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

As I brooded, Vidia said, “When you come to London I want you to tell my brother that you sleep with African girls. I want you to shock him.”

“I don’t get it. Why should he be shocked?”

“Because he’s always talking this liberal nonsense. And he was brought up in Trinidad. Yet it would not occur to him to make love to a black woman.”

“That’s too bad. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

And I also thought: This brother of his is a fool. I knew that he was at Oxford, studying Chinese, and that Vidia thought he was lazy. His name was Shiva.

“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

“So you are leaving, then?” Grace said, seeing us stand up to go.

“Safari tomorrow,” I said.

“I want to dance,” she said. She raised her arms and took a few dance steps, African dance steps, swaying her hips. A whole message, an unmistakable promise, moved through her body.

“I am coming back for you,” I said, and I meant it.

At home, Vidia noticed my kitchen was dirty — dishes in the sink, food left uncovered, some scuttling cockroaches on the floor.

“Sack Veronica,” he said fiercely. “Sack her!”

I said I would speak to her. I hated anyone criticizing my servants, especially Vidia, who didn’t know her.

“At least have a row with her. It will keep her on her toes.”

A safari was not a hunting trip but any long journey upcountry. “He’s on safari,” people said when someone was out of town. But for our safari Vidia was kitted out like a hunter or a soldier: bush hat, bush shirt, thorn-proof khakis, and a stout walking stick that doubled as a club, should he wish to disable or brain an attacker. He wore heavy, thick-soled shoes that he called veldshoen , an Afrikaans word meaning skin shoes. Though he had a purposeful, marching way of walking, what wrecked this attempt to seem soldierly was his small size, his delicate hands, his tiny wrists. He had bought an expensive camera at a discount from an Indian shopkeeper in town. He wore it as an accessory, a big thing thumping on his chest or smacking his hip as he strode along. With his downturned hat brim and his downturned mouth and the way he sweated in these heavy clothes in the Ugandan hot season, Vidia appeared conspicuous and comic.

In those days of roadblocks and sneering soldiers, it was not a good idea to dress in a military way. Casual clothes were best, the less serious the better, to advertise nothing but innocence or naivete. Any ostentation was seized upon. If you wore an expensive watch it would be taken. I worried that the simple brutes who manned the roadblocks outside Kampala would wonder about this muhindi in bush clothes with the severe expression. Soldiers wore hats identical to Vidia’s khaki one. Indian shopkeepers never dressed this way, and being an Indian, Vidia would be seen as a shopkeeper. But I hadn’t the heart to tell him any of this.

We set off through early morning Kampala just before dawn, when the roads were still clear. Africans got up with the sun and mobbed the roads in daylight; their bicycles and animals made it slow going. Even in the murky light we could see the effects of what was now known as the Emergency. The fall of the Kabaka meant that his kingdom was no longer the dominant province, and as if to prove it the soldiers had become an army of occupation. The whole city looked vandalized and neglected, there was garbage in the road, cars had been tipped over and burned — another rumor confirmed — and some houses and shops looted and torched.

“Good God,” Vidia said. “But you see? I told you. It is going back to bush.”

We were stopped at a succession of military roadblocks and asked where we were going. At one of them the soldiers took an interest in Vidia’s bush hat and sunglasses, but Vidia scowled back. One soldier said, “Nice goggles,” and I thought he would demand them, but he just smiled in admiration.

Soldiers made Vidia nervous. These men had a fearsome reputation for incompetence and bad temper. They had recently been engaged in a messy full-scale siege and many of them had been involved in killing. I told Vidia how, during the Emergency, a Ugandan soldier had stopped an Indian friend of mine. The soldier’s friends had called “Hurry up!” to him from their Land Rover.

“What should I do with this muhindi? ”

“Kill him and let’s go,” one of the soldiers yelled.

“Please don’t kill me,” my Indian friend said.

“Hurry up! Kill him and let’s go!”

The soldier waved his rifle back and forth and was so flustered by the nagging of his comrades and the pleading of the Indian that he left the man standing, gibbering in fear, beside his car. There wasn’t enough time to kill him. Many of the murders had happened in that casually violent way. Kill him and let’s go!

“That scares the hell out of me, man,” Vidia said.

But soon there were no more roadblocks and we were on the open road, in sunshine, heading southwest in a swampy area near a stream called the Katonga, which drained into Lake Victoria a few miles south. The Katonga was famous for the density of its reeds— masses of papyrus, a lovely pale green plant with a feathery crown on its stalk that always reminded me of Uganda’s connection to the Nile. Papyrus was Egyptian in its beauty; its image had been carved into ancient tombs along with hieroglyphics; it had been prized for its many uses — not just to make paper and cloth, but its pith was eaten and its root used for fuel. Yet in Uganda it was just another plant that choked the waterways and was good for nothing.

“Do you find those African girls frightfully beautiful?” Vidia asked. “The ones at that bar?”

“Some of them, yes. Very beautiful. A few remind me of Yomo.”

“What do you hear from her?”

“She had an abortion and is planning to go back to college.” I had recently had a sorrowful note from her and a letter from her brother. “The father of the child wouldn’t marry her.”

“Oh, God.”

I could not say anything more. I missed her badly and my life had been empty since she left. We traveled ten miles before I spoke again.

“Do you find them beautiful?”

He thought awhile, “No,” he said. Then “No” again. And “No” after another pause. “But Derek Walcott is married to a woman of mixed race who is very beautiful.” He considered this. “I could just imagine myself with her. Do you know Walcott’s poetry?” He recited:

This island is heaven — away from the dustblown blood of cities;

See the curve of bay, watch the straggling flower, pretty is

The wing’d sound of trees, the sparse-powdered sky, when lit is

The night. For beauty has surrounded

Its black children, and freed them from homeless ditties.

“That word ‘ditties’ sounds precious, but it is right somehow,” he said. And then he made his disgusted face and said, “The narrator of my novel goes to prostitutes.”

He had a way of letting his narrator stand for him, and so I knew what he was driving at and we discussed the narrator.

“Frequents prostitutes,” he said, trying out the literary phrase. His expression was still sour. “Afterwards, you hate yourself for being a man.”

That shocked me. Making love to a woman did not have that effect on me at all. Afterwards I was calm, happy, tired, at rest, the opposite of disgusted. I felt rewarded and fulfilled. Sex was magic, mind-expanding, enacted in energetic postures that I recalled later, seeing myself kneeling, standing, knotted, on all fours. It was knowledge, too — not blind lust, though wild monkey-lust was part of it, helping to illuminate the act, which was for me a source of serenity.

I enjoyed every aspect of it, from its first intimation, which was the woman’s returned glance, to the quiver of anticipation, sensing my scalp tighten at the prospect, the warmth on my skin and my fingers becoming tremulous, the sense of blood beginning to pound behind my eyes and my breath coming in gasps, my chest tightening, my mouth dry, as though I were on a narrow path, working my way slowly into a jungle, following a bird with brilliant plumage and a flicking tail.