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

“Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full?”

And then that gloomy laugh.

We had our tea and left after an hour, because it was such a long way back to south London. He had hardly spoken to me.

“Which one was Shiva?” my wife said.

I mentioned this to Vidia, that we had gone all that way for tea but had felt unwelcome.

Vidia said, “He told me he gets depressed when he sees you.”

“I can’t imagine why. I never talk about my work. I just listen to him.”

“Perhaps that’s the reason.”

“That I listen?”

“That he hates himself.”

At another period, Shiva had a large apartment in Earls Court, over a bookstore. It seemed very stylish, his living in the middle of things, especially the raffish multiculturalism of Earls Court. We lived narrowly in distant, lifeless Catford, an hour across London. By now we were unwilling regulars at each other’s dinner parties.

The first time at dinner in his Earls Court flat, I noticed that Shiva was served a special meal: bigger, different, tastier-looking.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Shiva’s a vegetarian,” his wife explained, as Shiva protected his full plate with his forearms.

“It looks like chicken to me,” someone said.

“It is chicken,” Shiva said. “It’s not as bad as beef.”

There was beef in our moussaka, and I felt at that moment all of us coveted Shiva’s special meal. Shiva explained that he had been raised eating certain foods. I gathered that chicken was regarded as a vegetable in the Naipaul household, and I was able to understand a bit better Vidia’s contradictory crankishness when it came to diet.

On another visit to Shiva’s, helping to clear up after the meal, I put some leftovers into the refrigerator and saw many stacked containers, all precisely labeled: Lunch Wednesday, Dinner Wednesday, Lunch Thursday , and so forth.

“You’re well organized,” I said to his wife, who was at the sink.

“Oh, that. I’m going away Tuesday.”

She explained that whenever she went away, she left meals for Shiva, all the meals he would need for the duration of her absence. They were all different, precooked, needing only to be heated up. Shiva was unable or unwilling to make a meal for himself, so this nannying — or mothering — was the elaborate answer.

Seeing me smile, his wife reacted defensively and said, “Vidia doesn’t cook either. He is waited on hand and foot by Pat.”

That was true, and it was a world away from my life and the lives of most of the people I knew. Was it that the Naipaul brothers’ lives were well organized or that they had submissive wives? It spoke volumes about the family home in Trinidad. Surely they had been indulged, and all that had done was to make them seem helpless, if not infantile.

Even if someone had offered me meals and nannying, I would have refused. In the balancing act of working on The Mosquito Coast , I was progressing with such steadiness that I became superstitious: I wanted nothing in my life to change. I stayed in London. I ate the same lunch every day, fish fingers. I meditated intensely on the implications of my story and on the characters. I felt that any change in my circumstances would upset my narrative.

The month I finished my novel, April of 1981, I wrote to Vidia, who immediately and enthusiastically replied, “That novel sounds terrific — just the kind of thing you would do very well. The idea is at once simple and appetizing: the way good ideas should be.”

It was what I wanted to hear after almost two years of working on the book. Vidia had never been more generous.

“Your energy is amazing; you seem vitalized by all your many successes. I run across your name and your books everywhere and I always feel slightly proprietorial.”

After all these years he was still my friend and my booster. I rejoiced in pleasing him. He read the new novel.

He said, “This is a big book.”

Both Shiva and I had been shaken by the 1978 mass suicide, in Jonestown, Guyana, of members of the People’s Temple commune. To me it was one of the ghastliest events that had occurred in my lifetime. Paranoia could not take a more violent or nightmarish form. The transplanted messiah, Jim Jones, creating madness among his followers, was someone who had triggered my thinking about The Mosquito Coast , though my book was very different. Shiva wrote a book about Jonestown, Journey to Nowhere . He often alluded to the grisly nature of his experience, for he had arrived in Jonestown before all the more than nine hundred bodies had been bagged and taken away. He said that he had never seen anything worse. He was dispirited by the experience, and for a while it rendered him mute. He suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown during the writing of the book. I understood then that it was not conceit or vanity or childishness that kept him so insecure, but something fundamental: he had emptied the goblet and in tipping it up had seen fear lurking on the bottom, as in the horrific line from the play I used to teach: “I have drunk and seen the spider.”

In his depression Shiva’s writing became turgid and verbose. Parties were “revelries,” speeches were “orations.” He would write, “Machines had subverted the bondage of mass muscular exertion,” when he could have written, “Machines had taken the place of workers.”

Speaking of Trinidadians, he wrote, “We acknowledged, with unspoken candor, our humble status in the imperial dispensation,” a pretentious way of saying, “We felt we didn’t matter much in the British empire.”

When truth broke through pastiche the effect was vulgar, and what he attempted as style was forced and unrewarding. He admitted as much. He said he was frustrated. Now nearly everything he wrote was a form of fault-finding.

“I sit at my desk all day,” he told me. “I do nothing. I try to write. It won’t come.”

This was not the lazy artistic boast of ten years before, but a more imploring anguish. It was also fear.

“Sometimes I can’t do anything until five o’clock. Sometimes there’s nothing.”

With no one else listening, he didn’t mock me, didn’t giggle; he was solemn, and he looked terrible: pasty, swollen, almost deranged, holding a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

“My brother thinks I’m lazy.”

Weariness was in his voice. He was a man burdened, and now I knew it was not an act. He seemed on the point of resignation. When Indira Gandhi was killed, in 1984, he flew to India and wrote an angry, grieving piece. As though evading the serious commitment of the book he had started, he wrote more articles: about the Third World — denying that such a place existed; about Australia — hating the whole country; about himself and his brother — wishing for his confusion to be understood and admitting that perhaps Vidia was the only person on earth who understood him.

After the least exertion, he became short of breath. He said, “I get so tired,” and the way he said it convinced me something was truly wrong. I asked Vidia whether there was anything we might do to help. But he only repeated that Shiva had brought this misery on himself. He said it with sympathy, helplessly, not knowing what the remedy was.

And really, a man of thirty-nine or forty, when he speaks of fatigue you don’t think that he is ill so much as overworked or even exaggerating — too many late nights, he must be neglecting himself. You never imagine that such a person is deathly ill. Yet Shiva was.

He was working on a section of his Australia book, writing about a comical Sinhalese named Tissa, who spoke to him about the futility of male ambition in Sri Lanka. Shiva wrote Tissa’s question, “Is it like that on your island as well?” and then he died.