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

He raged on as the nervous woman drove. It was as though he had been tricked into visiting Portland, conned into believing it was a real city — which of course it is, substantial and prosperous and book-loving, Seattle’s younger sister.

Seeing that her driving had been seriously impaired by Vidia’s outburst, the woman gripped the wheel and wondered what to say.

“Thank you for doing this, then,” she said at last. “I really didn’t expect you to come here. I don’t expect you’ll be doing it again.”

“By thanking me, you show me how stupid you are,” Vidia said.

I must not cry, the woman thought, negotiating the rush-hour freeway traffic and feeling that tears were filling her eyes. She had risen early, given her husband breakfast, seen her children off to school, and hurried in the darkness to meet Vidia at his hotel, pay his hotel bill, and give him his fee and his lift to the airport. Now, so as not to rile Vidia further, she politely denied that she was stupid, and she kept driving.

Vidia said, “You are stupid, because if you knew anything about me, you would not have invited me to your small town.”

“But you were sent here,” the woman said. “You have to understand that it was your publicist who arranged this. She indicated that you wanted to come.”

“They don’t know me!” Vidia howled. “They don’t know me!”

He was still ranting as the woman drove up the ramp to the airport terminal.

“They are stupid too. How dare they send me here!”

“That’s their job, to put you in front of audiences,” the woman said, and brought her car to the curb. She was dazed. She told me later, “It felt like being hit by a two-by-four.” She got out, took Vidia’s bag from the back seat, and placed it on the sidewalk.

Vidia said, “Please bring my bag in,” and turned away sharply.

Inside the terminal, the woman set the bag down on the scale at the check-in counter.

Just as Vidia was about to speak, the woman winced. She thought he was going to scream again. But he said, “You have lovely fingers. So thin.”

Without a word, the woman left him. She went to her car and found a parking ticket on her windshield for $72. She drove home sobbing.

The woman was my friend. In telling me the story, she was also saying, Why did your friend Naipaul do this to me? I winced at these stories. I had no answer.

Such stories that people volunteered, saying “You must hear this,” Vidia always said were true. It was sometimes hard for me to imagine his fury or his cold cruelty, because we had never quarreled, nor had I ever witnessed a scene as awful as those I heard described.

There was a story I never asked Vidia to verify — didn’t dare ask, because I wanted it to be true. If it was not true, it ought to have been.

Ved Mehta is a distinguished Indian writer. Vidia knew of him. Speaking of The New Yorker once, how under the editorship of William Shawn he could not interest the magazine in his writing, Vidia said, “Of course, they already have a tame Indian.”

Ved Mehta is also famously blind. A certain New Yorker doubted his blindness. Seeing Mehta at a New York party, speaking to a group of attentive people, holding court, the man decided to test it. He had always been skeptical that Mehta was totally blind, since in his writing he minutely described people’s faces and wrote about the nuances of color and texture with elaborate subtlety, making precise distinctions.

The man crept over to where Mehta was sitting, and as the writer continued to speak, the doubting man began making faces at him. He leaned over and waved his hands at Ved Mehta’s eyes. He thumbed his nose at Ved Mehta. He wagged his fingers in Ved Mehta’s face.

Still, Mehta went on speaking, calmly and in perfectly enunciated sentences, never faltering in his expansive monologue.

The man made a last attempt: he put his own face a foot away and stuck his tongue out. But Mehta spoke without pause, as if the man did not exist.

Realizing how wrong he had been, the man felt uncomfortable and wanted to go home. Leaving the party, he said to the hostess, “I had always thought Ved Mehta was faking his blindness, or at least exaggerating. I am now convinced that Ved Mehta is blind.”

“That’s not Ved Mehta,” the hostess said. “It’s V.S. Naipaul.”

AT SOME POINT in these late middle years, when Vidia was working on a book, hiding and making himself ill from hunching over it as his handwriting grew tinier with concentration and anxiety, he would interrupt himself in describing what he was writing and say, “It’s Major.” His pompous certainty gave the word a capital letter.

In the past he had said, “It’s Important,” or “It’s a Big Book,” and raised his eyes and seemed to see it hovering in the air, like the prophet Joseph Smith contemplating the gold plates of Mormonism glittering in the hands of the angel Moroni. Several times, Vidia had applied this praise to me. The Mosquito Coast was a Big Book. My Africa books were Big Books. They might even have been Important Books. But they weren’t Major. A Bend in the River was Major. Being Vidia, he repeated it: “It’s Major. It’s Major.”

Was he satirizing himself? Not so far as I knew. He never spoke about his work except in tones of the utmost solemnity. No one I had ever met was so devoted to the act of writing. That was his lesson. His dedication and belief had attracted and inspired me, so I had followed him, uttering my own humble equivalent of “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” Vidia was almost mystical in his belief in writing, for literary creation was a form of prayer, a disturbing prayer. He was not the writer as equal, the reader’s buddy, but rather the writer as priestly figure. Nor did he deviate from his vows: if he said something was Major, he meant it.

Much of Vidia’s writing is like a literary shadowgraph, full of the starkly textured silhouettes of keenly observed shadows, as though the penumbra for Vidia has more meaning than the person or thing that shapes it. Miguel Street , the first book he wrote (though not the first published), ends with a dramatic departure, as the narrator says, “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, only looking at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.”

There is also adumbration in the last sentence of In a Free State: “Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.”

Perhaps because of its shadowy tide, there are many shadows in An Area of Darkness , but the best image occurs in Amritsar: “Each Sikh was attached to a brisk black shadow.” And in his latest, Beyond Belief, a book that is almost devoid of landscape and weather and color, he writes particularly of shadows, how in Iran “on sunny days light and cloud shadows constantly modeled and remodeled the ridges and the dips of the bare, beige-colored mountains.” In that same book, trees are judged less by their foliage than by their shadows, as with the trees he describes on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan: “a spindly hybrid poplar that cast little shadow.” And the racecourse in Kuala Lumpur, “green and sun-struck, with still, black shadows.” And the wall in Tehran that “cast a broad diagonal of shadow tapering up to the top and there disappearing.” Even people can be shadows, like the servants in Pakistan, “the thin and dingy shadow people of every Pakistani household.”

It is as if, for Vidia, shadows have substance.