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

“But this is awfully good,” Vidia said, examining the label as he worked his lips together.

“Try some of that sherry sauce in your soup. Joshua will be right back with your entrées,” the Major said, marching away.

Pat had begun to cry. She sobbed miserably and said she could not eat. It was the thought of the hotel’s closing, she said. All the flowers, all the order and nearness, all the hope. And they were shutting up shop.

“Oh my, Vidia, look,” she said, and gestured towards a waiter. “His poor shoes.”

There was something pathetic in the shoes. They were broken, without laces, the counters crushed, the tongues missing, the heels worn. They seemed to represent battered, tortured feet. The sight of the shoes reduced Pat to tears once again. Each time she saw the man wearing them, she began to sob. I did not tell her that Africans got such shoes second- and third-hand. Used to being barefoot, the Africans who owned them rarely found that they conformed to their misshapen feet; the shoes, like the torn shirts and torn shorts they wore, were often merely symbolic.

“Don’t be sad, Patsy,” Vidia said. “He’ll be all right. He’ll go back to his village. He’ll have his bananas and his bongos. He’ll be frightfully happy.”

Later, the Major said that after India’s independence, he had followed some other Anglo-Indians in coming to East Africa. Kenya, for its good climate, had been a choice destination. Tanzania was regarded as a rough place, difficult to farm, full of Bolshie Africans in Mao suits. Uganda was black, an agglomeration of incoherent kingdoms with bad roads. In any case, the Major had come reluctantly. He had liked India. Africa was all right, but Africans infuriated him. His Swahili was just a stern litany of orders and commands, and I saw something rather strict, even domineering about him, a coldness, and a defiant cynicism. He embodied the worst of the settler severity and the woman-hating mateship of the officers’ mess.

Ignoring her tears, the Major took a dislike to Pat from the first, and afterwards he sometimes mimicked her to me — clumsy, overstated mimicry that betrayed a kind of rancor. To him she was the bibi , the memsahib , the whiner, but for Vidia’s sake he was polite to her. Vidia used the old-fashioned-sounding word “pathic” to describe the Major. I had never heard the word before. Vidia said English prostitutes used it, which seemed a curious attribution and an even more questionable authority. Oh, tarts said it, did they? I took it to mean that the Major was bent. Vidia’s more particular word “bugger” was never uttered here at the Kaptagat Arms.

They talked of India: the beauty of Punjabi Muslims, the ferocity of Sikhs, the plains of Uttar Pradesh, the Englishness of hill stations, polo at the Poona Club. The Major had been posted all over. He said to Vidia, “I could tell you some smashing stories. I am sure you’d be able to use them.”

“No, not me,” Vidia said. “You must write them yourself.”

Over the years, I heard him give that same advice to everyone who offered him a story to write. He could not write their stories; it was for them to do. When they protested that they could not write, Vidia said, “If your story is as good as you say, you’ll write it.”

The Major was also a reader and had admired Vidia’s book An Area of Darkness . Soon after we arrived, I saw him reading Graham Greene’s The Comedians , which had just been published in Britain.

“What do you think of it?” I asked.

“Characters called Smith and Jones and Brown. That’s no bloody good. What should I think of it?”

He did not like Americans, he said. He made no secret of his contempt for me. I had a sissy way with the sherry sauce. “Yanks!” he cried, and then told long, implausible stories. Once, the Major said, while in the United States on a military errand, he had ordered a slice of ham in an officers’ club. Unbidden, an American officer at the table had spooned a dollop of marmalade on the ham and said, “That’ll make it taste a whole lot better”—spoken in one of the Major’s cruelly inaccurate accents.

“Bloody Yanks,” the Major said. “I couldn’t eat it.”

With minor variations, he told me the same story four times. I did not mind. I felt that this casual abuse would give Vidia a perspective on an American’s life among these English settlers in Africa.

Vidia found a room in the hotel he liked. He negotiated a weekly rate, and soon he and Pat moved in. The idea was that Vidia would finish writing his novel there, and it was at the Kaptagat Arms that he told me its title, The Mimic Men . Pat did some writing too. She kept a diary. She also had literary ambitions — she wanted to write a play — but she seldom discussed her plans, always deferring to Vidia. From time to time she broke into helpless blubbing, either as the result of a disagreement or simply because of some sorrowful sight — broken shoes, a snotty-nosed child, a woman bereft, a gardener laboring on his knees. Often her tears roused me. I did not know why, but her weeping made me want to hold her and fondle her breasts.

There were no other guests at the Kaptagat Arms. The Major had several mild-mannered Labrador retrievers, which nuzzled our legs, their tongues lolling, hoping to be scratched. Some British teachers from a nearby prep school came to the bar most nights and got drunk.

“That silly Jewess,” a male teacher shrieked one night.

Vidia said to avoid them. “Infies.”

He understood the Major, he said. The Major’s Indian Army nickname had been “Bunny.” The poor man was tormented by passion and frustration. Clearly, he was a very sensitive soul, Vidia said. “Look at those eyes.” (To me, the Major’s blue eyes seemed cold and depthless.) The Major had a feeling for India, which was a mark of his sensibilities. He had heart. He was a good soldier and respected his men. He understood the culture. He was intelligent. He had brought this sense of order to Africa, where, imparting skills, building an institution, he was in a way running a miniature colony of his own.

Vidia, suspecting that the Major found him to be a puzzle, seemed to look for ways to make himself more puzzling. Yet Vidia had such simple, inflexible rules that, if they were strictly followed, he was happy. For example, Vidia’s vegetarianism caused a dilemma in the kitchen. Omelets were a frequent solution. “I have had to buy more cookery books,” the Major told me.

I visited Vidia whenever I could, at first for weekends and then for weeks at a time. The Kaptagat routine was quite different from my life in Kampala, and I grew to like playing bar billiards and eating steamed chocolate pudding, putting sherry in my soup and walking the Major’s dogs.

What occupied me — though I never spoke of it — was my own novel. It was understood that my writing consultations with Vidia were just about over. My cowardice essay was nearly done. “I think it’s an important statement,” Vidia said, “though you might have revealed too much of yourself.” I had moved on. I did not say what I was doing. Anyway, no one asked. I was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

“My narrator has something to say about that,” Vidia would say in the middle of a conversation, and it was often as simple as a reference to the fluctuating price of land. He was close to all his characters — he quoted them, and he often quoted the narrator, who was a wise, if world-weary, forty-year-old with opinions on politics and oppression, friendship and money. Vidia was happy with his novel’s progress now that he was the resident of this comfortable hotel. All his needs were seen to. He had rusticated himself and was looked after by the Major and his Kikuyu servants, whom in Kenyan fashion he had begun to call “Cukes.”