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

I should not have told him this. He exploded with laughter, gagging and choking, smoke shooting out of his nostrils, his big face going red.

“I think I’ll be home by Christmas.”

He said, “I’ll be home on Wednesday.”

Today was Monday. I wanted to go home. Feeling demoralized, I went to a hotel and tried to call my wife but got nothing, just the sound of surf and a feeble voice on the line. I was horribly homesick and could not sleep.

Shiva and I met the next day, also by accident. He had one of the good rooms in the guesthouse, and I passed it on my way out. He called to me and ordered coffee. Among the papers on his coffee table was a telegram: CONGRATULATIONS ON THE HAWTHORNDEN. LONGING TO SEE YOU WEDNESDAY. LOVE, JENNY.

He had won a literary prize. He was going home. His wife loved him. This was bliss — beyond bliss.

“What do you think of India?” I asked.

“I don’t think much!” He howled again.

This was how he conversed. Was it aggressive? He made you ask the questions, and he would give an unhelpful answer and then laugh in a mirthless way.

“This is paradise compared to some places I’ve been,” I said. “Iran. Kabul. Peshawar.”

“This is the Turd World!”

And that laugh again, like a form of punctuation, a jeering exclamation mark. I took it to be nervousness, or obstinacy. The young companion of my London Christmas long ago had become a rather prickly man.

He had become very heavy, and in the heat of India his bulk made him slow and clumsy. He looked uncomfortable. He chain-smoked. He drank whiskey. Instead of a fat, contented drunkard, I had the impression of a dissatisfied sot, confused, unhappy, and angry. Nothing was angrier than his laughter.

He lived in Vidia’s shadow, as I did, but no shadow is darker than a clever brother’s. Yet he had started his intellectual life idolizing Vidia, who left Trinidad in 1950, when Shiva was five, and who was always absent. Shiva became a devotee, and was so deeply influenced that his writing often looked like a parody of Vidia’s. Attempting subtlety, Shiva ended up sounding pompous and convoluted, though he was seen to be the “warmer” brother, in the shorthand of magazine profilers and portraitists. And there was that act of piety which even Vidia marveled at: the memorizing of The Mystic Masseur . Veneration could go no further than reciting the sacred texts by heart, but it was death for Shiva’s prose style. In spite of his mockery of me, it was impossible for me not to feel a bit sorry for him.

Yet at that moment in India I envied him his swift return to London. I cursed my luck at being on this long trip alone. The phones didn’t work. I got no mail. I was like an old out-of-touch explorer. True, it was the reason I saw so much, and the reason I was changed by the experience. But if someone had said, “Here’s ten thousand dollars, scrap the trip,” I would not have hesitated to join Shiva on the London-bound plane.

There was a young Indian woman who hung around the guesthouse. She stared at me. Why? Indian women never did that. She touched my arm. “Hey, I’ve been to the States.” She took my hand and squeezed it. In Indian terms, this was as if she had said, “Take me, I’m yours.” She looked me straight in the eye.

“I won’t bite you,” she said. Her powdered face and red lips and kohl-darkened eyes gave her a lecherous mask that made me desire her and fear her at the same time.

“You are afraid of me,” she said.

“Right.”

Her red betel-stained teeth were straight out of a “Kali, Goddess of Destruction” picture. She plucked at her sari and laughed again. I was not afraid of making love to her — I sensed she was wild; I was afraid of everything that would come after — indignant relatives with swords and daggers, my goolies in great danger. Everything in India had a price, and pleasure usually had a penalty.

That night, having a farewell drink with Shiva, I saw the Kali woman again in the courtyard.

“See that girl?” Shiva said. “I slept with her this morning.” His laughter was more ambiguous than ever. “She’s crazy. I mean, really crazy.”

In the morning he left for London to collect his literary prize and resume his life — lucky dog. That same day I took a train to Nagpur. I put “the Turd World” into my diary, and the remark found its way into my book, without Shiva’s name attached to it. After Madras in southern India, I went to Sri Lanka and beyond, way beyond: Burma, Vietnam, Japan — onward, going slowly into the unknown.

Christmas came. I was in Siberia, it was winter. I was still on my goddamn trip! I battled on. At last, around the New Year, I returned home. I wrote my book and it was published a year later. I paid my bills.

And I saw Shiva at parties.

“Taking any more trains, Paul? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Now I was sure it was envy, and I pitied him, and his laughter defied interpretation.

Vidia’s image of himself as a struggler against the odds and of Shiva as an overprotected child of privilege might have been accurate, but it made their relationship touchy. I knew little about their childhoods. It was clear that Shiva had had a smoother ride at Oxford, and when he decided to make a living as a writer, he was welcomed by publishers. His older brother was a writer, so surely he too had to have talent. Shiva hated that sort of reasoning but profited by it nevertheless.

“He’s a complainer, always making excuses. My father was like that,” Vidia said.

The father, Seepersad, was an enigma to me, but the fact that the fictional Mr. Biswas had been modeled on him helped to understand the man. Some of those Biswas traits were recognizable in the Naipaul brothers. Mostly I saw Shiva as a suffering parody of a much younger Vidia — prickly and slow, hating the shadow that had been cast over him by his famous and formidable brother, who could be so bluntly present or silently absent.

Taking Vidia’s cue that writing was an ordeal, each sentence a hideous labor (I always wanted to jeer at them and say, “Isn’t it much worse for men at sea?”), Shiva went Vidia one further and did no writing at all for long periods. He used his inactivity as an example of the uniqueness of his gift, yet the writing he did manage to scratch off, while perhaps the result of extraordinary labor, did not seem so extraordinary in itself. He just talked more about it. Vidia said he was lazy and drank too much. He said Shiva’s fatness was self-indulgence. If I winced at his description, Vidia admitted he was being brutal. Wasn’t it simpler than this, that Shiva found it very hard to write? But who finds it easy?

“In Vidia’s eyes, Shiva couldn’t do anything right,” Vidia’s long-time editor, Diana Athill, said some time later. “He had this picture in his mind that Shiva was going utterly to disgrace himself and the family and that he was going to become a drug addict, was going to be useless. It was intense anxiety. He was cruel to the boy, really cruel, telling him he was a fool whenever he said anything or did anything, really, to a point where Shiva was sitting there not daring to speak, because if he said anything, he was snipped at.”

“He’s not happy,” Vidia said. “And why?”

What kept Vidia most serene was his often stated belief that there is justice in all things — in human effort as in nature and art: nothing arbitrary or random but always an elemental fairness. The good you did was rewarded, and you were improved by your act. Good writing always succeeded, dishonest writing was always found out — though with all writing, time was a factor; it might take a while for the work to rise or fall. If an apparently inferior writer made a hit, there was always a reason. Vidia did not dismiss popular novelists. He said, “Perhaps there’s something there.” He meant an illumination or a truth, however crudely expressed. He felt George Wallace’s remark about “pointy-headed intellectuals” expressed an essential truth about the corruption in academic life, and he took satisfaction in taunting Americans by quoting Wallace with approval. Evelyn Waugh had managed to infuriate many Americans in a similar way by saying, “Erie Stanley Gardner is your finest novelist.”