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

I loved hearing Vidia’s jokes. His laughter was a sign of health. It mattered more than anything that after ten years we were still friendly enough to swap jokes, or anything else. I could say what I wanted to him. What are friends for?

He also said, “People who see one as a little brown Englishman are making the biggest mistake of all. One reads it. One hears it. One is somewhat appalled.”

But what was he? Loathing self-definition, and especially hating the description “West Indian writer,” he wished to be appreciated for his gifts — who doesn’t? — but as an ethnic Indian it was his fate to be one out of many (the title of one of his stories): owing to his racial coloration, he was indistinguishable from the billion or so Indians in the world. Most Indians in Britain, a new class, lived simple, humble lives. Vidia on a London street was less likely a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper, the very dukawallah he despaired of: a London newsagent hurrying from the bank back to his shop, where he hawked cigarettes, chewing gum, and the daily newspapers, keeping the tit-and-bum magazines on the top shelf. That place was now a national institution, known throughout Britain as “the Paki shop.”

The most maddening thing for any Indian in England was that they were not called Indians but “Pakis”—short for Pakistani. Just as few English people troubled to make serious distinctions when they saw a brown face, Indians did the same when they saw a white one. Vidia celebrated himself as unique. He once spoke of his pleasure, years ago, in standing out and seeming exotic on an English street (“Recognition of my difference was necessary to me”). That was before the deluge. Now, purely on the basis of his physical characteristics, Vidia was no one — that is to say, just a Paki.

The idea of an address — a place of his own — preoccupied him, sometimes to the point of obsession. Not owning a house made him yearn for one. He always said he had no home, owned nothing, belonged nowhere. I surmised that his satisfactory but chaotic childhood — he is Anand in A House for Mr. Biswas , the novel that is the chronicle of his family — had given him no firm footing in Trinidad, and he often suggested that the Indians had been disenfranchised on the island.

His return addresses on letters were usually care-ofs and the poste restantes of publishers and agents. Sad, I thought. For years he had seen The Bungalow as temporary. He hoped for better, and he kept most of his belongings in a warehouse. But time passed and still he did not have a house. He was Anand in the book, but more and more he resembled Mohun Biswas, his hero, who longed for a place he could call his own.

I had bought and sold two houses in London, and so these days we talked more of real estate than of books. I was a property owner and he liked the solid practicality of that: no more hand-to-mouth living, the rented flat, the rented TV. Anyway, he seldom talked about books and was especially reticent about the one he happened to be writing, except to nod and say confidentially, but with noticeable astonishment, “I think what I am writing now is very important and has never been said.”

That he never mentioned my work I took as approval, not indifference. He now said, “You’re all right. You see?”

But property was on his mind. Place, too.

“Some snowy place. I see a cabin, a log fire. Boots.” He smiled at the thought. “I love the snow.”

He had written about the snow, always with the dreamy hyperbole of a person from a tropical island for whom snow is decoration — like icing on a cake — if not magic, weightless, crystalline, never having to be shoveled or driven through. But he had gone to several snowy places and had not liked them. Cross “snowy places” off the list.

For a few years he had fantasized about Montana. He liked the name; he imagined big skies, high mountains, dense forests. He did not know the “badlands” image. But he decided without ever going there that Montana was not for him.

California attracted him. He asked me for names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Californians who might show him around and also treat him to meals. He was a conscientious looker-up of people. He liked being met, enjoyed occupying the place of honor — where, of course, he belonged. My contacts served him. But he disliked California. He found that Californians cultivated the body but not the mind; he saw them as selfish and materialistic and smug.

He liked New York City. He liked New York humor and New York acceptance. No one stared at him in New York. He had once spoken of buying an apartment and living there for several months a year. But he did not act on this.

An islander, a country boy, as he thought of himself — though he had moved from his small rural hometown of Chaguanas to Port of Spain when he was seven — he said certain aspects of the Caribbean made him nostalgic to return: his memory of the cool cocoa plantations, the big shady villas with wide verandahs. The thought of disorder beyond the plantation gates, of the sort he wrote about analytically in “The Killings in Trinidad” and imaginatively in Guerrillas , kept him from ever making this move.

All these places were far from his English addresses: the not very distant county of Wiltshire, and London, which he knew well, having lived as far north of the river as Muswell Hill and as far south as Streatham.

“What did you pay for your house in Clapham?”

I told him.

“And what is it worth now?”

I guessed at its value.

“You see? You’re part of the market, you’re in the housing spiral. All the time I have spent chuntering and dithering I have been losing money. One should have bought something years ago. Just let it quietly appreciate. Then make one’s move. But one dithered.”

He was gloomy, feeling worse than houseless: he was placeless and a little hopeless.

“And you have a place in America?”

“A house on Cape Cod.”

“I don’t want to see it,” Vidia said. “It would just remind me of all the mistakes I have made in my life.”

There were large Victorian houses in Clapham, I told him. The inflated prices of Chelsea had not crossed the river. This made him smile.

“But, you know, one wants something fashionable,” he said. “Uncompromisingly fashionable.”

Kensington or Knightsbridge, he said. They were places that I associated with Arabic graffiti in different colors, and scrawled-upon posters, and no parking spaces, and Arabs dressed in galabiehs as though for the Empty Quarter, and businesses that catered to London Arabs: kebab shops, fruiterers, juice parlors, liquor stores, massage and escort services, and undisguised brothels. Every public phone booth was plastered with the explicit calling cards of prostitutes (“Young buxom blonde at your command”).

Instead of telling him this — which he knew — I made other suggestions.

“What about Chelsea?”

“Pretentious.”

“Lord Weidenfeld lives there.”

“I think you have just proven my point.”

“St. John’s Wood is fashionable, isn’t it?”

“St. John’s Wood, my dear Paul, is suburban.”

“Richmond is lovely. I’d like to live there, by the river.”

“It’s nice. People do live there. But it is suburban. And one would need a monkey wagon.”

The idea of buying a small car and riding up and down in it was just ridiculous to him.

“Mayfair must be the height of fashion.”

“Mayfair is corrupt. It’s a con. It’s full of prostitutes. I know Americans are glamoured by it, but I am sorry, Paul, it is not for me.”

“You’ve lived all over London.”

“Not really. Muswell Hill. The flat had previously been occupied by a Nigerian. It was unspeakable, but Patsy and I managed to disinfect it.” He made a face. “Streatham. I wrote Biswas . That was a wonderful period. Then Stockwell Park Crescent. Very modest accommodation, really. I have been a nomad.”