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

“Come at seven,” he said to me one day, inviting me to dinner.

I took this to mean drinks at seven and then dinner. I showed up casually at seven-fifteen and found him at the table with Pat. Pat looked embarrassed; Vidia said nothing. He ignored me. He was eating quickly, like someone who was himself late. He was gobbling prawns.

“We’ve finished the first course,” he finally said. His mouth was full, to put me in the wrong and make a point. “You’re late.”

His obsession with punctuality governed his relationships. I was lucky in having merely been reprimanded for my lateness; the usual penalty was rejection: “He was late. I wouldn’t see him.” An African painter I knew ran out of gas on his way to an appointment with Vidia and, having to walk the rest of the way, arrived half an hour late. Vidia sent him away.

“The oldest excuse in the book, man. ‘I ran out of petrol.’ All the lies!”

He began to rant more often, which was now most of the time. He stopped working. He grew morose.

One day, all he wrote was the word “The” on a piece of paper, nothing more. He showed it to me. It was large and very dark. “It took me seven hours to write that.” He smiled insanely at it, a grin of satisfaction, as if to say, See what they made me do! He looked crazy, but he said he was sad. The problem was his house. The noise was also an assault. “Those bitches!” He hated the smells — cooking fires, rotting vegetation, human odors. “No one washes. Is soap expensive here?”

There had always been a note of humor in his rage, but today he was not joking. He looked older, angrier, insulted, trapped. He was miserable.

“I had to take to my bed,” he said.

In her gentle, trembly, imploring voice, Pat said, “We’ve heard of a hotel…”

The hotel was outside the town of Eldoret, in the highlands — the White Highlands, as they were still known then — of western Kenya: a wooded refuge in the middle of the plateau. It was called the Kaptagat Arms and was run by a man known as the Major, who was noted for his rudeness. He was an Englishman, a retired army officer, Sandhurst trained, who had spent his military career in India. He was in his late sixties and very gruff. Stories about him circulated in Uganda, emphasizing that the Kaptagat Arms was a place to avoid. The most recent story, one I told Vidia, concerned a woman faculty member who had asked the Major for a Pimm’s Cup in the hotel bar. The Major had said, “We don’t serve that muck. Now get out,” and showed the woman the door. Woman-hating was a recurring theme in the Major’s rudeness.

Vidia had told me he loathed colorful characters. He hated clowns, comedians, yakkers, virtuosos, village explainers, and hollow jokesters, vapidly Pickwickian, who spent their lives monologuing in country pubs. He felt insulted by their insincerity and foolishness. Buffoonery caused in him a deepening depression. Yet he liked my story about the Major for its rough justice. The woman in question he had singled out as an infy. Pimm’s No. 1 Cup was an infy drink.

“One of these suburban drinks,” Vidia said.

I was apprehensive. It seemed to me that the Major was the sort of colorful character who would either antagonize Vidia or lower his spirits. He had told me of a fistfight he’d had in a London restaurant once with just such a presumptuous person. It was hard to imagine this tiny man provoked to physical violence. But he never lied, so I believed him.

The three of us, Vidia, Pat, and I, went to the Kaptagat together. It was a long drive. First the Jinja Road out of Kampala, with its sugar estates and clouds of butterflies that settled on the road and posed a skidding hazard at the curve near Iganga. Then Jinja itself, the cotton mills, and Owen Falls — the headwaters of the Nile — and the conical hill outside Tororo where a dangerous leopard was said to live. Near the Kenyan frontier and the customs post, we came to the end of the paved road. Eighty miles of dusty, stony road had to be traversed, and on it, outside Bungoma, which was just some Indian shops and a bicycle mender, we saw six or seven naked boys with white-powdered bodies running along the road, having just “danced,” as Africans said, meaning they were initiates in a circumcision ceremony. Their white faces were ghostlike. Farther on, seeing the sign Beware of Fallen Rocks , Vidia muttered the words to himself, liking the sign for its precise language.

After we left Eldoret and its single gas station, we traveled north down narrow red clay roads, past corn fields, following wooden arrow-shaped signs saying To the Kaptagat Arms . We found the place in the early afternoon. It was utterly silent and abandoned-looking: no guests, no cars, only flitting birds and a few Kikuyu gardeners work ing in the flower beds. The hotel had one story, a converted farmhouse with an added wing of single rooms that looked out on the flower garden.

“Hello?” I said. “ Jambo .”

No one answered. Inside in the reception area there were Indian artifacts on shelves — Benares brassware, carved ivory, wall hangings, some baskets — as well as the sort of paraphernalia found in English country pubs: horse brasses, pewter tankards, tarnished trophies, old blurred photographs of anglers struggling to hold prize fish upright, hunting horns, ribbons, and the sort of fluted glass that offered a yard of ale. There were mounted racks of gazelles and oryx and kudu. There was a shoulder mount of a zebra on one wall and a zebra skin on the floor. The most ominously impressive object was a large, dusty tiger skin nailed to one whole wall, where it sprawled disemboweled in an arrested growl.

I rang a tinkly bell that was propped on the gold-stamped leather of the reception book and blotter, whereupon a tall craggy figure marched out from the back office. His posture was crooked and peevish. He had white hair and a deeply lined chain smoker’s face and a burning butt between his fingers. Undeniably the Major, he looked cross, with an English scowl that meant “nothing impresses me.” Staring with puzzled, just-interrupted eyes, he stuck his chin out and said, “Yes, what is it?”

“We’ve just driven from Uganda,” Vidia said.

“Shocking road. But we do get quite a few people from that side.”

“We are inquiring about your hotel,” Vidia went on. “We’d like to have lunch and look around.”

“Give me a moment to get sorted out,” the Major said. “Have a shufti at the garden. I’ll give you a shout when we’re ready to seat you. What was the name?”

“Naipaul.”

“Are you the writer?”

It was an inspired response. The heavens opened. A trumpet sounded, flocks of doves soared, and all the malaikas , the choirs of black angels, in the skies of western Kenya burst into song.

“Yes,” Vidia said, stammering with satisfaction. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

He was home, welcomed, at ease, in his own element, in the presence of a reader, happier than I had ever seen him.

“And what can I do for you?”

The Major had to repeat the question. He was speaking to me. I was lurking near the tiger skin, feeling awkward, but also wondering how you managed to kill one of these enormous creatures without making a mark or leaving scars.

“I am with them,” I said. “And I am looking for the bullet hole in this thing.”

“You won’t find it,” the Major said. “I shot him in the eye.”

The big glass eyes of the tiger stared like a martyr’s into the room with its ridiculous curios.

“How did you find us?” the Major asked.

“I had a vibration,” Vidia said.

Over lunch in the dining room, where we were the only diners, the Major was attentive. He said that business was terrible and that he planned to sell the place. He was breezy and somewhat stoical, as though fighting a rear-guard action and about to announce his surrender. He pulled the cork from a bottle of wine. “This is an Australian hock.”