The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  He saw the twinned stories of Sartaj the cop and Gaitonde the killer as parts of a vast whole that included Partition, geopolitical struggles, the Great Game, and the very contemporary yearning for the revolution that must destroy the world in order to create a brand-new paradise. Some of his ambiguity—the good guys and the bad guys are not so different from each other, or from us—comes from his early readings of the Mahabharata. ‘Reading Kurukshetra, I thought, okay now there’ll be a happy ending. And when there wasn’t, it sent a chill through my heart: so the good guys can die as well?’

  That complexity drove his vision for Sacred Games, despite the inevitable complaints that the book is too long, too layered. ‘I saw an intricate web of events and people, connections of power and desire running across the whole country.’ Then he grins. ‘When I began, I thought I was doing a local story about two guys down the street who had a feud. A short book.’ We look at the bulk of Sacred Games and start laughing. ‘Yeah, I didn’t realize how long it was because I’d written it in separate chapters. In June 2005, I told Melanie’—his wife, also a writer—‘let’s see how long the damn thing is. It was quite a shock, actually.’

  After Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra says he’s taking ‘a very determined’ holiday; he thinks he’s finally done with Inspector Sartaj Singh: ‘There was one time Melanie and I were having an argument—the usual couples’ thing—and she said, why . . . can’t you be more like Sartaj? Well, he’s got himself a girlfriend now, he can go away.’

  I tell him as we’re finishing with coffee that I don’t believe he’ll be on vacation too long, that he seems to enjoy writing too much to stop. ‘Yeah,’ says Vikram. His accent still owes more to Mumbai than to Berkeley. ‘Everyone has stories, if you’re willing to look for them.’

  It’s not till I re-run the tape for this interview that I realize how accurate he is. The conversation at the kitty-party table-for-fourteen behind us is captured loud and clear: ‘But, of course, he bumped her off! It wasn’t the affair na, but she was telling his business secrets in bed.’ If only Chandra had been at that table, I think, we could have had a great Delhi novel next from Mumbai’s novelist of the times.

  (Based on a 2007 interview. In 2013, Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.)

  10

  V.S. Naipaul

  Some years ago, Patrick French spent over a month in Delhi conducting meticulous, detailed interviews with seven or eight different people. All of them had witnessed a minor but indelible incident at a literary festival involving V.S. Naipaul. Over hour-long interviews, French cross-checked each account thoroughly, pressing for facts and details, until he had an accurate picture fixed in his head.

  The incident was one of many in Naipaul’s life that never made it to French’s biography, The World is What It is, but it was an index, if one was needed, of the lengths to which French was willing to go to in order to ensure that this would be the authoritative, not just authorized, version. ‘[. . .] the aim of the biographer,’ writes French, ‘should not be to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the eye of the reader.’

  And this he does. The authorial voice of the biographer is all but absent; instead, through a pastiche of interviews with Naipaul, with the great writer’s many admirers and detractors, through a careful examination of the voluminous Naipaul archives, French puts together a book that is destined to outlive both the subject and the biographer.

  Naipaul’s life can be roughly summarized: the insular, deprived childhood in Trinidad, the urgent need to escape that brought him to the UK, the sense of being different and out of place that drove him to depression and rage, the early years of struggle, interspersed with thin success, and then finally the years of being Sir Vidia, the Nobel Prize winner.

  The three motifs of his life are equally clear: the fierceness with which he willed himself into existence as a writer, the search for belonging accompanied by the need to repudiate any place that might welcome him, and the intense honesty of his gaze. Those who read him might—and do—disagree with the accuracy of his judgements and might argue with his opinions, but his way of seeing, an innate inability to look away or to see with blurred vision, fuels his work. His insistence on honesty allowed French’s biography to step away from hagiography, to be a searing and often disturbing account of the life of one of the most respected and controversial writers of his time.

  As a writer, he blurred the distinction between fiction and non-fiction; in his later years, he attacked the form of the novel with ferocity, though many critics believe that it is his novels—A House for Mr Biswas, The Mystic Masseur, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival—that will last. He reported unflinchingly from the edges of a world in the throes of upheaval and change, rendering South America, Trinidad, India, and a score of other places neither as the West saw them nor as their inhabitants could see them: it was his view that drove his narratives, he was, as French notes, ‘always, on nobody’s side’.

  French remarks, a little later in the biography, ‘As people and ideas shifted between countries in a way they had not done at previous points in human history, an author who took the world as his subject was no longer impossible. He could carve out a space for himself as a new sort of writer, claiming to come from a place without history . . .’ And so he did, sometimes with detachment, often with passion, often with bitterness.

  Perhaps wisely, French refrains from analysing the books—as Naipaul has often said to critics and interviewers, everything of importance is in his work, he has little interest in explaining himself. Instead, the second half of the biography becomes an increasingly personal history, a record of a life at once touching—as Naipaul struggled to find the recognition and financial success that eluded him in the early decades—and monstrous.

  His marriage to Pat Hale was by turns intimate and abusive; Pat bore the brunt of Naipaul’s temper, his often unreasonable demands and struggled, as he did, with the sexual side of the relationship. Naipaul found release in furtive visits to prostitutes; patient, long-suffering Pat cooked, cleaned, set up house and was his most important reader. ‘I should have left,’ Naipaul told French. ‘I didn’t have the brutality.’ And yet, his relationship with his mistress, Margaret Gooding, seems just as brutal in a different, darker way.

  The climax, so to speak, of his marital life, is laid out by French in cold terms. Naipaul has abandoned Margaret, Pat is dying of cancer and Naipaul is made angry by that impending death. As his first wife declines in hospital, Naipaul proposes to Nadira, a Pakistani journalist who astonished him by asking whether she might kiss him at their first meeting. Pat’s funeral is seen by some as a shabby affair, but characterized by Naipaul as ‘chaste, Quranic in its purity’. Naipaul returns from the funeral, and sends for food, apples and cheese for him, olives for Nadira who will be arriving the next day. In a rare and much-quoted authorial comment, French writes, ‘[And so] the funeral green olives did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.’

  It is perhaps this passage that has shocked most readers. And yet, what stands out is Naipaul’s candour in his conversations with French, his refusal to make excuses or apologies. He has made few of them throughout his life, either to the many friends and supporters who later found themselves attacked or abandoned, or to his many critics. The World is What It is offers a powerful insight into Naipaul’s journey as a writer and into the life of the man, and it is a gripping, unforgettable biography: yet it is an excruciating read, a book that challenges and exhausts the reader. French writes with the purity and clinical sharpness of the professional historian, omitting nothing, excusing nothing.

  The virtues of The World is What It is can be found in Naipaul’s own writing: an absolute honesty, a refusal to flinch from the unpleasant, an impassioned insistence on objectivity. French, as a biography, also employs the ruthlessness and dispassionate coldness of his subject. The result is one of the most compelling books of the year, an an
alysis not just of Naipaul but of a certain kind of mind, of the price of greatness. Some may think it too high, on reading this biography of a towering writer who lacks all capacity for compassion, who has humour, but often lacks humanity, who has over time become less and less relevant, in part because he has so little respect for women as intellectual equals. Sometimes it is best not to know too much about the writers whose works and style you admire, and yet, it is impossible to look away.

  (Published in the IIC Journal, 2008. In 2010, V.S. Naipaul published a travelogue, The Masque of Africa.)

  11

  Ved Mehta

  Indian writing has little space for the family album. The few portraits of parents, siblings or partners that emerge are like the photographs that hang in our homes: officially posed, formally garlanded. Ved Mehta’s Continents of Exile series is one of our few, monumental exceptions, a long-playing biography on the screens of our imaginations.

  Ved is in Delhi for the re-release of the eleven books that make up the series, written over decades, starting with Daddyji and continuing through Mummyji and Mamaji into the personal terrain of All For Love and The Red Letters.

  Nothing is exempt from Mehta’s need to set it all down, not the years of apprenticeship with Mr Shawn—William Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor—not his blindness, not his sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch. This has its pitfalls, as Ben Yagoda noted in About Town, a history of the New Yorker: ‘Ved Mehta’s endless biographies of the various members of his family almost seemed to dare the reader to say, “This is boring!” and flip ahead to the next article.’

  Mehta, one of the great raconteurs in person, knows this; he also knows that Continents of Exile cannot be ignored. ‘When my three-part essay on Mamaji came out, other New Yorker writers asked why Mr Shawn would run this, at a time when people were dying in Vietnam,’ he says. Shawn had his own reasons for shaping and encouraging Mehta’s personal and painful brand of honesty.

  *

  ‘I hate the word “memoir”,’ says Ved Mehta, after I’ve used it for the fifth time. ‘I prefer biography, or autobiography.’ We’re discussing the Indian reluctance to write in the autobiographical vein. My theory is that there are too many unspoken taboos on writing about the personal, the familial. Ved’s hands flicker in disagreement, like an unconscious turning of a page to a different chapter.

  ‘Indians aren’t reticent,’ he says. ‘Maybe we still have a Victorian morality that won’t let us speak our minds. But there’s a freedom in the West you don’t have here. Writers there are not afraid of not making a living. They have the freedom to write about sex. The freedom not to appear dignified, noble, likeable. What would Henry Miller have written if he’d wanted to be liked by his middle-class relatives?’

  I think of my impatience as an adolescent reading Mehta’s ‘endless biographies’, wading through these meandering accounts of parents, relatives, lovers, friends, editors, partners. It was years later before I realized how deeply embedded Mehta’s portraits had become in my mind, as though his family had become mine, as though I knew Kiltykins and Daddyji as well as he did. It took years to see how tight, how taut—Mehta’s adjectives, not mine—the narrative was; how much had been skillfully omitted, how accurate the details were.

  Mehta would give the credit to Shawn: ‘He was a genius, and he also had enormous taste, sympathy and humanity. These sound like abstractions, but they are not.’ The preferred adjectives to describe good writing today are ‘necessary’ and ‘honest’; but as Mehta expands on Shawn’s virtues, they seem like the Holy Trinity of truly timeless writing, including Mehta’s own work. Taste, sympathy, humanity.

  *

  How reliable is memory anyway? Here are three Ved Mehta stories. The Neemrana festival gathered together some of India’s greatest writers—V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Khushwant Singh and Ved Mehta among others—and then, for inexplicable reasons, sequestered them in a fort-palace far away from their readers.

  The insistent literariness of the Neemrana festival was enlivened by a massive disagreement between the wife of the German ambassador and Naipaul. The author and the ambassador’s wife threatened, from opposite corners of the fort, to leave if the other stayed on; the combined diplomacy of Pico Iyer, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Nadira Naipaul finally persuaded a still-furious Naipaul to come down to dinner.

  Ved Mehta walks in late. For once, his normally acute senses fail to compensate for his blindness, and he sees only Vikram Seth and Dom Moraes, not Naipaul. ‘Dom,’ says Ved in his clear, carrying voice, ‘you’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.’

  ‘No, no,’ says Mehta, though he’s smiling. ‘That didn’t happen.’ He has, he explains, often had to deny stories about himself.

  The late Dom Moraes and he once made the same trip, and wrote separate accounts. Dom had a wonderful story about Ved Mehta as the guest of a maharana, drawn to the lifelike figure of a stuffed tiger. ‘May I pet it?’ he asks, and the maharana gives his permission, while Dom signals frantically—but ineffectively, since Mehta can’t see him—from the other end of the room. Ved, petting the stuffed animal, is remarking on the realistic feel of its fur when the tiger gets up, yawns and walks away.

  ‘Dom,’ says Mehta with some feeling, ‘treated me as Quixote treated Sancho Panza. I never rode horses. The maharana never introduced naked ladies into my bedroom. And the stuffed tiger story isn’t true.’ I have a clear memory of Dom telling the story in his rich timbre, and Mehta and I both agree that some stories, however false, should be true.

  The third story concerns Mehta’s blindness, which he has often written about, commenting that it is for the blind to imagine the world of the sighted—the sighted rarely feel compelled to do the opposite. One of Mehta’s readers, noting the many references in his writing to ‘seeing’ and ‘scrutiny’ or specific colours, particular details, is convinced that Ved Mehta is not really blind. At a book launch, the reader decides to prove his theory.

  Ved Mehta is speaking to a group of friends. The reader sneaks up and joins the group; then makes a rapid hand gesture in front of Ved’s face. The writer continues with his tale. The reader tries a more obvious gesture; the writer is unmoved. The reader, still convinced that Mehta’s faking, starts waving his hands in front of the writer’s face, jumping up and down. The writer remains impassive. Defeated, the reader leaves, and tells a friend who’s witnessed the incident that he was wrong, that Ved Mehta is, indeed, blind.

  ‘That wasn’t Ved Mehta,’ says the friend. ‘That was V.S. Naipaul.’

  This story is true.

  *

  The conversation has roamed from the short attention span of the modern-day reader to the relative merits of Joyce versus D.H. Lawrence to a dispute over whether it was alcohol or buggery that fuelled the productivity of Truman Capote. (‘Buggery,’ says Mehta, and that settles the matter.)

  There is one final matter to be addressed. ‘I never started out wanting to write a million words about my life,’ says Ved Mehta, and we both contemplate what it would have been like, in 1972, to look ahead at a vista of writing a biography all the way up to 2003. I cannot imagine it, any more than he could, as a young writer. ‘Writing is in itself a way of growing up; the more difficult the challenges you take on, the more you change.’

  Continents of Exile is balanced by the other books—travelogues, political accounts, short stories—but perhaps Ved Mehta knows that his biographies will define him. There is an end to a novel, even a trilogy; but an autobiography can only end with an obituary, which we will hope is long delayed. However inadvertently he began the project of writing his life, the million-plus words it’s taken to cover his history, Ved Mehta has hit upon the only possible answer to writer’s block. Writing your life as you live it is the perfect way to ensure that you will never run out of material.

  (Based on an interview conducted in 2009 and readings between 2004–2012.)

  12

  Nayantara Sah
gal

  The residential quarters at the IIC in Delhi are reminiscent of reserved airport lounges: they both signify the temporary privilege conferred on VIPs in transit. It is an odd space to meet Nayantara Sahgal, a writer whose life and works are both umbilically linked to the capital city.

  But Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s daughter is here on a mission: to promote the book that she hopes will both round off Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to his family, and remind a forgetful India of Pandit. It is an index of how far the editing of history has proceeded that Before Freedom includes just five letters from Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Many more were written, as is apparent from Nehru’s responses, but they cannot be found. ‘What came down to me was what was in my mother’s possession. I did try to obtain the other half of the correspondence—they may be in some archives, perhaps, or some closed sector of a library,’ says Sahgal.

  It stings. In the introduction, Sahgal recounts the story of the trip she and her sister made to Allahabad in 1990 after the death of their mother. They visited Anand Bhawan, the house that Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit had shared with her brother Jawaharlal for many years, and Swaraj Bhawan, where she had grown up. The guide made no mention of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit at all.

  ‘There’s a definite attempt to blot her out. It’s ironic because she herself had no ambition to be anywhere in history.’ Sahgal points out that her mother had retreated to Dehradun, where the writer now makes her home, after resigning from Parliament in 1968. ‘What threat could a woman who had literally bodily removed herself from public life, what possible threat could she have constituted?’ she asks rhetorically. And answers her own question. ‘Indira Gandhi was a very different person from her father. He had a very strong, stable confidence. She was, I feel, a person deeply emotionally insecure.’