, hoping to draw him out.

  Vidia lifted his head, looked at nothing, and said, “I don’t think like this about myself. I deal with material at hand and I don’t make generalizations like this.”

  Feeling rebuffed, I said no more and let the silence descend. Time for Vidia to offer something. Perhaps he was right: it seemed in my question that I was embarrassed by his discomfort and trying to ingratiate myself.

  He giggled confidently in the silence and said, “Sorry, I don’t want to stump the conversation.”

  Buford rescued the faltering moment, saying, “Paul, if I can intercept. I arrived from New York last night, and as I got here on the train I was thinking of your books. In some ways no two writers could be more different, and yet there are some similarities. And one is that both of you became writers in Britain. In your case, Vidia, you actively became a writer when you came to Britain and started studying at Oxford. And in Paul’s case—you, Paul, also became a writer when you lived here. What was the effect of being in Britain for you?”

  I gestured for Vidia to answer.

  “This is a very important question,” Vidia said.

  He coiled on his chair, concentrating hard, and lifted his gaze again, speaking to the heights of the circus tent.

  “It has to be considered,” he said. “Writing is a physical business. Books are real physical objects. They have to be printed, published, reviewed, read, distributed—it’s a physical object, it’s a commercial enterprise. It’s an effect of the industrial society. You can’t beat a book out on a drum.” He let this sink in. “So, in the 1950s, when I started, if you were writing in English, there was only one place where you could be a writer. It was here. It couldn’t be the United States, because I h
ad no link with America. I had a link only with here. It certainly couldn’t be any other English-speaking country, because I don’t think they even had publishing industries.”

  He frowned and folded his arms, looking defiant. “The thing was different in 1950. It has changed considerably. There’s a publishing industry in Australia, Canada—India has developed a publishing industry. And to write always as an exotic is a very awful thing to have to do.”

  “Why is it awful?” Buford asked.

  “Because you seldom have people who can share your experience, your background,” Vidia said. “My brother, while he lived, said to me one day that probably he was the only man who could truly understand what I was writing. And I understood a little bit more of what he was trying to do as well, because we shared the background. If we were addressing audiences of people like ourselves, we would have been different writers. I am always aware of writing in a vacuum, almost always for myself, and almost not having an audience. That wonderful relationship that I felt an American writer would always have with his American readers, or a French writer with his French readers—I was always writing for people who were indifferent to my material.”

  Buford said, “Why could you not return to Trinidad?”

  “You cannot beat books out on the drum!” Vidia cried. “It’s as simple as that. What would I have done?” He moved heavily in his chair and looked pleadingly at Buford, mocking him with incomprehension. “I mean, enter into it imaginatively—that question. Who would have published your books? Who would have read them? Who would have reviewed them? Who would have bought them? Who would have paid you for the effort? It’s not a question.”

  Over the nervous laughter from the audience at seeing Vidia’s hackles rise, Buford said that surely the source of Vidia’s fiction was the richness of Trinidad.

  “Yes, yes, inevitably, because that’s the material you have when you’re starting out,” Vidia said. “It’s the material you carry for your first twenty years or so. And it is very important, because it’s a complete experience. Experience later will be modified. But that’s very pure.”