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

“I’m going to South America,” I said.

“I am thinking of going to the Congo,” he said.

“A travel book?”

“Not exactly that. Call it travel with a theme.”

I said, “I’m planning to leave my house in Medford, Massachusetts, and just take trains, heading south, until I get to Patagonia.”

“It’s a delicious idea. I know you’ll do it well.”

“I’ll be spending some time in Buenos Aires,” I said. He did not react, and so I went on, “I don’t know a soul there.”

“Really.”

“Or in Argentina, for that matter.”

This seemed a natural inquiry, because Vidia had been to Argentina many times over the past seven years, had written about it extensively — about Borges and Evita and the culture of politics and terrorism. He had been fierce in some of his statements: “There is a certain ‘scum’ quality in Latin America. They imagine that if you kill the right people everything will work. Genocide is their history.” But he was frowning at me now, as if I had mentioned a place that was foreign to him.

“Do you know anyone there I might meet?”

“There are so many fraudulent people there,” he said. “Stay away from the ones that wear white shoes. And the ones who wear wristwatches that light up.”

“I was thinking of particular people I might call on.”

He thought hard. At last he said, “No. No.” And he stood up. Tea was over, the visit was at an end. He said with a trace of bitterness, “You’ll be all right, Paul. You’ll be all right.”

I took my Patagonia trip. I wrote my book. He took his trip. He wrote his Congolese pieces — journalism. After a time, he wrote a novel, A Bend in the River , set in Africa, about an Indian there who has a passionate affair with a married woman. And he wrote something else. I saw it listed in a bookseller’s catalogue, a privately printed book called Congo Diary: “In a limited edition of 330 copies. Three hundred are numbered, twenty-six lettered, and four bear the printed name of a recipient.”

Mine was not one of the printed names. I bought copy number 46 for $200. It was signed by Vidia. The dedication was “M. M.”

BROTHERS are versions of each other, a suggestion implicit in the word itself, the “other” in “brother.” Seeing Shiva Naipaul was always an oblique encounter with Vidia, as though I had bumped into someone similar, not an identical twin; the rough draft, not the finished article.

Brothers are like that. The wit in one is craziness in another; one is an original sculptor, another is “good with his hands,” a third is a klutz who drops things, and a fourth might be a brutish criminal, even a destroyer. Three or four flawed prototypes for the man of achievement. You discern the thin one in the fat one, the artist in the con man. What are the roots of this variety, so many exotic blossoms on the same stem? No one knows their past; and the brothers resent the blurring of these convergent echoes and resemblances, because such resemblances can be so misleading.

The history of scribbling brothers is full of conflict, which ranges from hurt feelings and petty grumbling (“Why does he get all the attention?”) to vicious attempts at literary fratricide (“Take that, you bastard!”). One of the brothers is always the other’s inferior. Look at the brothers William and Henry James, Oscar and Willie Wilde, James and Stanislaus Joyce, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anton and Nikolai Chekhov, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell — there are no intellectual equals here, and, being writers, they are borderline nutcases.

Such brothers are often fratricidal from birth and babyish in their battling, for there are nearly always aspects of lingering infantilism in sibling rivalry. When brothers fight, family secrets are revealed and the shaming revelations often make forgiveness irrelevant — the damage is done. In the literature of sibling rivalry, an enthralling spectator sport but pure hell on the fraternal rivals, the cry is usually “He hit me first!” or “Choose me!” It is also typical for one sibling to feign an utter lack of interest in the other; inevitably you end up admiring one and pitying the other. The larger family — the cause of it all — winces and tries not to choose sides. The nicer-seeming brother is not necessarily the better writer, nor even necessarily nicer.

Shiva Naipaul never had news of his brother, and was insulted if you asked: they seldom met. In the way of a brother, Shiva’s presence rang bells like mad and was full of reminders of Vidia — turns of speech, Trinidadian eccentricities, Hindu fastidiousness, and chance remarks that at times added to my understanding of Vidia; but in the impatient and rivalrous manner of a brother, Shiva more often obscured it, even undermined those insights.

Meanwhile, Shiva protested his love for Vidia, yet he said his brother had hurt him. “I had vulnerabilities he did not always find easy to understand,” Shiva wrote in an essay, “My Brother and I.” “For a long time there was mutual distress.” That was putting it mildly, and “distress” was a Vidia word, an understatement he used often to indicate outrage or fury. There was anger on Shiva’s part, indifference — or disparagement — on Vidia’s.

“Shiva was raised by women,” Vidia had said. He repeated this formula often, shaking his head at the imagined damage from female attention.

More softly and with feeling Vidia had also said, “When my father had his heart attack, Shiva found him alone. My father was dead. Shiva just stood there, frozen, mute. He could not speak.”

I saw Vidia occasionally, talked with him on the phone quite often, and corresponded. I bumped into Shiva all the time, never spoke on the phone, never wrote him a letter, nor did I ever receive one from him. This bumping into him characterized the randomness of his life. He said he didn’t make plans — that seemed a luxury to me. I felt I was overworked and stuck in a routine, but if I complained, it was dishonest of me — I liked the grind, I was happiest when I was writing, creation to me was pure joy. Shiva, echoing Vidia, said writing was misery. All the same, he could seem quite jolly.

I had run into Shiva in the middle of my period of financial uncertainty, in 1973—“I’ll take a trip and find a book to write.” It was to be The Great Railway Bazaar . After leaving the Punjab in Pakistan, I went to New Delhi. I met Shiva by chance in a guesthouse there. He told me he had flown to India. I said I had come overland on trains from London.

“God, how long did that take?”

“About five weeks.” I thought I had made pretty good time.

“Five weeks!” He sat like a pasha on cushions, smoking and drinking tea. His chubby cheeks shook as he laughed. “You’re a masochist.”

“Some of it was fun,” I said. “The Orient Express. Some of the Turkish trains. The mosques in Herat, in Afghanistan. The Khyber Pass.”

“Carry on, up the Khyber!” And he laughed again.

His mockery made conversation futile. It was nothing new. I always felt there was envy in his jeering, and I knew that if I jeered at him, he would be furious.

I smiled, defying him to mock. October in Delhi, twenty-five years ago. Two thirty-year-olds in a garden, each with a book in mind. He had a famous brother — he’d be all right. But if I didn’t bring home a book I was sunk.

“Why are you putting yourself through this?”

“A travel book,” I said.

“I didn’t think you wrote travel books.”

“It’s just an attempt. I need the money.”

“So you’re going to write about India like everyone else?”

“No. This is a whole trip. I’m going to Sri Lanka by train, via Madras. Then all over — Calcutta, Rangoon, Vietnam, Japan. And home on the Trans-Siberian.”