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

In “Pardon Sir, Your Slip Is Showing!” she wrote, “Words are wonderful things. They are extremely useful, even indispensable at times; you can use them to communicate, to beguile, to frustrate, to berate, to admire, to flatter, to fool…” And she ended, “If words loose [sic] their meaning, life looses [sic] its meaning.”

“Remembering the Old of the Sadiqians” was Nadira’s lament for the fact that the retired teachers of Sadiq Public School in Bahawalpur had small pensions or none at all. Conclusion: “No wonder our education system is in shambles.”

A week later, in “Computer Blues,” Nadira deplored the rise of computer technology. Her then husband made an appearance in this piece: “The early days of his computer mania were quite a strain on our marriage.” Nadira hated her computer. Nothing worked as it should — disks, printer, fonts, spell checker; power outages in Bahawalpur did not help. Also, “I keep loosing [sic] articles from the disks, sometimes loosing [stc] the disks,” and so on.

Lovable, ungrammatical, clumsy, audacious — had such pieces turned Vidia’s head? Nadira had been married to a man who was living the more or less feudal existence of a wealthy Pakistani farmer-landlord. That sort of life — you see it in India also — is like a glimpse of old Russia, something Tolstoyan in the landlord’s experimental farm, with his many peasants and tenants and his money, for this man lived on the same premises with Nadira and his first wife, a German woman, and the children from both marriages.

The rest of the story, too, is like a Russian novel. Nadira acquires some local fame as a columnist. She revolts. She leaves for Lahore. She is squired around town by several men, who woo her but stop short of being suitors. She has no money except for the insignificant fees for her “Letter from Bahawalpur,” and she no longer lives in her town. On her divorce, it is said that her husband does not even return her dowry. She is living precariously when she receives an invitation to meet Sir Vidia Naipaul.

She says to my friend in Lahore, “Who is he? Has he written anything?”

It is impossible not to admire her pluck.

Later, people said, “Have you heard about Vidia? He got married .”

Vidia had sounded happy in the piece describing his wedding curry lunch. It did not surprise me that I hadn’t been invited. I was in Hawaii, half a world away, and I had still not gotten over the death of Pat or the sad news that there had been only a handful of people at her funeral.

A month after Vidia’s wedding, I had a call from Bill Buford, the literary editor of The New Yorker , telling me that the magazine was sponsoring an event at Hay-on-Wye, a well-known literary festival, in a pretty part of the Welsh border country.

“We want you and Vidia to appear,” Buford said. “Do a sort of literary dialogue.”

“Vidia hates literary festivals,” I said. “He has never been to one. And they seem like dog shows to me. Have you asked him?”

“We were hoping that you would, Paul.”

“Never. He’ll just scream.”

“He’s been very mellow since he got married. It’s a new Vidia, honestly.”

“He won’t do it,” I said.

“We figure he might if you ask him. He’ll listen to you. You’re his friend.”

“Believe me, he does what he wants.”

“Salman Rushdie will be there.”

“That’s no incentive to Vidia. He laughed when the ayatollah announced his fatwa . I tell you, he won’t want to go.”

“But Vidia’s new wife might.”

“I don’t know Vidia’s new wife.”

“Paul, if you ask Vidia to attend it will mean a lot to us.”

“He’ll want to be paid.”

“We’ll pay him. Within reason, of course. Will he want a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Paul, please…”

I cannot bear it when people plead with me. Perhaps they know that. Pleading always has the intended effect.

It was a deep-voiced woman who answered the telephone at Dairy Cottage. I knew just where she was: on the white sofa by the window, which gave onto the western side of the hedge, the green shrubs, the green trees, the red maple. It was where Pat always sat, because Vidia disliked answering the phone.

“And who is speaking?” she asked.

I told her my name.

As she passed the phone to Vidia, I heard her say, “It’s Paul Theroux. I want to meet him.”

I should have known that would be enough, but even then, I was not certain that Vidia would say yes to the festival.

IT HAPPENS TO BE a tic of mine as a traveler, on returning to any distant city, to take the same walk, make the same stops, eat the same meals at the same restaurants, look into the same stores, verify the faces of clerks or doormen, even touch the same posts and gates — go through a ritualistic renewal of familiarity along a known route before striking out and doing anything new. It is not compulsive. It eases my spirit. And in any new city I make a route and remember it.

It was a sunny morning at the end of May in England’s never-disappointing springtime. I was just a tourist now. Christie’s salesrooms were on my London trail. I walked from Brown’s Hotel to King Street in time to see the “Visions of India” pre-auction show.

“Your friend Naipaul was just here,” a Christie’s man said, greeting me. He knew me as a sometime bidder and Naipaul as a connoisseur. “He might still be somewhere in the building.”

We looked among the pictures but didn’t see him. I had wanted to surprise him, perhaps have lunch. He had agreed to go to Hay-on-Wye to do the staged dialogue. I would have enjoyed looking at these pictures with Vidia, who had a discerning eye for paintings of Indian landscapes. But he had gone.

I continued on my quasi-Tourettic walk, feeling like a practitioner of advanced mazecraft. I had arrived in London that morning and was happy with my first-class rail ticket to Newport, Wales, in my pocket. I left the next day from Paddington station, first reading the newspaper and then looking over the first chapter of Kowloon Tong , which I had just started to write. I had spent part of the winter in Hong Kong.

If things had been different in my life, I might have been writing the book in one of those Oxfordshire or Somersetshire houses — the Old Vicarage or Stride Manor, say. The house filled with the aromas of log fires and baking bread. “Dad’s working in the library.” It had been a dream of mine to end up in the West Country as a solvent escapee from London and part-time patriarch, my kids coming down with girlfriends or wives, maybe even grandchildren, on weekends. Wearing muddy Wellingtons, I would meet them at the local railway station with the other parents and country squires, leaning against our Land Rovers and listening for the train. I would be known as “the American” in the village and greeted with insincere and resentful jollity by the gruff locals in the pub, the Black Horse—“Evenin’, squire.” They would patronize me with archaisms and bore me stiff with country lore they’d got out of books. Behind my back I’d be called “the Yank.”

No matter! The West Country was one of the prettiest places in the world. I knew that now. I had been looking at it, off and on, for thirty-four years, but now I knew it would never happen. Just thinking of the word “never” and seeing these blue remembered hills made my eyes prickle with regret.

A taxi met me at Newport. The driver, a former teacher and Welsh speaker, took me to Abergavenny and across the Black Mountains past jumbled villages. Too far from London to be within commuting distance, the countryside looked unmodernized, like the England of the sixties and seventies. The village of Hay was on a hill, the river Wye below it. I dropped my bag at the innlike hotel and after lunch, on that afternoon of June 1, 1996, went to the festival.