Sir Vidia's Shadow (49 page)

“I introduced them at the U.S. consul's dinner,” he said. “I wanted Naipaul to meet some characters for his book. I saw Nadira sitting at another table. I went up to her and said, ‘Guess who is here?' and ‘I want to introduce you to him.' She told me she did not know the name V.S. Naipaul and had never read anything by him. I then accompanied her to meet him. She went up to him at the dinner table where he was serving himself, and as I introduced them, she said, ‘How fantastic' and ‘What an honor' and ‘I know your work' and then plonked a big kiss on his cheek. He blushed, but he was taken. They were together for the whole evening. The very next day he phoned me and said, ‘I don't need your help because Nadira is taking me around and we are leaving for Bahawalpur.' Nadira was with Naipaul in the hotel when he phoned me.”

The marriage lunch was at an Indian restaurant in South Kensington. Vidia and his new wife sat holding hands at the table. This was a new Vidia. I had never seen him hold Pat's hand. This was a smitten Vidia, a far cry from the man who once said to me that he turned away if he saw two people kissing on television. He was also a reticent Vidia. The new Lady Naipaul did most of the talking, and her talk sounded very similar to what Vidia always referred to as “chuntering.”

“It was amazing for him to have a woman in an Islamic country walk up and kiss him,” Nadira said, explaining her unorthodox manner of introduction. “I astounded a lot of people, but I tend to do that a lot in Pakistan anyway.” (This kiss received further revision two years later in an interview in London's Sunday
Times of
May 10, 1998, in which Nadira was quoted as saying, “My kiss was not some silly bimbo, fluff-headed thing ... It was an act of reverence.”) Going on to describe their travels in Pakistan after they met, she said, “I think we fell terribly in love with each other.”

Nadira was a bit surprised by the suddenness. “There can be dichotomy between the writer and the person, someone you don't want to meet again. I found the writer was the person. Here I had met a combination of a wonderful man and a man who had a vision, tremendous compassion, someone who reminded me of my past. He was my soul-mate. He was someone I had always looked for. I am madly in love with him. I think I shall always be madly in love with him.”

There was more. But knowing Vidia, this was the moment for him to cry, “Stop chuntering!”

Instead, Vidia said to the man from the
Telegraph, “Do
you know about Nadira, her reputation and her work? She is very famous.”

During the wedding lunch Nadira clutched Vidia's hand and whispered, “I want you,” as the guests tucked into King Prawn Curry and Chicken Badami Korma. Among them were his agent, his old Oxford tutor, a couple of literary critics, a fellow whom Vidia unfailingly referred to as “that epicene young man,” and Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser. I was ten thousand miles away, on the slopes of Mount Haleakala.

Vidia and I had often talked about Philip Larkin. We had both bought
High Windows
when it was published, in the summer of 1974. Larkin's poetry—mordant, sour, funny, right wing, cynical, elegiac, mocking, contemptuous of fame, fearful of death—matched exactly many of Vidia's moods. In “The Whitsun Weddings,” Larkin had written of the faces at weddings,

 

...each face seemed to define

Just what it saw departing: children frowned

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral ...

 

Vidia had referred to Nadira's “reputation and her work,” and had said, “She is very famous.” But surely Nadira's celebrity was similar to that which I had enjoyed when I had been famous in Kampala and in Bundibugyo. Nadira had been famous in Bahawalpur, a small town on the Sutlej River about two hundred miles south of Lahore. She wrote a “Letter from Bahawalpur,” which appeared each week in
The Nation
(Lahore). Her picture accompanied the column, a passport-quality full-face halftone of a vague, unsmiling woman with bobbed hair and dark raised brows like diacritical marks over her staring eyes.

To verify Vidia's high opinion, I got hold of a sequence of Nadira's dispatches from Bahawalpur.

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.

18

I
T 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.

Vidia and Nadira had arrived, having left Dairy Cottage that morning.

“Paul, this is Nadira.”

The skinny, scowling seven-year-old girl in her little princess sari on the Nairobi verandah had become a big woman. She was dark and tall—taller than Vidia—and watchful, with the sort of frank sizing-you-up stare that is never seen on the faces of Pakistani women. Her sari was loose at the hips, as if she had just lost some weight. She was waiting for me to say something. I spoke to Vidia.

“I just missed you at that Indian show at Christie's yesterday.”

Before Vidia could reply, Nadira slapped his shoulder and said, “You bad man! You did not tell me you went there!”

She slapped his arm again and scolded him. This seemed a trifle presumptuous in a woman who had been married only a month. I had never seen anyone touch Vidia before.

“You will not buy any more pictures!”

“You're telling my secrets, Paul,” Vidia said quietly, looking a little grim.

Salman Rushdie was being introduced to Vidia as I stepped up to a table to get myself a cup of coffee, and then I saw Bill Buford from
The New Yorker
beckoning, and we all headed to a big white circus tent.

As I passed Salman, he was smiling and shaking his head. He said, “I have never met him before.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Are you all right?' I told him yes, I am all right. He said, ‘Good, good, good.'” Salman began to laugh.

We took our seats, Vidia, Bill Buford, and I, on the stage in the big circus tent. The audience was large, but still the atmosphere was that of a dog show. We were being asked to perform, to walk on our hind legs, jump through hoops, create a spectacle for the readers. Buford said, “What about questions afterwards?”