Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  The country was thickly forested, full of browsing elephants and loping giraffes, with soft green hills and yellowing savannah scattered with flat-topped thorn trees. The lakes were large. Lake Victoria was an inland sea. Even Uganda’s crops were pretty, for there was nothing lusher than a hillside of tea bushes, jade-colored with fresh leaves. Coffee plants looked brilliant and festive when the berries were ripe. The cane fields were dense, and for a reason no one could explain, the road past them, on the way to Jinja, was always carpeted with white butterflies, so thick at times that cars had been known to skid when their wheels crossed them. There were hippos wherever there was water, and there were crocs in the White Nile. At Mubende a witch tree was particularly malevolent, but an offering of a snakeskin or feathers served as counter-magic. An old smoky-brown skull mounted in the roots of a banyan tree at Mityana was so ominous no one dared remove it. The nail driven into the skull was not an afterthought but rather the cause of death. A prince had carried out the execution, but a king had ordered it. Uganda was a country of kings with extravagant titles—the Kabaka of Buganda, the Omukama of Toro, the Omugabe of Ankole, the Kyabazinga of Busoga—and all of them lived in fragile and tumbledown palaces surrounded by stockade fences of sharpened bamboo stakes.

  Down the dusty roads Julian drove with Yomo, stopping in villages to talk to rural teachers. He was in the Extra-Mural Department, which required him to travel in remote parts of the country: in the north at Gulu, Lira, and Rhino Camp; in West Nile, where Yomo was taken to be a Sudanese; at Trans-Nzoia near Mount Elgon, a perfect volcano’s cone; to the border of Rwanda, where in the purple mist they saw a whole range of green-blue volcanoes.

  Uganda had been a protectorate, not a colony, and had known such insignificant white settlement that there was no resentment against whites, and none had been hoofed out of the country as they had elsewhere in Africa. Muzungus were a curiosity, not a threat. Ugandans were proud of their kings, who were superior to any European—they had been more than a match for explorers as ingenious as Burton and for all foreign politicians. The lesson for missionaries was Uganda’s notoriety in having produced many of Africa’s first Christian martyrs, when King Freddy’s grandfather, Mutesa I, burned thirty of them alive. But these deaths only excited religious activity, and Uganda’s martyrology served as an inspiration to the missionaries who stalked the bush.

  Indians were a separate category—muhindis, “Asians.” People muttered about them, but perhaps no more than Indians muttered about themselves, for they were divided between Muslims and Hindus, and they made jokes about each other, revealing some sense of insecurity. Many Indians seemed genuinely liberated from caste consciousness. Africans envied and disliked them for their supposed wealth and cliquishness. Indians regarded Africans as weak, unreliable, and backward “Hubshees,” which meant Ethiopians. Yet Indians also felt that Africans were unfairly privileged for their political independence, to which some Indians had contributed but from which they were excluded. Indians thought it was laughable that Westerners paid so much attention to Africans. Money given to Africans was money wasted. Indians and Africans were in constant contact, for Indians were shopkeepers and Africans were their customers. There were no marriages between the two groups. Each said the other smelled.

  They were all colonials, Indian and African alike. Just a few years earlier they had all been singing “God Save the Queen.” Before each movie at the Odeon, on Kampala Road, there was a full minute’s footage of the Union Jack flapping in a stiff wind and a trooping-the-colors close-up of Queen Elizabeth on horseback, in a crimson tunic and black military beret. Now that was gone, though the memory was fresh. Some butcher shops labeled the poorer cuts “boys’ meat”—the stuff bought for servants to eat—and the “cook boy” might be a gray-haired man of sixty or more, and the “garden boy” another grandfather.

  “The housegirl is hopeless,” Yomo said.

  Yomo had the African monomania regarding diet. A country where pounded yam and palm wine were unobtainable was a Nigerian’s nightmare. She nagged on this subject effortlessly but with such passion that Julian was moved by how much she cared, how single-minded she could be on the subject of survival. She would be a good mother.

  “The girl never heard of kola nuts!” Yomo said.

  This housegirl was a married woman, thirty or so, with three kids whom Julian had allowed to play in the kitchen. Yomo exiled them to the back verandah.

  “You said you liked kids,” Julian said.

  “I want one of my own,” said Yomo. “Give me one.”

  Two months of trying, at least twice a day, yet there was apparently no progress. Julian remained complacent. His luck so far had been wonderful. It seemed right to him to leave the matter of children to chance, as that priest on the Congo border had done. If Julian meddled or fretted, it would surely go wrong. Whatever happened would be right. He suggested that Yomo go to his Indian doctor, but she procrastinated. From her various oblique remarks, always referring to bush clinics in Yorubaland, Julian suspected that she was afraid of doctors.

  Yomo did not know what to make of his Indian friends, could not understand a word they said; nor could they understand the way she talked. But she was patient. She sat and smiled and afterwards she always said, “They are so oggly!” She also said that Indian men smelled of Indian food, and Indian women of coconut oil.

  The Indians in Uganda, despairing of India, loved living in East Africa—loved the weather, the mangoes, the empty roads, the greenery, and especially loved the parks where they promenaded every Sunday, airing their women and letting their children run. They put walls around their houses. The walls worked; the walls kept them private. There was profit everywhere, there was space. In many ways Uganda the republic resembled Uganda the British protectorate. Institutions worked well—the post office, the telegraph, the police, the railway trains, the ferries on Lake Victoria.

  One day when Julian was talking with Indians about India, one of them mentioned U. V. Pradesh. It was the first time Julian had heard the name.

  “You want to know the difference between East African Indians and the babus in India?” this man, Desai, said. “Read Mother India by U. V. Pradesh.”

  No one knew what the initials stood for. The initials gave the name a blunt, impersonal sound, like a weighty name you might see lettered on the door—a large door that was closed—of someone in authority you were anxiously waiting to see: a dentist, a headmaster, an inspector, someone unfriendly, possibly intimidating. That was how the name seemed to Julian, unconsoling, and so far the name was everything.

  Whenever a book was recommended to Julian by someone whose intelligence he respected, he read it. Mother India was a book he took to immediately. He skipped to the portrait of the East African Indian, in the chapter “Degrees.” This man was a liberated soul, a free spirit in Africa, but on a visit back to India he was lost, encumbered and bewildered by caste prejudice. Julian recognized the man, he trusted the book, and then he read the whole thing from the beginning. It was skeptical, tender, comic, complex, and the narrative voice was never raised, never hectoring, always finding the connection and the paradox. The dialogue was beautifully chosen and always telling. Yet U. V. Pradesh was only a name. At one point he made a reference to “my companion,” but that only confused the issue. “Companion” could not have been more ambiguous, and it also looked like deliberate concealment.

  “You are still reading that book, Jules!” Yomo made his name sound like “Jewels.” She was stretched out on the couch, an odalisque, knees apart, touching herself, deliberately trying to shock him.

  “I like it, so I’m reading it slowly.”

  “Come over here and bring your friend and give me a baby.”

  She said no more than that, but the way she said it and stroked herself did shock him, and tempted him. He loved her for being able to speak directly to his body, and she seldom failed to get a hook into his guts.

  So life went on. Yomo waited for him to finis
h 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

  “I’m Not Everyone”

  HIS 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.