Sir Vidia's Shadow Read online

  “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.”

  Naipaul smiled a wolfish smile and said, “Are you sure you want me to read your poems? I warn you that I will tell you exactly what I think.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “But I’m brutal, you know.”

  Gerald winced, and later on the verandah he said to me, “He’s different from what I expected.”

  “In what way?”

  “Rather patrician.”

  But I thought: I want to show him my work. I want to know exactly what he thinks. I had never shown anyone my novel. I wanted him to be brutal.

  I saw Naipaul talking to Professor Dudney, an authority on the pastoral Karamojong people of Karamoja, one of the northern provinces of Uganda. The Karamojong went mother-naked, and the men were often photographed posing unashamed, letting their penises hang as impressively as prize aubergines. Dudney had married a Karamojong woman, who was just as attracted to Kampala cocktail parties as Dudney was to Karamojong rituals during which the blood of cattle was guzzled.

  At about five o’clock, Haji Hallsmith started turning the knobs of a large wooden radio. He urged the guests to be seated, to listen to the program, one he had made himself with his African students. I knew the producer, Miles Lee, an authentic Gypsy whose training for Radio Uganda consisted of working for many years as a fortuneteller at the Goose Fair in Nottingham. He too had become a Muslim, changing his middle name, Allday, to Ahmed, and could be found drinking with Haji Hallsmith. He was another one who said, “Of course Muslims can drink. But not during prayers.”

  The radio program was called In Black and White, and its subject was African writing. After some music, the pluckings of a seven-stringed instrument called a nanga, Hallsmith, suffering mike fright, began to introduce the poets in a shrill old-auntie voice.

  Naipaul settled into his chair, his face darkening as the program continued. It was a look of intense concentration, or perhaps of desperate boredom. Poems were being read on the crackly radio, Africans reciting African poems, muffled by the cloth on the grille of the big speaker. Naipaul might not have realized that the hour for this welcoming party had been chosen because it was also the hour for the weekly In Black and White.

  —And now Winston Wabamba is going to read his poem “Groundnut Stew.”

  Naipaul’s face hardened into an expression of extreme impatience. I could see it was also a martyr’s death mask. When Hallsmith smiled at him, Naipaul’s eyes went out of focus, for it was a hot afternoon, the sun blazing through the windows over the tops of palms and tulip trees. There were jeers and curses from the low brick warren of huts where the servants lived.

  Everyone else in the room was attentive, gathered around the radio, our heads cocked to one side or bowed in a meditative way. Gerald Moore massaged his eyes with his fingertips in concentration. We were mocked by the parrot squawks and cockcrows out the window, and as the sun dropped there was another sound, almost unearthly, like a riot of radio waves in a Martian invasion, a squealing and a mad ripping of the air.

  Naipaul was startled.

  “Bats,” I said.

  He looked wildly at the bats streaking past the window and slumped again.

  I had never before heard the whole radio program. It was broadcast at the time of day when I was usually headed to the Staff Club. Now that I was compelled to listen to the entire thirty minutes, I was reminded of how sentimental and inept the poetry was. It did not look so bad on the pages of the university’s literary magazine, but when declaimed on Radio Uganda, under the supervision of Miles Ahmed Lee, it sounded hollow and clumsy, and the clichés were the feebler for being spoken aloud with an attempt at feeling.

  Was I also hearing it with Naipaul’s ears? He was a newcomer. He had never heard it before. The poems sounded awful to me. The room was hot with the exhausted air of the day, the last blaze of the low sun, the dust and humidity and bird complaints, the servants’ curses and bus horns.

  When the program was over Naipaul got to his feet and, staggering slightly because of his mood, said, “Splendid, splendid.”

  “Can we go home now?” Yomo said, reaching into my front trouser pocket.

  Naipaul was surrounded by party guests, but by the time we got to the door he had broken away from them, and he called out, “Find me some people—I want to meet people.”

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” I said.
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br />   He followed us through the door to the verandah.

  “I read Miguel Street last night,” Yomo said. “The whole thing.”

  Naipaul stared at her pityingly, shaking his head. He said, “You must sip it like good wine.”

  “Ha! I don’t sip wine!” Yomo was laughing. “I drink up the palm wine! I’m from Nigeria.”

  “Really.” Naipaul looked indifferent. “Uganda must fascinate you.”

  “These Uganda people are primitive.”

  Naipaul’s mask slipped and he laughed. Then, sizing me up, he asked me what I thought of the radio program.

  At first I hesitated to tell him I really had not liked it, because it seemed too unkind to Hallsmith, the host. And when he’d been seated in his armchair, Naipaul had looked enigmatic, if not disapproving, and afterwards hadn’t he said “Splendid"?

  But I liked him, I liked his writing, I wanted to take a risk, I wanted to be truthful.

  “I thought it was awful,” I said.

  “Yes!” he said, and he laughed his deep, appreciative laugh. “Dreadful! Dreadful!”

  He looked happier saying that, less lonely and less tormented than he had appeared in the room. With conviction and a solemn friendliness, he touched my arm.

  “We’ll meet soon. We’ll talk.” It meant everything to me. Then he said, “Do you have a motorcar?”

  “He doesn’t talk like the people in his book,” Yomo said on the way home.

  That was true, but I was thinking how I wanted him for a friend. I mentioned this, but Yomo said he was just an ugly little Indian man, and what was the point in talking so much about him?

  “He’s a wonderful writer,” I said.

  “You are a wonderful writer,” she said. We were home now, and she was saying “I want a baby. Give me a baby!” as she pulled off my clothes.

  Within a few days I knew him much better. I showed him some of my poems, one of which began “Mirrored images of bitches’ murderous beauty,” and another, “The girl who came with doves to sell will die.”

  He said, “Lots of libido.”

  That made me smile.

  He said, “But I have given up sex, you see.”

  We were alone, driving to the market.

  “What about your wife?”

  “I give her a chaste kiss at night.”

  That was not my question, but I left it, because my car was now surrounded by market traders showing us baskets of fruit.

  “I hate food that is uncovered,” he said. “I have a horror of dirt.”

  The Kampala Central Market was the wrong place for someone with a horror of dirt.

  “The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” he said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  Flayed, stringy goat and sheep carcasses hung from iron hooks among buzzing flies, and some hacked-apart chunks of meat and cracked bones were stacked on plates under the sign Boys’ Meat. He liked that sign. He lingered, murmuring the expression. He said he was a vegetarian. I asked him why.

  “The sinew. I could never chew through it.”

  He would go without eating rather than touch meat, he said. He had had arguments in restaurants after being served vegetable soup made with meat stock. He gave me a running commentary on his health and digestion.

  “Meat is nyama,” I said, instructing him.

  “Yes.”

  “The word for animals is nyama.”

  “Yes.”

  “Prostitutes—the slang. Same word. Nyama.”

  “Really.”

  We passed the locust stalls, where behind bulging sacks of locusts fried in hot mafuta fat, men and women sat measuring out single portions of the greasy insects on squares of newspaper. The wood-colored locusts gleamed, looking freshly varnished, and the locust sellers called out, “Nzige!”

  It was the season, I said. They gathered the locusts under street-lamps all night.

  “Nzige, nzige.” Naipaul said “Nah-zeegay” and chuckled and greeted a locust seller who was making up a large package for a man. “Chap’s absolutely mad about them, I imagine.”

  He frowned at the baskets stacked around the basket sellers. He found the fish flyblown. He said that some vegetables, plantains especially, reminded him of his childhood.

  “What sort of a family did you have?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to tell you.” He smiled helplessly, appealing to me, raising his hands to indicate that this was not a fruitful line of inquiry.

  “I come from a large family,” I said, hoping to interest him.

  “We’ve done the market,” he said. He had not heard what I said. He wanted to leave. And later: We’ve done the bus station. And: We’ve done the park. And: We’ve done the museum. And: Churches depress me, man. He was able to size a place up fairly quickly, and then he was ready to go. He had an inspector’s gait, hands clasped behind his back, moving fast yet looking at everything. He was inquisitive, he was brisk. I think we’ve done this.

  He seemed eager for me to know him. He said he slept badly, he was abstemious about alcohol, he got headaches, he had asthma. He claimed to have an explosive temper. He liked playing cricket and wanted me to help him find a pitch where he could practice bowling. He asked me about Gerald Moore, and when I said that Gerald had found him patrician, he seemed pleased.

  “Jerry said that, did he?”

  We never called the department head “Jerry.”

  “What about Dudney?” he said. “His wife is incredibly ugly, which of course is why he married her. Unbelievably ugly.”

  I said that in most parts of Uganda she was considered a beauty—plump and loud and fertile and maternal, and probably circumcised, with big lips and quarter-inch gaps between her teeth.

  “That’s precisely what I mean.”

  The whites he had met in Uganda so far were most of them degenerate, he said. They drank too much. They were intellectually dead. They were low class. Sometimes he used that expression, but more often he said, “They are common.” They were inferior.

  “Infies” was his usual name for them. “Listen to the infy,” he would say while one of the expatriates held forth in the Senior Common Room. “Most of them are buggers, too.”

  He found Swahili unpronounceable and was especially lost in nasalizing sounds, as when a consonant, following the rule of all Bantu languages, was softened or rubbed down by an initial m or n. He could not nasalize words such as mbuli (folly) or its opposite, mwambo, and while the meanings of more complex words, such as mkhwikhwiziri (b.o., the smell of an unwashed body), interested him as much as they did me, he found them impossible to say. Yet he sometimes made attempts, and it was difficult to know whether in garbling the words he was mocking them or simply making mistakes. “Mahboya” he said for the name Mboya. “Mah-zee” he said for mzee. An expatriate noted for his effeminacy and for patronizing African boys he called “Mah-bugga” and sometimes succeeded with “Mbugga.”

  Looking for clues to his writing, I asked him what he read.

  “One is reading the Bible. It’s frightfully good, you know. And Martial—delicious. You read Latin, of course you do.”

  He quoted salacious epigrams and poems, many of which were about buggery. He said they were lyrical. “And so concise.”

  He said frankly that coming to Uganda had been a great mistake, which he regretted. Although his trip had been financed by the American Farfield Foundation, he said he was losing money. But he had a book to finish.

  Sure of himself and very direct, he commanded attention. He strode through Kampala, assessing it all, “being brutal,” as he said, like a man sent from headquarters to inspect a lagging field office. His conclusions: Mass sackings were called for. Eliminate all funding. Shut it down. Seal it off. Say goodbye.

  And that was after only two weeks or so. I had never met anyone so certain, so intense, so observant, so hungry, so impatient, so intelligent. He was stimulating and tiring to be with, like a brilliant demanding child—needy, exhausting, funny, often making a po-fa
ced joke just to please me, and who was I? But he seemed to like me. He asked to see more of my writing. Watching him evaluate it, I could hear the crackle of the circuits in his brain, a succession of satisfying clicks, and the fastening of synapses, like buckles being fixed, as he processed information. “Keep it up” was all he said. He had no small talk, and he pounced on incidental remarks.

  “This is a pretty prosperous country,” I said casually.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean a successful agricultural economy. The tea, the coffee, the sugar—”

  “Define the difference between success and achievement,” he demanded.

  And he listened closely to all answers. It was hard to drive a car and hold this sort of conversation, but I did my best.

  “We see the institutions that exist here,” he said. “What matters most is how they are maintained. Maintenance of a civilization is the proof that it has meaning and is coherent. Here in Uganda, other people are doing it for them. Outsiders are the key. Take them away and Uganda will go back to bush. All this will be jungle.”

  On one of those early days in my car he plucked at the plastic seat cover and said, “American writers always know the names of these.”

  “That’s a grommet,” I said.

  “And these.”

  “That’s a gusset.”

  “And this.” He ran his thumb and forefinger along a seam.

  “That’s called piping.”

  A laugh had been building in his throat from the moment I had said “grommet,” and now he was laughing hard. No sound, except that of a lifelong smoker, was more satisfying than the dense laughter of an asthmatic, forcibly compressed, struggling and echoing through thickets in his lungs.

  “You see? But they are silly words. They are purely technical. There is no picture. They say nothing. Don’t be that kind of writer. Promise me you won’t use those words.”