Paul Theroux: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

“I have said before that writing is like sleight of hand. You simply mention a chair and it’s shadowy. You say it’s stained with wedding saffron and suddenly the chair is there, visible.”

This was spoken at his house, which smelled of fresh cement and red floor wax and new paint; the sun streaming through the windows that had no curtains; the house he hated, within earshot of the noise from the brick-and-thatch servants’ quarters.

“And that is not music. Listen to the bitches!”

Sometimes students brought him their work. He did not encourage them, but he allowed them. He saw the occasional lecturer. Sometimes he was asked a question about literature or the world.

I was present when he told a man with a serious inquiry, “I can’t answer that. I would need written notice of that question.”

After the man left, Vidia said, “That’s what he wanted to hear, you know. He didn’t really want me to answer his question.”

A female student brought him an essay. She had come to his house because he refused to hold classes.

“Your essay is hopeless,” he said. He chose a few examples to illustrate how bad it was, and then he said, “But you have lovely handwriting. Where did you learn to write like that?”

Another student, celebrated as a rising Ugandan poet by Hallsmith, sent Vidia a poem, entitled “A New Nation Reborn,” and showed up some days later at VIdia’s house wearing his crimson student’s gown. These gowns, introduced by the same English vice-chancellors who had contrived Makerere’s Latin motto— Pro Futuro Aedificamus , We Build for the Future — mimicked those worn by Oxford students. The young poet gathered his gown like an older woman taking a seat at a doctor’s office. He said, “Have you read my poem?”

“Yes, I’ve read it.” Vidia paused, tapped a cigarette, and said nothing for a long while. “I have been wondering about it.”

“It is about tubbulence.”

“Really.” Vidia found the boy’s eyes and fixed them with his weary stare. He said, “Don’t write any more poems. I really don’t think you should. Your gifts lie in some other direction. A story, perhaps. Now, promise me you won’t write any more poems.”

The boy shook his head and made the promise in a halting voice. He went away baffled and dejected.

“Did you see how relieved he was?” Vidia said. “He was glad I told him that.”

Vidia rubbed his hands and disposed of other students in the same fashion. I was surprised when he agreed to be the judge of a university literary competition, but he carried out his duties his own way. He insisted that there be only one prize, called Third Prize, because the entries were so bad there could be no first and second prizes.

“Make it absolutely clear that this is Third Prize,” he told the people in the English Department.

Some of the members objected to this.

Vidia said, “You are trying to give the African an importance he does not deserve. Your expectations are misguided. Turn away and nothing will happen. It’s the language again. Obote is just another chief. You call these politicians? They are just witch doctors.”

When the term “Third Prize” was converted to “The Prize,” Vidia smiled and said, “Blackwash.”

“The Africans who carry books around are the ones who scare me, man,” he said around that time.

He was dimly aware of, but not impressed by, some of the distinguished men and women who were living in Kampala or doing research at the university. An anthropologist, Victor Turner, was then at Makerere. You would not have known that this small, soft-spoken man with the diffidence of a librarian had spent years in mud huts on the upper Zambezi and on the Mongu floodplain and written pioneering studies of the Lozi people of Barotseland. Colin Turnbull had studied the Mbuti Pygmies. In the course of illustrating his encyclopedic studies of the mammals and birds of East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon, a painter and naturalist, had discovered at least two new species of mammal and several birds that had never been described. Michael Adams, a friend and contemporary of David Hockney’s, was our Gauguin. Colin Leakey, son of Louis Leakey, was our botanist. Rajat Neogy, the editor and founder of Transition , published Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer.

“What should I think about Africa?” Vidia demanded of an anthropology professor one day.

“Mr. Naipaul, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have too many opinions about Africa,” the man said. “If you do, you miss too much that’s really important.”

“Really.”

Later, walking back to his house, Vidia said, “Foolish man. He refuses to see the corruption. He accepts the lies.”

But he blamed himself, saying he should never have come, should not have accepted money from the Farfield Foundation. “Don’t ever accept money from a foundation,” he said. “It will ruin you. There are strings attached to all money you don’t earn yourself.”

This mistake in coming to Uganda inspired him, he said, to write an essay about all the rules he had made for himself and how disastrous it had been when he had broken one.

“Every time I’ve broken one of my own rules I have regretted it. Like this… Maka-ray-ray. Or the weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.” He kicked a stone. “Like that.”

His own behavior alarmed him.

“This is turning me into a racialist, for God’s sake. What a dreary, boring thing to be.”

Until I met Vidia, I had never known a person who recognized no one as his equal. He’s a Brahmin, the local Indians said: all Brahmins are fussy like that. Early on, seeing me solicit directions from a villager, he stood silently by, listening to the flow of Swahili, and then said, “You talk to these people so easily.”

I told him I had made a point of learning the language. People told the truth in their own language. They were nervous or inaccurate or more easily mendacious in a second language.

“I don’t mean that,” he said.

What did he mean? Perhaps that I spoke to them at all, and that I listened. His manner made him an impossible colleague but a natural bwana and employer of servants. He said I was too easy on my staff. “Your housegirl is an idler.” My cook, he said, was dirty. My gardener was a drunk.

“Your gardener is a drunk too,” I said, unwittingly indulging in the asinine debate between bwanas: my Africans are better than your Africans.

“Only on Sundays. A servant has a right to get drunk on Sundays. You have no right to criticize him for that, Paul.”

One of his pleasures was in taking his houseboy, Andrew, to the market and buying him half a pound of fried locusts and watching the man devour them, the dark mafuta grease smearing his cheeks.

“Good, eh, Andrew? Delicious, eh? Mazoori , eh?”

“ Ndio, bwana. Mzuri sana .”

“You see, Paul. The occasional treat. The occasional reprimand. Works wonders. He’s frightfully happy now.”

He complained that we were out of touch in Uganda. I said that we got the London newspapers on Sundays.

“Bring me the English papers this Sunday,” he said. “We will read them and then go for a walk.”

But he was in a foul mood when I arrived. I knew the reason: Sunday was the day when African families congregated outdoors. There was music, laughter, singing, fooling. “Bongos.” I thought the London papers might help.

“If there’s nothing about me in those papers, I am not interested in reading them,” he said in a sharp voice.

“Vidia,” Pat said, chastising him with his name.

“All right, let’s go for that fucking walk.”

His fluctuating temperament fascinated me, because it was so unusual, even self-destructive. Expatriates in Africa were generally even-tempered, and the farther into the bush you found them, the more serene they were. In Africa, nitpickers were those people by the side of the road plucking at someone’s louse-ridden head. The expression described no one else. So it was strange to find someone losing his temper, almost constantly on the boil. Such people never lasted. Vidia was especially fanatical in the matter of timekeeping.