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

“We were expecting you yesterday,” Vidia said.

He was stern with Shiva, much more an uncle than a brother. There was a marked difference in age, thirteen years, and in attitude — crabbed Vidia, college-punk Shiva. But Shiva wasn’t bothered.

“It’s a long story!” he said, and laughed. He had a delightful laugh that encouraged you to share the hopeless joke, the unconvincing excuse.

Vidia went to his armchair and sat down. He filled his pipe. He set it alight and puffed it. When Pat left, fussing with the tea things, Vidia said, “Tell him, Paul.”

“Tell him what?”

“Tell Seewyn about your African girls.”

“What about the African girls?” Shiva said, smirking.

“Tell him, Paul.”

“That I sleep with them?” I said.

“See? He’s shocked. Seewyn’s shocked.”

“I am not shocked,” Shiva said.

But he was. I could see his discomfort, and I could not understand why he was so flustered. He was tapping at his face with his fingertips. He awkwardly lit a cigarette and blew smoke nervously.

“The big liberal,” Vidia said. “All that Trinidad racial mumbo-jumbo. And he is shocked.”

The moment was tense, two brothers in a standoff. And I had been put on the spot. Trying to explain, I said, “It’s pretty simple. It would be odd if I didn’t have African girlfriends. I live in Africa.”

“It would not occur to Seewyn to sleep with a black woman.”

Shiva laughed and said, “There are no black women at Oxford.”

The conversation had started to embarrass me, and this argument was being made as much at my expense as at Shiva’s.

I said, “You don’t know what you’re missing, Shiva.”

Vidia had been reading a book with the red label London Library on its cover when Shiva had knocked. He put his finger between the pages, preparing to open it.

“Did you bring some work with you?” Vidia asked.

“Mencius,” Shiva said.

“Do you know Sun Tzu?” I asked him.

He squinted at the name and then verified it, giving it the proper Chinese pronunciation, and said, “ The Art of War .”

“Is it studied? I was reading it in Kampala and want to know more about it.”

“It’s pretty well known,” Shiva said. “Sun Tzu was a general during the late Tang dynasty. The Chinese have revived the book because Mao praised him.” He turned to Vidia. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“You’ve just had tea,” Vidia said.

“I mean a stronger potion,” Shiva said.

He laughed again. I saw that his laughter, especially the giggly sort, was prompted by embarrassment, his awkwardness in the presence of his brother.

Vidia scowled. “What about your Chinky book?”

Shiva tapped his cigarette, flicked his long hair. He said, “I think I’ll go out to a pub. Want to come with me, Paul?”

I said okay, but I had the feeling that Vidia disapproved of my going.

The pub in Stockwell was so noisy and dirty I was glad Vidia had not come — anyway, he avoided all pubs. Shiva smoked and we drank pints of beer at a small table. I liked his sudden friendliness, and he had an air of idleness that was a relief from Vidia’s demanding attention. Shiva seemed sad, almost desperate, but forgiving, and so he was easy company.

“My brother told me all about you,” he said. “Your African adventures.”

He sounded mocking and envious, but he was just self-conscious, not the words themselves but the gauche way he said them.

“Everyone says that. Vidia’s my champion.”

“He means it. He is your friend. He is really proud of you.” Then Shiva laughed sadly. “I’m afraid he’s not very proud of me.”

To avoid this subject I said, “You should visit Africa sometime.”

“I don’t think so,” Shiva said. “Do you have any money on you? I need some cigarettes.”

I gave him a pound note.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said, with such unnecessary force that I smiled, and when he bought the cigarettes and pocketed the change I knew I would never see the money again.

I said, “Are you planning to be a writer?”

He laughed his giggly laugh, which meant he was mortified by my question. He said, “I know better than to do that.”

“Vidia told me that you know his work well.”

“I memorized The Mystic Masseur . I can actually recite it.”

So it was true. This amazed me: the novel was two hundred pages long.

“When my brother came back to Trinidad after it was published, I recited parts of it to him. I was just a little schoolboy. It was my party piece.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Vidia didn’t seem to notice. He was very tired all the time. I just remember him sleeping, lying in a bed in the house. He hardly spoke to me or to anyone. No”—Shiva stroked his hair—“there was one thing. He took me out and we bought a dog. The dog was an awful nuisance, not housetrained or anything like that. Vidia said, ‘I think that’s enough of this dog.’ We took him some distance from the house and let him go. ‘Just walk away,’ Vidia said. But the dog followed us. Then we took him really far, and walked away very fast, and hid. That did it. We never saw the dog again.”

I could see Vidia’s frowning face and hear him saying Just walk away .

I said, “You know, that business about sleeping with African girls… It’s not a big deal. I had a Nigerian girlfriend when I met your brother.”

“He teases me,” Shiva said.

He said that he had hoped to go to Trinidad in a few days but that he didn’t have the money and couldn’t decide whether it was worth pressing Vidia for the airfare. It was a dilemma. He wanted to go — he had not seen his mother or sisters for a year.

“We should go back to the house,” I said.

“Do you mind buying me another drink?”

I agreed, though I feared that it was going to make us late for dinner, and it did. Back at the house, Vidia was at the table making a point about punctuality: he had started eating. Pat was flustered. Shiva hardly noticed, but I could tell that I was out of favor, having contributed to Shiva’s dereliction.

That night, after Pat and Vidia went to bed, Shiva and I talked about Mencius and Africa and his airfare dilemma. At ten or so, Pat appeared in her robe and slippers, looking sleepless and harassed. She said, “Vidia wants you to please stop talking. You’re keeping him awake.”

Apart from Vidia, the only other writer I knew in London was a young novelist named B. S. Johnson, who was notorious for being hot-tempered and unstable. He was a big boisterous man who lived with his wife, Ginny, in an apartment in Myddleton Square. His baby son he called Sausage. He was poetry editor of The Transatlantic Review and had printed some of my poems, the poems with “lots of libido.” I had phoned Johnson before Christmas, on the day Vidia ditched me, cross that I had made him wait under an awning in Great Russell Street. I phoned Johnson again.

“Come to a preview of my film,” he said.

There were screenings all the time, he said. It was an experimental film, called You’re Human Just Like the Rest of Them . He had written several novels, one about Gypsies, called Traveling People , and one about a teacher, Albert Angelo . His newest novel, The Unfortunates , was sold unbound, just loose pages in a box that could be read in any order.

I mentioned that I was staying with Vidia.

“Naipaul is a prick,” Johnson said.

“No, he’s all right,” I said.

“You’re a bloody Yank. What do you know about the fucking English class system?”

This was not a debating point — he sounded, if not paranoid and deranged, then aggressively energetic. His books had that crazy, selfish energy. Albert Angelo especially had an arresting narrative structure, beginning as a po-faced novel in the third person and becoming a first-person confession.