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

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said that evening in the Norfolk’s bar. He said nothing else, but I knew it was his way of asking about Hopkinson.

“He’s writing a novel,” I said.

“Oh, God.”

“It’s his third.”

“Oh, God.”

“He spoiled the first two, he said. He rushed them. He said he was not going to rush this one.”

Vidia gagged on his tea and released great lungfuls of laughter, his smoker’s laugh that was so fruity and echoey.

“He’s just playing with art.”

“He was a friend of George Orwell,” I said.

“One has been compared to Orwell,” Vidia said. “It is not much of a compliment, is it?”

The Indian high commissioner in Nairobi, Prem Bhatia, gave a dinner party for Vidia. Now, as at the Kaptagat, I saw a contented Vidia: a respected visitor in the house of a man who admired his work. This role of guest of honor calmed Vidia and made him portentous and unfunny and overformal, and at the table he became orotund.

“One has been contemplating for some little time…”

Bhatia had been a distinguished journalist in India. He had lively talkative teenage children and the sort of ambassadorial household that was like a real family. It was not a stuffy party. Two dining tables had been set up in the courtyard of the residence for the Kenyan, Indian, and English guests. Vidia and his host sat at a head table.

As an elderly Sikh servant in a red turban poured wine, Bhatia followed him and said, “Now do enjoy your wine, but be very careful of the glasses. They cost five guineas each. I had them sent from London.”

Hearing this, one of the Englishmen picked up his wine, drank it down, and flung the glass over his shoulder at the courtyard wall. The glass made a soft watery smash as it hit the flagstones.

There was a sudden hush. Bhatia kept smiling and said nothing. The Englishman laughed crazily — he might have been drunk. His wife, her head down, was whispering.

“Infy.” It was spoken loudly from the head table.

After the party, when all the guests had gone and the servants had withdrawn, Vidia talked in his pompous visiting-elder-statesman manner, which was also the tone of his narrator, whom he had told me was a politician. The subject was the Indians who had been deported.

“This is disgraceful,” Vidia said. “How are you planning to respond?”

“We’ve lodged a very strong protest,” Bhatia said.

“You must do more than that,” Vidia said. “India is a big, powerful country. It is a major power.”

“Of course—”

“Remind the Africans of that. Latterly, the Africans have behaved as though they were dealing with just another shabby little country. Latterly—”

“I’ve sent a letter.”

“Send a gunboat.”

“A gunboat?”

“A punitive mission.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shell Mombasa.”

“Who would do this?”

“The Indian Navy,” Vidia said. “One has thought about this extensively. Send the Indian Navy on maneuvers off the Kenyan coast. Anchor off Mombasa — a fleet of ships. Remind them that India is a formidable country. Shell Mombasa.”

The high commissioner was frowning.

“Punish them,” Vidia said. “When Mombasa is in flames they will think twice about persecuting Indians here. Aren’t there fuel depots in Mombasa? Yes, they will leave the Indians alone for some little time.”

The following noon we were having drinks by the pool at the residence of the American ambassador, William Attwood. Vidia was in the midst of his punitive-mission speech when, without prelude, a large, smiling, familiar-looking African appeared. He said he wished to consult with the ambassador. They went into the house.

“He’s asking for money, of course,” Vidia said. “What else would he want? And did you see how fat he is? He’s just another thug.”

After ten minutes the ambassador returned. He said the man was Tom Mboya, a leading politician and government minister.

“Mah-boya,” Vidia said.

“Very impressive man,” Attwood said. “Mboya’s going to be the next president of Kenya.”

Vidia simply stared. He was thinking, Fat thug.

Mboya never became president. Within a few years he was murdered by his political enemies.

The ambassador’s wife joined us for lunch while Vidia continued describing the maneuvers in a possible punitive mission. The rant may have made the ambassador nervous, for, passing the sugar tongs to his wife, he bobbled them and dropped them. They skittered toward the edge of the pool and fell in.

“Never mind,” Attwood said.

We stared as the silver thing swayed downward and settled into the deep end of the pool.

Vidia said, “Do you have a bathing costume that would fit me?”

“Lots in the changing room there,” said Attwood. “We keep them for visitors.”

Vidia excused himself and was back in a few minutes wearing a blue bathing suit. Without a word he dived neatly in and propelled himself to the bottom — eight feet or so — and brought up the dripping sugar tongs, which he handed over. While the ambassador was still marveling at his athleticism, Vidia changed his clothes, and lunch resumed.

It was a reminder of his island childhood. He had been brought up near water and was clearly a wonderful swimmer — I could see it in the way he had launched himself off the edge of the pool, diving with hardly a splash, going deep without apparent effort. At that moment I saw him as a skinny child, diving off a splintery pier in Trinidad, in view of the anchored cruise ships. All his pomposity had fallen away and he had become graceful, a child of the islands.

The ambassador thanked us for coming.

“I think he needed to hear that,” Vidia said of his proposal to shell Mombasa and set it aflame. “Did you notice how attentive he was? He at least realizes there is a problem. I know your people can do something.”

Over the next few days, in Nairobi’s Indian restaurants and shops, Vidia demanded to know what the Indians would do when they were expelled. They had no future in Africa, he said. They had to make plans for crunch time now.

“Yet one has a vibration that the Indians won’t rise to the occasion,” he said to me.

Passing Khannum’s Fancy Goods shop on Queen’s Road, Pat said she wanted to buy a few yards of printed cloth to use as a dust cover for a table in the room at the Kaptagat. Vidia and I waited on the verandah, where a small Indian girl of about seven or eight was sitting on a wooden bench being fanned by her African ayah. The girl wore a pink sari and long Punjabi bloomers and had the prim look of a child on her way to a party.

“ Jina lako nam?” I said to the girl, asking her name in Swahili.

The ayah smiled and nudged her gently, a tender gesture that made the girl recoil and scowl at the servant in a bratty way. Vidia sighed — perhaps because I was speaking Swahili, perhaps because of the little-princess look of the skinny girl in her partygoing sari.

“ Wewe najua Kiswahili? ” I asked. Did she speak Swahili?

The ayah made the soft tooth-sucking cluck with pursed lips that meant yes in East Africa, but no sooner had she sounded this cluck — answering for the girl — than her mistress, silly little toto , scowled again and folded her arms.

“I am knowing wery vell how to speak Inglis!” she said.

“What a horrible child,” Vidia said, looking away. “People are always writing magazine pieces about children — parents and children. They are foolish. I have no children. My publisher, André Deutsch, has no children. My editor has no children. It has been a conscious decision. People say, ‘You’d have lovely children’—the Indian-English thing. I do not want children. I do not want to read about children. I do not want to see them.”