“You are hungry?”
“Yes, sahib.”
“Have the rest of this coconut.”
He refused. He was a high-caste beggar. I was a foreigner, an Untouchable. He could not eat coconut that had been tainted by my fingers. He wanted his own coconut. If he had been dying of thirst, he would not have drunk out of a container that had touched my lips. He was a Brahmin.
Naipaul is a Brahmin. He is also proud of what he has achieved. On another occasion, he was guest of honor at a dinner in London to which a large number of people had been invited. Before the dinner, a woman came up to him and said, “You wrote a dishonest book about London—Mr. Stone. Nothing in that book is true. You totally misrepresented the way we live.”
Vidia did not reply. Instead, he immediately left the party, before all the guests had arrived, before any were seated or the meal was served.
“What about the hostess? Didn’t you say anything to her?” I asked, because Vidia himself had told me this story.
Vidia shook his head. “Let that foolish woman who insulted me explain why I wasn’t there.”
At about the same time, he told an interviewer, “I can’t be interested in people who don’t like what I write, because if you don’t like what I write you’re disliking me.” It was after such an encounter that he said, “England is a country of second-rate people — bum politicians, scruffy writers, and crooked aristocrats.”
To people who found him demanding, insisting on high fees to speak or read, first-class airfares, five-star hotels, chauffeurs, minders, secretaries, and vintage wines, Vidia gave his usual reply: Treat me as you would a world-class brain surgeon or astrophysicist.
His sweeping generalizations and cutting remarks were widely quoted. What about Africa? one interviewer asked him. What was the future for Africa?
“Africa has no future,” he said.
Indians were treated no more gently by him. They did not read, he said. “If they read at all, they read for magic. They read holy books, they read sacred hymns — books of wisdom, books that will do them good.” He told me that it was very bad that Indian women kept their hair so long: “It encourages rape.” He became noted for pointing out that the red-dot caste mark that Indians wear on their forehead means “my head is empty.”
Asked about his book sales on his native island of Trinidad, he said, “My books aren’t read in Trinidad now. Drumbeating is a higher activity, a more satisfying activity.” Once he had written, “I happen to like Spanish dancing,” but later in an interview he said he deplored dancing. “Dance? I’ve never danced. I’d be ashamed of it. It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified. I dislike all those lower-class cultural manifestations.”
He was invited to San Francisco to read at two performances. He demanded, and received, his astrophysicist’s fee. Both performances were sold out in advance. Vidia read. But the audience was disappointed that he took no questions afterwards. When his host tried to ask him why he would not relent, he pretended he had not heard the question and showed her his tweed jacket, saying, “It’s rather fine, don’t you think? Made in South Africa.”
But he told me the reason. “I was invited to read from my work, not to answer asinine questions.”
He was much more concerned by the movie shown on his incoming flight. He had hated it. He mentioned its name.
“Do you know that film, Paul?”
I said I didn’t.
“The people responsible for making that film should be punished. They should be beaten. Whipped! No one should be allowed to make films like that. It was grotesque. Beat them!”
Another flight, this one to Trinidad, also enraged him. After takeoff, he stood in the aisle to slip off his sweater. A flight attendant hurried towards him.
“Please don’t take your shirt off,” she said.
“You see?” he told me. “Here is this simple West Indian fellow. He is planning to fly to Trinidad with his shirt off — bare-chested — as they do on his island.”
“What did you do?”
“I’m afraid I raised my voice. I screamed at them. I said they were all cunts. Excuse me. I was very angry.”
He screamed in India, too, when he was told to remove his shoes before entering various temples, including the ancient Lord Jagannath Temple in Puri. Vidia pointed out that the temple floor was far dirtier and more disgusting than his shoes and that the idea of defiling such a filthy, unswept place was ridiculous. This story was repeated in The Times of London, which indicated that there had been “an altercation.”
In Portland, Oregon, he was being driven to the airport the day after a reading, which had been arranged by his American publisher. His driver, a local woman, making small talk on the long drive, asked him his feelings about Portland, and, as he had just visited Seattle, she chitchatted about their differences.
“Seattle is an ocean city,” she said. “Portland is definitely an inland place.”
“How would you characterize Portland?” Vidia asked.
“This is a small town,” she said.
Vidia suddenly became furious and turned on the woman, shouting, “I don’t go to small towns! I never go to small towns!”
He raged on as the nervous woman drove. It was as though he had been tricked into visiting Portland, conned into believing it was a real city — which of course it is, substantial and prosperous and book-loving, Seattle’s younger sister.
Seeing that her driving had been seriously impaired by Vidia’s outburst, the woman gripped the wheel and wondered what to say.
“Thank you for doing this, then,” she said at last. “I really didn’t expect you to come here. I don’t expect you’ll be doing it again.”
“By thanking me, you show me how stupid you are,” Vidia said.
I must not cry, the woman thought, negotiating the rush-hour freeway traffic and feeling that tears were filling her eyes. She had risen early, given her husband breakfast, seen her children off to school, and hurried in the darkness to meet Vidia at his hotel, pay his hotel bill, and give him his fee and his lift to the airport. Now, so as not to rile Vidia further, she politely denied that she was stupid, and she kept driving.
Vidia said, “You are stupid, because if you knew anything about me, you would not have invited me to your small town.”
“But you were sent here,” the woman said. “You have to understand that it was your publicist who arranged this. She indicated that you wanted to come.”
“They don’t know me!” Vidia howled. “They don’t know me!”
He was still ranting as the woman drove up the ramp to the airport terminal.
“They are stupid too. How dare they send me here!”
“That’s their job, to put you in front of audiences,” the woman said, and brought her car to the curb. She was dazed. She told me later, “It felt like being hit by a two-by-four.” She got out, took Vidia’s bag from the back seat, and placed it on the sidewalk.
Vidia said, “Please bring my bag in,” and turned away sharply.
Inside the terminal, the woman set the bag down on the scale at the check-in counter.
Just as Vidia was about to speak, the woman winced. She thought he was going to scream again. But he said, “You have lovely fingers. So thin.”
Without a word, the woman left him. She went to her car and found a parking ticket on her windshield for $72. She drove home sobbing.
The woman was my friend. In telling me the story, she was also saying, Why did your friend Naipaul do this to me? I winced at these stories. I had no answer.