Sir Vidia's Shadow (6 page)

But before I could say any of this, Naipaul piped up, “Your writing, of course. If you didn't write, you'd go out of your mind.”

He had read only a small amount of what I had written, but he seemed to see that it stood for more. I had written many poems and published some in American and British literary magazines. “Little magazines,” Naipaul called them, making a face. “Lots of libido,” he always said of my poems, but it was not a criticism. He liked one I had published in the
Central African Examiner
about an old car I had seen rotting in the bush. He quoted it word for word to me a few days afterwards. It was a trenchant comment about colonialism, he said; it was about Africans letting things go to ruin. I reread it and thought: Maybe.

My writing project at the time was an essay on cowardice, inspired by Orwell's clear-sighted and confessional essays. I had been writing it for the American magazine
Commentary
. Naipaul had approved; it was not a little magazine, but the essay needed work. “I warned you, I'm brutal,” he said. “Forget Orwell for the moment.” I was on my fifth or sixth revision with him. It was like whittling a stick, but I was learning.

“It's true, Patsy. You know that. He'd go out of his mind.”

I kept driving, heading back to town, wondering whether it was true. I had been content for two years at a bush school in Malawi. I had been writing the whole time. Had the writing kept me sane?

“More bongo drums,” Naipaul said as we passed a roadside market.

There was noise, for sure, but no bongo drums. I said, “The only bongo in Uganda is an animal that looks like a kudu. They're hunted with dogs by wealthy tourists who go on safaris here. When the bongo turns to battle the dogs with his horns, the hunters shoot him. They're mostly in the Ruwenzoris. In the
bundu
.”

“I want to see the bush,” Naipaul said. “The bush is the future.”

We were on the outskirts of Kampala, passing a row of Indian shops, where on the verandahs some African men sat at Singer sewing machines, working the treadles with their bare feet, running up missionary-style dresses. Another African was squatting at a box, looking serious and intent, writing a letter in clear copperplate script for a customer, a woman who knelt, wringing her hands.

“And the president of Gabon is called Bongo,” I said. “Omar Bongo.”

“Omar Bongo! Did you hear that, Patsy? Omar Bongo. Oh, how I don't want to go to Gabon.”

He brooded for a moment, then asked me to slow down at the next row of Indian shops.

“It is hopeless for them,” he said. “They should leave. You know that Indian boy, Raju? I told him to go away, to save himself. Of course I didn't say it so simply. I asked him, ‘What is the message of the
Gita?'
The
Bhagavad-Gita
. You've read it, Paul, of course you have.”

From the back seat, Pat said, “You were too hard on Raju.”

“‘The message of the
Gita,'
I said to him, ‘is action.'”

“It's just as bad for him to go as to stay here,” Pat said.

“Action. He's got to take action. These people”—Naipaul was gesturing at the little shops and the people on the verandah, who were baffled by the gesticulating Hindi in the bush hat in my car—“will be dead unless they read the
Gita
and take action.”

“No, no!” Pat Naipaul cried out from the back seat. “How can you say that?”

A growling in my guts told me that a quarrel was starting. I had never been in the presence of a husband and wife having an unself-conscious quarrel. I felt fearful and helpless.

“They should forget England. The bitches will lie to them. India is the answer. It is a real country. A big country. They make things in India. Steel. Paper. Cloth. They publish books. What do they make here? Nothing, or some rubbish that no one wants, while the infies tell them how wonderful it all is.”

“It would be worse for them in India. You've seen it,” Pat said with passion, and she seemed to be sobbing. “They'd be licking the shoes of those horrible people.”

Coolly facing forward, Naipaul said, “You always take that simple senseless path.”

“India would destroy them,” Pat said, and I could see in the rear-view mirror that she was wiping tears from her eyes and trying to speak.

“I was offering him a real solution,” Naipaul said.

Pat replied, but her weeping made it difficult for her to speak, and while she faltered, saying how unfair he was, Naipaul became calm, rational, colder, and did not give an inch.

“Stop chuntering, Patsy. You're just chuntering, and you have no idea of what you're talking about.”

The tears kept rolling down Pat's cheeks, and though she dabbed at her face she could not stanch the flow. There were tears on her pretty protruding lips. I was shocked, but there was something in her tear-stained face and her posture that aroused me.

“I think we've done this,” Naipaul said, tapping the cigarette pack.

After I took them home, I told Yomo about the Naipauls' argument. She said, “Did he smack her?”

“No. Just talked, very coldly.”

Yomo laughed. “Just talked!” She was not shocked in the least. She shrugged, pulled me to the sofa, and said, “I want to give you a bath.”

The next afternoon, in the blazing sun, Naipaul and I were on the sports field again, being watched by urchins from the mud huts in the grove of trees beyond the field's perimeter. They jeered at the perspiring runners—it was so odd for them to see white people run or sweat or suffer. They mimicked the movements of the cricketers. I ran around the track while Naipaul flung cricket balls at a batsman. Naipaul seemed to know what he was doing. He knew cricket lore. He had told me it was a fair game—that it was more than a game, it was a whole way of thinking. “There is no sadder sound of collapse than hearing a wicket fall,” he said. “The best aspect of cricket is that no one really wins.”

He did not say anything about the argument with his wife until we were on our way into town afterwards for tea and cakes. He lit a cigarette and faced away from me, looking out the window—the same posture as the day before, the same time of day, the sun at the same angle, him smoking, me driving.

“I hate rowing in public,” he said, and nothing more.

At the teashop I had chocolate cake, he had cucumber sandwiches.

“These are cooling, but you need your cake. The body knows.”

He clutched the empty teacup.

“They warm the cups at the Lake Victoria in Entebbe. That's nice. But not here.” He poured the milk, he poured the tea, he added sugar, he stirred, he sipped. “We're moving into our house tomorrow. Do you know those houses?”

“Behind the Art Department, yes.”

“They're pretty crummy.”

He was more restless than usual. When he had gone without sleep his eyes became hooded and Asiatic. He looked that way today. He began talking about the Kabaka again, asking questions. People in Uganda, even expatriates, seldom mentioned him. He was an institution, a fixture, a symbol. No one ever saw him.

I said, “He is fairly invisible, but people say that he knows what's going on. He has his own prime minister, the Katikiro, and even his own parliament, the Lukiko. He takes an interest in things.”

“He has taken no interest in me,” Naipaul said.

I smiled to show my incomprehension. Why should the Kabaka, the king of Buganda, even be aware of Naipaul's existence? The Kabaka was forty-two, handsome, androgynous, aloof, a drinker, the ruler of almost two million people. He had been a thorn in the flesh of the British. He was a thorn in Obote's flesh. The Kingdom of Buganda belonged to him.

“I sent a little note to the palace. I had a letter of introduction. He hasn't replied. Not a word.”

What a good thing it was that we were alone. Any local person overhearing him go on about not receiving an invitation from this king would have found the complaint absurd. And a more delicate aspect was that the Kabaka was never discussed in public; his name was not spoken. It was bad form to do so if you happened to be in the presence of one of his subjects, and politically unwise if you were in the presence of one of his enemies.

“He has other things on his mind,” I said.

Naipaul chewed his cucumber sandwich and faced me, as though challenging me to give him one good reason why the Kabaka could not reply to the note informing him that V.S. Naipaul had arrived in Kampala.

“They want to kill him,” I said, lowering my voice in this crowded Kampala teashop. “Obote wants to overthrow him.”

This was news to Naipaul, who I felt had mistakenly lumped the king together with the clapped-out maharajahs and sultans he had come across in India—men down on their luck, feeling wronged and dispossessed, grateful for a sympathetic hearing. The Kabaka was strange but he was vital, and he had a palace guard and a whole armory of weapons.

“It's not a good idea to talk about him,” I said.

“Excellent. I have no intention of doing so. I have lost all interest in him.”

Leaving the teashop, we bumped into Pippa Broadhurst, a lecturer in history, who had been at Hallsmith's party. A feminist, hating the prison of marriage, the jailer husband, the life sentence, clucking “I am a human being too,” Pippa had found in the smoky bowl of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania a hospitable
manyatta
(village) and had had a brief affair with a spear-carrying
moran
(warrior) of the Masai people—another blood drinker, like Dudney's Karamojong missus. The upshot was Flora, a brown long-legged daughter, with whom Pippa went everywhere. The warrior was still in his thornbush kraal in Masailand.

“Hello, Vidia,” said Pippa. “And congratulations. I understand Mr. Bwogo's found you a house.”

“The house is pretty crummy.”

“Everyone gets those houses,” Pippa said, snatching at Flora.

“I'm not everyone,” Vidia said.

 

The house, one of a dozen just like it, was newly built and raw-looking, set on a hot, rubbly slope of baked earth above a brick warren of ruinous servants' quarters. The afternoon sun struck the house and heated it and made it stink of risen dust. The small brick buildings down the slope, too close together, were jammed with squatters and relatives, and I could hear music and chatter coming from the area of woodsmoke. Cooking fires and laughter: it was life lived outdoors, people eating and cooking and washing themselves. The clank of buckets and basins and the plop of slopping water reached me as I tapped on the front door.

“Come in,” Naipaul called in an irritated voice.

I could see what he disliked about the house. It was new and ugly, it smelled of fresh concrete and dust, it had no curtains.

“Paul,” he said in an imploring way, “do sit down.”

Pat said, “Go on, Vidia, please.”

“Listen to the bitches!”

“Vidia,” she said, trying to soothing him.

He continued to do what he had been doing when I entered, which was to read aloud from closely typed pages a scene about a farewell Christmas party in London, a meal at which presents were being given and toasts proposed. It was something from his novel, I supposed, the one he had brought to Uganda to finish. He went on reading, speaking of the tearful meal and the emotion, of people weeping.

Pat pressed her lips together when he finished, pausing before she spoke. The last time I had seen her was in the back seat of my car, when she had been sobbing openly and trying to speak (“Stop chuntering, Patsy”), her face contorted, her hair a mess, her cheeks and lips wet, her large breasts tremulous with her grief.

But today she was cool and very calm. In the most schoolmistressy way she said, “Too many tears.”

I was seated by a small table on which there lay a carefully corrected paragraph of small type, which I glanced at. The first words, in boldface, read
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad
. It was his
Who's Who
entry, with meticulous proofreader's marks in the margin in black ink, Vidia's precise handwriting, deleting a semicolon, adding a literary prize and a recent date.

He had only briefly interrupted the reading of his novel when I entered. I felt he wanted me to hear it, to mystify and impress me. I was impressed. He was admitting me to this ritual of reading; he trusted me.

He turned to me and said, “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?”

No bongos, but I knew what he meant.

“Do you suppose we could flog them?” He knew it was an outrageous suggestion, but he wanted to gauge my reaction. He took a harmless pleasure in seeing people wince.

We went to the window and looked downhill at the roofs of corrugated asbestos, moldy from the damp, at the woodsmoke and the banana trees, at barking dogs, crying children, all the elements of urban poverty in Uganda.

“That's what they need, a good flogging.”

“Vidia, that's quite enough of that,” Pat said, strong again, no sign of the tears and sobs of the other day.

His reading from the typescript and his unembarrassed candor in allowing me to hear it encouraged me to ask him again about writers he liked. So far, all I knew was that he disliked Orwell and that for pleasure he read the Bible and Martial. I had Nabokov's
Pale Fire
with me and told him how much I liked it.

“I read
Pnin
. It was silly. There was nothing in it. What do people see in him?”

“Style, maybe?”

“What is his style? It's bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?”

His interest, his passion, was located solely in his own writing. He saw it as new. Nothing like it had ever been written before. It was an error to look for any influences, for there were none; it was wrong to compare it with any other work; nothing came close to resembling it. It took me a little while to understand his utter faith in this conceit, but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, and that he was a new man, was the day our friendship began.