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

“You are still reading that book, Jules!” Yomo made his name sound like “Jewels.” She was stretched out on the couch, an odalisque, knees apart, touching herself, deliberately trying to shock him.

“I like it, so I’m reading it slowly.”

“Come over here and bring your friend and give me a baby.”

She said no more than that, but the way she said it and stroked herself did shock him, and tempted him. He loved her for being able to speak directly to his body, and she seldom failed to get a hook into his guts.

So life went on. Yomo waited for him to finish work and they were together the rest of the time. She laughed at the Ugandans for being primitive. They stared at her with bloodshot eyes. Julian wrote poems and worked on his novel and took George Orwell’s and U. V. Pradesh’s essays as his models for nonfiction. On weekends he gathered up Yomo and they headed into the bush.

“Always the bush,” she said.

“I like the bush.”

Every morning he was in Kampala, he had coffee in the Senior Common Room. All the lecturers and staff sat there in shorts and knee socks, like a lot of big boys, yakking. He read the Argus —now he was a peruser and student of the Court Proceedings. He drank coffee. He read his mail. In a country where telephones were rare and unreliable and no one phoned overseas, the arrival of the mail was an important event.

One day, a man named Haji Hallsmith sat heavily on the sofa next to Julian in the Senior Common Room. The exertion was intended to call attention to himself. His proper name was Alan, but he had converted to Islam in order to marry a Punjabi. The young woman’s brothers had objected, given Hallsmith a severe beating, and spirited the woman away, and all that remained of the adventure was the religion and his nickname, though he had not gone on the haj.

His face fattening with mockery, his eyes glassy, Hallsmith leaned towards Julian, who could see that he was drunk, could smell it too, the tang of waragi , banana gin.

“What’s in that cup?” Julian said.

Hallsmith laughed. He had probably been on a bender and was still drunk from the previous night, drinking coffee now to prepare himself for a class. He was a lecturer in the English Department.

“Just coffee.”

“You’ve been drinking more than coffee,” Julian said. “I think waragi, mingi sana .”

“So what?” Hallsmith said with a drunkard’s truculence.

“Isn’t that against your religion?”

“Drinking is sanctioned, except during prayers!” Hallsmith shouted.

Perhaps from the effort of summoning the strength to speak, he belched and brought up a mouthful of air, more banana stink.

“Do you know about U. V. Pradesh coming?” he asked.

Julian said that he didn’t but that he was pleased. He was more excited than he let on, not merely because he had just read Mother India , but because he had never met such an esteemed writer, one of the powerful priestly figures whom he thought about all the time.

The larger world was elsewhere, and the little town and university were seldom visited. Occasionally experts flew in — the Pygmy specialist, the cautious economist, the elderly architect, the agitated musicologist; never a poet, never a novelist.

People from beyond Africa were welcome. The expatriates needed company, for they had no society. They needed visitors and witnesses to bring them news of the outer world, to listen to their stories — because the expatriates were sick of listening to each other, irritated more by the sameness of the stories than the lies and liberties in them — and most of all they needed strangers to measure themselves against.

“I’ve ordered Pradesh’s books,” Haji said. “They’re in the bookshop. I’m planning a drinks party for him next week at my flat. He’s staying with me for a bit. Come and meet him.”

So Haji Hallsmith had appropriated U. V. Pradesh as his listener and witness. Haji also did some writing: confessional poems that embarrassed his friends. Yet they read them, always looking for clues to that brief, bewildering Muslim marriage.

“What about my malaika? ” Julian asked.

It meant angel, and Hallsmith knew who he was talking about.

“Your splendid malaika is always welcome, Jules.”

That same afternoon, Julian went to the bookshop and bought all the U. V. Pradesh titles it had in stock— The Part-Time Pundit, Calypso Road , and several others. While he read The Part-Time Pundit , Yomo read Calypso Road .

She said, “These Trinidad people talk like Nigerians.”

“What do you mean?”

She read, “‘If you vex with she, give she a dose of licks, and by and by she come quick-quick when you bawl.’”

“That’s Nigerian?”

“For sure.”

The character Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Part-Time Pundit , was unlike anyone Julian had ever met in fiction. The narrative, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, was simple and strong, unusual, funny, oblique, very sure of itself. It described a world Julian knew nothing about. Every name, every character, every setting was new, and yet it was familiar in its humanity. Among other things, it was about transformation.

He read three more U. V. Pradesh books. They were also fantastical, assured narratives of transformation. He saw no literary influences, no antecedents. They were original and powerful, too plain to be brilliant, with a pitiless humor that gave them pathos.

The voice of the narrator he recognized from Mother India: impartial, remorseless, almost cold. In his essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell had said you could see a human face behind all third-person narration, yet there was no face that Julian could discern here. About U. V. Pradesh personally Julian knew nothing beyond the fact that he had been born in the West Indies, was educated in England, resided in London, had won a number of prizes, was about forty — nearly elderly, so Julian thought. The biographical note in the back of Pradesh’s books was short and unrevealing.

Pradesh took no sides in these works of fiction. One, about an election, was plotty and sprawled improbably. Another, set in London, could have been written by an old, wise Englishman, and its observations about age and frailty gave it a morbid power. Calypso Road was slight but charming, full of curious characters. They were all confident, fresh, spoke with the concision of poetry and with an originality that was like news to Julian.

“So what you tink?” Yomo said. Reading made her impatient, lust corroded her English. She was tugging at his sleeve, pulling his hand between her legs.

“I like this book.”

The extraordinary ending of The Part-Time Pundit , so unexpected and yet so logical a transformation, overwhelmed him. Why had he not seen it coming? It made him wish he had written it himself. The best of it was this: after all his changes of direction, the Trinidadian pundit Ganesh vanishes, only to reappear in London years later.

The nameless narrator, now a grown man in London, looks “for a nigrescent face,” sees the pundit from his island approaching him.

“Ganesh?” he says in disbelief.

The pundit seems utterly changed, wearing a tweed jacket and soft hat and corduroy trousers and sturdy shoes. He carries a walking stick and is marching through a railway terminal.

“Pundit Ganesh?” the narrator repeats, seeing Ganesh Ramsumair.

“‘G. Ramsay Muir,’ he said, coldly,’” and the brown man scuttles away.

“Why are you smiling?” Yomo asked.

Julian was thinking, I’m going to meet the real man.

HIS SMILE was not a smile but his laugh was more than a laugh, especially when he—