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

The radio program was called In Black and White , and its subject was African writing. After some music, the pluckings of a seven-stringed instrument called a nanga , Hallsmith, suffering mike fright, began to introduce the poets in a shrill old-auntie voice.

Naipaul settled into his chair, his face darkening as the program continued. It was a look of intense concentration, or perhaps of desperate boredom. Poems were being read on the crackly radio, Africans reciting African poems, muffled by the cloth on the grille of the big speaker. Naipaul might not have realized that the hour for this welcoming party had been chosen because it was also the hour for the weekly In Black and White .

— And now Winston Wabamba is going to read his poem “Groundnut Stew .”

Naipaul’s face hardened into an expression of extreme impatience. I could see it was also a martyr’s death mask. When Hallsmith smiled at him, Naipaul’s eyes went out of focus, for it was a hot afternoon, the sun blazing through the windows over the tops of palms and tulip trees. There were jeers and curses from the low brick warren of huts where the servants lived.

Everyone else in the room was attentive, gathered around the radio, our heads cocked to one side or bowed in a meditative way. Gerald Moore massaged his eyes with his fingertips in concentration. We were mocked by the parrot squawks and cockcrows out the window, and as the sun dropped there was another sound, almost unearthly, like a riot of radio waves in a Martian invasion, a squealing and a mad ripping of the air.

Naipaul was startled.

“Bats,” I said.

He looked wildly at the bats streaking past the window and slumped again.

I had never before heard the whole radio program. It was broadcast at the time of day when I was usually headed to the Staff Club. Now that I was compelled to listen to the entire thirty minutes, I was reminded of how sentimental and inept the poetry was. It did not look so bad on the pages of the university’s literary magazine, but when declaimed on Radio Uganda, under the supervision of Miles Ahmed Lee, it sounded hollow and clumsy, and the clichés were the feebler for being spoken aloud with an attempt at feeling.

Was I also hearing it with Naipaul’s ears? He was a newcomer. He had never heard it before. The poems sounded awful to me. The room was hot with the exhausted air of the day, the last blaze of the low sun, the dust and humidity and bird complaints, the servants’ curses and bus horns.

When the program was over Naipaul got to his feet and, staggering slightly because of his mood, said, “Splendid, splendid.”

“Can we go home now?” Yomo said, reaching into my front trouser pocket.

Naipaul was surrounded by party guests, but by the time we got to the door he had broken away from them, and he called out, “Find me some people — I want to meet people.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” I said.

He followed us through the door to the verandah.

“I read Miguel Street last night,” Yomo said. “The whole thing.”

Naipaul stared at her pityingly, shaking his head. He said, “You must sip it like good wine.”

“Ha! I don’t sip wine!” Yomo was laughing. “I drink up the palm wine! I’m from Nigeria.”

“Really.” Naipaul looked indifferent. “Uganda must fascinate you.”

“These Uganda people are primitive.”

Naipaul’s mask slipped and he laughed. Then, sizing me up, he asked me what I thought of the radio program.

At first I hesitated to tell him I really had not liked it, because it seemed too unkind to Hallsmith, the host. And when he’d been seated in his armchair, Naipaul had looked enigmatic, if not disapproving, and afterwards hadn’t he said “Splendid"?

But I liked him, I liked his writing, I wanted to take a risk, I wanted to be truthful.

“I thought it was awful,” I said.

“Yes!” he said, and he laughed his deep, appreciative laugh. “Dreadful! Dreadful!”

He looked happier saying that, less lonely and less tormented than he had appeared in the room. With conviction and a solemn friendliness, he touched my arm.

“We’ll meet soon. We’ll talk.” It meant everything to me. Then he said, “Do you have a motorcar?”

“He doesn’t talk like the people in his book,” Yomo said on the way home.

That was true, but I was thinking how I wanted him for a friend. I mentioned this, but Yomo said he was just an ugly little Indian man, and what was the point in talking so much about him?

“He’s a wonderful writer,” I said.

“You are a wonderful writer,” she said. We were home now, and she was saying “I want a baby. Give me a baby!” as she pulled off my clothes.

Within a few days I knew him much better. I showed him some of my poems, one of which began “Mirrored images of bitches’ murderous beauty,” and another, “The girl who came with doves to sell will die.”

He said, “Lots of libido.”

That made me smile.

He said, “But I have given up sex, you see.”

We were alone, driving to the market.

“What about your wife?”

“I give her a chaste kiss at night.”

That was not my question, but I left it, because my car was now surrounded by market traders showing us baskets of fruit.

“I hate food that is uncovered,” he said. “I have a horror of dirt.”

The Kampala Central Market was the wrong place for someone with a horror of dirt.

“The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” he said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Flayed, stringy goat and sheep carcasses hung from iron hooks among buzzing flies, and some hacked-apart chunks of meat and cracked bones were stacked on plates under the sign Boys’ Meat . He liked that sign. He lingered, murmuring the expression. He said he was a vegetarian. I asked him why.

“The sinew. I could never chew through it.”

He would go without eating rather than touch meat, he said. He had had arguments in restaurants after being served vegetable soup made with meat stock. He gave me a running commentary on his health and digestion.

“Meat is nyama ,” I said, instructing him.

“Yes.”

“The word for animals is nyama .”

“Yes.”

“Prostitutes — the slang. Same word. Nyama .”

“Really.”

We passed the locust stalls, where behind bulging sacks of locusts fried in hot mafuta fat, men and women sat measuring out single portions of the greasy insects on squares of newspaper. The wood-colored locusts gleamed, looking freshly varnished, and the locust sellers called out, “ Nzige! ”

It was the season, I said. They gathered the locusts under street-lamps all night.

“ Nzige, nzige .” Naipaul said “ Nah-zeegay ” and chuckled and greeted a locust seller who was making up a large package for a man. “Chap’s absolutely mad about them, I imagine.”

He frowned at the baskets stacked around the basket sellers. He found the fish flyblown. He said that some vegetables, plantains especially, reminded him of his childhood.

“What sort of a family did you have?”

“I couldn’t even begin to tell you.” He smiled helplessly, appealing to me, raising his hands to indicate that this was not a fruitful line of inquiry.

“I come from a large family,” I said, hoping to interest him.

“We’ve done the market,” he said. He had not heard what I said. He wanted to leave. And later: We’ve done the bus station . And: We’ve done the park . And: We’ve done the museum . And: Churches depress me, man . He was able to size a place up fairly quickly, and then he was ready to go. He had an inspector’s gait, hands clasped behind his back, moving fast yet looking at everything. He was inquisitive, he was brisk. I think we’ve done this .