Sir Vidia's Shadow (3 page)

So life went on. Yomo waited for him to finish work and they were together the rest of the time. She laughed at the Ugandans for being primitive. They stared at her with bloodshot eyes. Julian wrote poems and worked on his novel and took George Orwell's and U. V. Pradesh's essays as his models for nonfiction. On weekends he gathered up Yomo and they headed into the bush.

“Always the bush,” she said.

“I like the bush.”

Every morning he was in Kampala, he had coffee in the Senior Common Room. All the lecturers and staff sat there in shorts and knee socks, like a lot of big boys, yakking. He read the
Argus
—now he was a peruser and student of the Court Proceedings. He drank coffee. He read his mail. In a country where telephones were rare and unreliable and no one phoned overseas, the arrival of the mail was an important event.

One day, a man named Haji Hallsmith sat heavily on the sofa next to Julian in the Senior Common Room. The exertion was intended to call attention to himself. His proper name was Alan, but he had converted to Islam in order to marry a Punjabi. The young woman's brothers had objected, given Hallsmith a severe beating, and spirited the woman away, and all that remained of the adventure was the religion and his nickname, though he had not gone on the haj.

His face fattening with mockery, his eyes glassy, Hallsmith leaned towards Julian, who could see that he was drunk, could smell it too, the tang of
waragi
, banana gin.

“What's in that cup?” Julian said.

Hallsmith laughed. He had probably been on a bender and was still drunk from the previous night, drinking coffee now to prepare himself for a class. He was a lecturer in the English Department.

“Just coffee.”

“You've been drinking more than coffee,” Julian said. “I think
waragi, mingi sana
.”

“So what?” Hallsmith said with a drunkard's truculence.

“Isn't that against your religion?”

“Drinking is sanctioned, except during prayers!” Hallsmith shouted.

Perhaps from the effort of summoning the strength to speak, he belched and brought up a mouthful of air, more banana stink.

“Do you know about U. V. Pradesh coming?” he asked.

Julian said that he didn't but that he was pleased. He was more excited than he let on, not merely because he had just read
Mother India
, but because he had never met such an esteemed writer, one of the powerful priestly figures whom he thought about all the time.

The larger world was elsewhere, and the little town and university were seldom visited. Occasionally experts flew in—the Pygmy specialist, the cautious economist, the elderly architect, the agitated musicologist; never a poet, never a novelist.

People from beyond Africa were welcome. The expatriates needed company, for they had no society. They needed visitors and witnesses to bring them news of the outer world, to listen to their stories—because the expatriates were sick of listening to each other, irritated more by the sameness of the stories than the lies and liberties in them—and most of all they needed strangers to measure themselves against.

“I've ordered Pradesh's books,” Haji said. “They're in the bookshop. I'm planning a drinks party for him next week at my flat. He's staying with me for a bit. Come and meet him.”

So Haji Hallsmith had appropriated U. V. Pradesh as his listener and witness. Haji also did some writing: confessional poems that embarrassed his friends. Yet they read them, always looking for clues to that brief, bewildering Muslim marriage.

“What about my
malaika?
” Julian asked.

It meant angel, and Hallsmith knew who he was talking about.

“Your splendid
malaika is
always welcome, Jules.”

That same afternoon, Julian went to the bookshop and bought all the U. V. Pradesh titles it had in stock—
The Part-Time Pundit, Calypso Road
, and several others. While he read
The Part-Time Pundit
, Yomo read
Calypso Road
.

She said, “These Trinidad people talk like Nigerians.”

“What do you mean?”

She read, “‘If you vex with she, give she a dose of licks, and by and by she come quick-quick when you bawl.'”

“That's Nigerian?”

“For sure.”

The character Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in
The Part-Time Pundit
, was unlike anyone Julian had ever met in fiction. The narrative, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, was simple and strong, unusual, funny, oblique, very sure of itself. It described a world Julian knew nothing about. Every name, every character, every setting was new, and yet it was familiar in its humanity. Among other things, it was about transformation.

He read three more U. V. Pradesh books. They were also fantastical, assured narratives of transformation. He saw no literary influences, no antecedents. They were original and powerful, too plain to be brilliant, with a pitiless humor that gave them pathos.

The voice of the narrator he recognized from
Mother India:
impartial, remorseless, almost cold. In his essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell had said you could see a human face behind all third-person narration, yet there was no face that Julian could discern here. About U. V. Pradesh personally Julian knew nothing beyond the fact that he had been born in the West Indies, was educated in England, resided in London, had won a number of prizes, was about forty—nearly elderly, so Julian thought. The biographical note in the back of Pradesh's books was short and unrevealing.

Pradesh took no sides in these works of fiction. One, about an election, was plotty and sprawled improbably. Another, set in London, could have been written by an old, wise Englishman, and its observations about age and frailty gave it a morbid power.
Calypso Road
was slight but charming, full of curious characters. They were all confident, fresh, spoke with the concision of poetry and with an originality that was like news to Julian.

“So what you tink?” Yomo said. Reading made her impatient, lust corroded her English. She was tugging at his sleeve, pulling his hand between her legs.

“I like this book.”

The extraordinary ending of
The Part-Time Pundit
, so unexpected and yet so logical a transformation, overwhelmed him. Why had he not seen it coming? It made him wish he had written it himself. The best of it was this: after all his changes of direction, the Trinidadian pundit Ganesh vanishes, only to reappear in London years later.

The nameless narrator, now a grown man in London, looks “for a nigrescent face,” sees the pundit from his island approaching him.

“Ganesh?” he says in disbelief.

The pundit seems utterly changed, wearing a tweed jacket and soft hat and corduroy trousers and sturdy shoes. He carries a walking stick and is marching through a railway terminal.

“Pundit Ganesh?” the narrator repeats, seeing Ganesh Ramsumair.

“‘G. Ramsay Muir,' he said, coldly,'” and the brown man scuttles away.

“Why are you smiling?” Yomo asked.

Julian was thinking, I'm going to meet the real man.

2

H
IS SMILE
was not a smile but his laugh was more than a laugh, especially when he—

Wait, wait, wait. You know I'm lying, don't you? This is not a novel, it is a memory.

The man is not “U. V. Pradesh.” It is V.S. Naipaul, and the book I mentioned in the previous chapter is
The Mystic Masseur
, and the hero is Ganesh Ramsumair of Trinidad, who turned into G. Ramsay Muir in London. Yomo is Yomo, and Hallsmith is Hallsmith, but the young man is not Julian Lavalle. It's me, Paul Theroux, and I am shining my light upon the past. I cannot improve on this story, because Naipaul always said,
Don't prettify it
, and
The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength—aspire to that
, and
Tell the truth
.

It is a morning in June on Cape Cod, bright and dry—hasn't rained for more than a month—and I have set myself the task of putting down everything that happened thirty years ago in Africa, when I first met him, because it all matters. I cannot change any of this. I am writing with a ballpoint on a pad at my desk. How can this be a novel? This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction. It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing.

You would say “Isn't that V.S. Naipaul?” in any case.

There is so much of it. This was going to be a short memoir, but now I see it will be a book, because I remember everything. Where was I? Yes. He was laughing.

—especially when Naipaul was laughing at one of his own pointed remarks. It was a surprised bellow of appreciation, deepened and made resonant by tobacco smoke and asthma. It made you wonder whether he saw something you didn't see. I learned all this within seconds of our first meeting, at Hallsmith's party. With a disgusted and fastidious face, Naipaul had commented on how dirty Kampala was. Having just read
The Mystic Masseur
—a better title than
The Part-Time Pundit;
I will stick to the facts—I said, quoting his shopkeeper in the book, “It only looks dirty.”

With his deep, fruity smoker's laugh booming in his lungs, he showed me his delight and then gave me the next line, and the next. He recited most of that page. He could have given me the whole book verbatim. I was thinking how he knew his work well. He told me later that he knew each of his books by heart, storing them during the slow process of writing and rewriting them in longhand.

After he was introduced to more people, his martyred smile returned. He was soon in distress. When Yomo said, “Your characters in your books talk like Nigerians,” he merely stared at her and frowned.

“Really.”

To someone with no sense of irony, his tone was one of shimmering fascination. He was thrown by Yomo's innocent statement, and perhaps by Yomo herself, who was very dark with high cheekbones and those drowsy eyes; in her stiffly wound turban she towered over him. She had the effect of making shorter people seem always to be ducking her. Naipaul behaved that way, moved sideways, nearer to me, dodging her, as if he were unused to discussing his work with such a tall, self-assured black woman.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“Here, I'm afraid,” he said, clearly intending to say more when his wife interrupted him.

“Vidia,” she said in a cautioning voice. That was the first time I heard his name, a contraction of it, which was Vidiadhar.

“Patsy,” he said, acquiescing, smiling in misery.

His wife, Patricia, was a small pale woman with a sweet face, premature gray hair, lovely pale blue eyes, and full lips with the sort of contour and droop that even in repose suggests a lisp. She was pretty, about ten years older than me, and though she was assertive, she seemed frail.

“They've promised us a house,” he said. “Mr. Bwogo. Have I got it right? Mr. Bwogo.” He nodded and seemed to recite it, giving it too many syllables: “
Bah-wo-go
.” “It seems nothing can be done without Mr. Bwogo.”

“He's the chief housing officer,” I said.

“Chief housing officer,” Naipaul said, and just saying it, reciting it again in his gloomy voice, he made the title ridiculous and grand and ill suited to describe Mr. Bwogo.

“I'm sure he'll take care of you,” I said.

With sudden insistence, as if demanding a drink, he said, “I want to meet people. Tell me whom I should meet.”

This baffled me, both the question and the urgent way he made me responsible for the answer. But I was flattered too, most of all because of the intense way he waited for a reply. Nerves of concentration tightened in his face, and even his muscles contrived to make his posture more than just receptive—imploring. On that first meeting I had an inkling of him as an intimidating listener.

“What is it you want to know?” I asked.

“I want to understand,” he said. “I want to meet people who know what is happening here. People who read books. People who are still in the world. You can find them for me, can't you? I don't mean only at Makerere.”

He smiled, making a hash of the university's name, pronouncing it “Maka-ray-ray.”

“Because I suspect a lot of fraudulence,” he said. “One hears it. One has vibrations.”

Pat had winced at “Maka-ray-ray” and said in an exasperated way, “He has no trouble at all with the most difficult Indian names.”

“Do you know Rajagopalachari's translation of the
Mahabharata?
” Naipaul said, and laughed hard, the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics.

I introduced him to my head of department, an expatriate Englishman named Gerald Moore, who was an anthologizer as well as an evangelizer of African poetry. Having spent some time in Nigeria, Gerald occasionally attempted a Yoruba salutation upon Yomo, whose way of replying was to mock his mispronunciation by repeating it in a shriek, opening her mouth very wide in Gerald's pink face. But he was a friendly fellow, and he had hired me. He mentioned his African anthology to Naipaul.

“Really,” Naipaul said, mocking in his profoundly fascinated way, and now I understood his tone as utter disbelief and dismissal.

The irony was not lost on Gerald, who fidgeted and said, “Some quite good poems.”

“Really.”

“Leopold Senghor.”

“Isn't he the president of something?”

“Senegal,” Gerald said. “And Rabearivelo.”

“Is he a president too?”

“Dead, actually. Madagascan.”

“These names just trip off your tongue.”

“I could give you a copy,” Gerald said. “It's a Penguin.”

“A Penguin, yes,” Naipaul said. “You are so kind.”

“I also do some writing. I'd like to show you. See what you think.”