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

His heart had been weak. It explained everything he said and did, everything he felt. It had taken away his strength; it had made him tired. It was why he panted and perspired, why he was often winded, why everything was so hard for him.

He was found slumped at his desk by his son, just as thirty-three years before, Shiva had found his own father dead.

I wrote to Vidia as tenderly as I could. He wrote back, saying, “I am melancholy in a clinical, helpless kind of way. I get, or am attacked by, these bad dreams just before waking up. In fact they wake me up.”

And he ended the letter, “How nice, in the middle of this, to get your hand of friendship.”

It was as though I were the brother who had survived. But Vidia went on mourning, and when he wrote The Enigma of Arrival and dedicated it to Shiva, he said of the book, “Death is the motif.”

“AT OXFORD CIRCUS, walk north until you come to the church with a spire like a sharpened pencil,” Vidia said, directing me in his precise way to the Indian restaurant where we were to have lunch. But I knew the church.

I was, as always, eager to see him. I needed to know what was on his mind, because he questioned everything, took nothing on faith, saw things differently from anyone else. His talk was unexpected and original. He was contrary and he was often right.

Long before, I had been with him while he listened to Indians in Uganda boasting of their wealth and security. “They are dead men” was Vidia’s verdict. Now most of London’s newsagents and sub-post offices were run by those same Indians, refugees from Uganda. They comprised almost a whole shopkeeping class in the south of England.

Three years before Shiva died, in 1985, Vidia had been upbeat and funny. “Intellectual pressure” was making his hair fall out, he said. But he was busy and happy. “One seems to be extraordinarily full of affairs.” He was only fifty. He accurately predicted the outcome of the Falklands war, in a characteristic paradox. The Argentines had sworn they would fight to the end.

“When the Argentines say they will fight to the last drop of blood,” he said, “it means they are on the point of surrender.”

And that happened, too. But with Shiva’s death he grew sad. He sorrowed quietly; his grieving showed in his writing, in his choice of subject. He wrote of death and dying — his sister had also recently died; intimations of mortality and a sadness crept into his prose, the tones of deeper isolation, because there is a note of loneliness in all elegies — beyond the death, something of departure, a sense that he was being left behind.

It made us firmer friends. Now, after almost twenty years, we depended on one another — each of us could count on the other to listen and be sympathetic. We were chastened by Shiva’s death. I realized how precious life was, how brief, how each day mattered.

If we were saddened, we were also vitalized, seeing what a waste it was not to live all we could. Vidia traveled more, but we were able to pick up the thread of friendship after weeks or even months of silence.

That was how I came to be rising from the Oxford Circus tube station to walk north on Upper Regent Street, towards the church with the pencil-like spire that I knew to be All Souls. We met on the sidewalk.

“Yes, yes, yes, Paul.”

Vidia placed a high value on physical characteristics, and especially on radical change. If someone had gotten very fat, or very thin, or pale or pimply, or had begun sporting a silly hat, Vidia took it as a danger sign, a mental lapse, depression, folly, vanity, something deeply wrong.

Watching him size me up swiftly, I could see that he was pleased I had not changed. Nor had he, I told him.

“I’m still doing my exercises every night,” he said.

In the Indian restaurant, the Gaylord, on Mortimer Street, Vidia began staring at the Indian waiter, a bespectacled young man, following him with his eyes around the room as though he had recognized him and was trying to think of his name. At last Vidia raised his hand and called him over.

“Do you know that you look like me?”

The waiter shook his cheeks and squinted, murmuring the question in disbelief. “I am not knowing, sir.”

In his twenties, with crusted sleepless eyes, dark jowls, thick untidy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a scowling smile, he had that fatigued and impatient look of many Indian waiters in London. The news Vidia gave him seemed to unsettle him. It was clear that no one had ever made such an observation to the waiter before. He glanced at Vidia and appeared to be so disturbed by what he saw that he turned away and laughed in a chattering way, his mouth wide, his eyes dead.

“Yes, I look like you,” Vidia said.

He studied the young man’s face closely and with such intensity the waiter backed away, giggling in anguish.

“Maybe, sir.”

“But you don’t really think so.”

“No, sir.”

“And yet it’s true. You look like me.”

This peculiar conversation bothered the waiter but was highly illuminating to Vidia, who seemed to see his younger self before him. The waiter was nervous, contemplating his face as represented by this fiftyish man grinning in satisfaction at him.

“Look in the mirror,” Vidia said. “Go on, you’ll see.”

The waiter, who could never have taken much pleasure in staring at his own reflection, waggled his head, Indian fashion, to mean yes he would. But I could tell that any resemblance was the last thing on which he wanted positive confirmation.

And it was all in Vidia’s mind. I didn’t see much of a likeness.

“All right,” Vidia said. “We’ll order, then.”

Over lunch Vidia told me that he had received his first Public Lending Right check, about £1,500. Mine was about the same, and the more popular authors got quite a bit more. This great scheme for compensating authors on the basis of library loans had finally been introduced in Britain. I had asked Vidia to sign a petition to support the PLR bill some years before. He had refused. I sign nothing . Now he was crowing over his check.

“Publishers want to cash in,” he said. “But why should they? We’re the ones who do the work.”

I said, “That campaign for PLR was quite a struggle. Nothing like it exists in the States. For a long time, no one paid any attention.”

“Really.” He raised himself up slightly from his chair and looked around. “I don’t see anyone I know here.”

“Who are you thinking of, Vidia?”

“No one in particular. But it’s nice when one sees someone one knows in a restaurant in London.”

“I saw Bruce Chatwin the other day in L’Escargot.”

“Who’s Bruce Chatwin?”

It was how Vidia belittled anyone.

“The way he talks,” Vidia said. “All those airs. That name-dropping. He is trying to live down the shame of being the son of a Birmingham solicitor.”

“I don’t think he cares about that,” I said. Bruce was a friend of mine, and I suspected this to be the reason for Vidia’s dismissing him.

“No. You’re wrong. Look at Noel Coward. His mother kept a lodging house. And he pretended to be so grand — that theatrical English accent. All that posturing. He knew he was common. It was all a pretense. And think of his pain.”

He was still scanning the restaurant for a familiar face. Seeing none, he settled into his prawn curry, seeming disappointed, as if he had shown up but no one else had.

“How’s your food?”

“It’s all right, but lunch — lunch is such an intrusion. It fractures one’s day. It takes over, makes the morning hectic, destroys the afternoon, and leaves one no appetite in the evening.”