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That reporting on lunch can prove contentious is apparent when "the tetchy, pompous V. S. Naipaul and his guests" are given an entire chapter in Paul Theroux's book, Sir Vidia's Shadow, written in a witty, engaging manner in his role as "the perceptive observer". But, notes Patrick French in his recently released biography of Naipaul (The World Is What It Is), it is "some distance from the truth". The guest identities are mixed up; so are their mannerisms, clothes, accents, even the conversation. And now, decades later, I'm having lunch with French at Tamura, the Japanese restaurant in New Delhi's New Friends Colony, and we're both hoping that truth will not be a casualty, writes Kishore Singh. | |||
French has just weathered the storm of salacious bits taken out of context from the biography and played across the world, passages which deal with Naipaul's wife, Pat, and mistress, Margaret. He's in India on the promotion leg of the worldwide launch, but from London at least, the calls coming his way for studio appearances have less to do with the book and more to do with the Tibet riots. As the writer of the bestselling Tibet, Tibet, his views are solicited all the time, particularly in relation to China. "Tibet," he says, sipping his miso soup, "is one of the most difficult places to work in, there's the problem with language, the secret police…" Trinidad, on the other hand, where he undertook "one long trip" to work on the Naipaul biography, "is one of the nicest places to do research." It helped that young writers there thought Naipaul "was amazing" and admired his "Trinidadian character," though they "hated what he stood for".
We're surrounded by tables full of silent Japanese (and maybe Korean) diners concentrating on their food. I've asked for and got a kushikatsu set, which is pork with sticky rice and soup; French has asked for a salmon maki as starter, and a bento or lunch box as main course. He's now picking at his sushi with chopsticks, recounting lunches he's had with Naipaul to fill in the gaps between his archival research in Oklahoma ("where the food is terrible: they don't eat vegetables at all, so the nearest thing to it are tomato ketchup and pickled gherkins!") and the interviews that yielded information but with lots of missing pieces in between.
"Lady Naipaul," he says of the interviews he did at Naipaul's cottage — and referring to its current incumbent Nadira — "would do a delicious lunch." Sir Vidia, though temperamental about food for most of his life, "liked quite frugal, Indian vegetarian meals — kedgeree, dal, vegetables". Nadira he found to be "very feisty, not someone to be pushed around", unlike Pat and Margaret, "two women", he muses, "who wanted to be mistreated". Is that plausible? "Pat," he explains, "had the choice to leave him", and often was ordered out, and "Margaret didn't have to fly halfway across the world to be with him. There's something very disturbing about how those two relationships unfolded."
But he does recall other lunches with Vidia that were less than palatable. Once, and this was before he was writing his book, he was at a hotel restaurant in Edinburgh introducing Naipaul in front of an audience. "He'd just flown in and was grouchy, and ordered cheese and biscuits." When they failed to materialise in five minutes, he rebuked the waitress, who shrugged and told him this wasn't a fast food place and that lunch was made fresh. "‘I ordered cheese and biscuits," French recalls Naipaul admonishing her. "Do you make the cheese? Do you make the cheese?" Another time, at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, he insisted the soda had been watered down. "This is bad soda," he kept griping, "this is bad soda, this is bad soda…" till they replaced it.
French has had only two pieces of maki and I'm hoping he'll ask if I want some. "Can I have my lunch box?" he asks the waiter, who seems to have trouble understanding English. Instead, he removes the maki and returns it packed; I wait for the bento box to materialise, since it would be rude to eat while my guest does the talking…
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I tell him the book is crafted so self-effacingly that Patrick French, the writer, does not peep through even occasionally. "That," he says, "was a deliberate strategy. Naipaul is such a good, concise writer, if I tried being writerly, I would have looked foolish." He opted to remain away also from "either a finger-wagging biography, or only showering praise". The challenge was "to expose the man to the reader: I can't think of any other person sharing information in a very revealing manner that could cause embarrassment to him or to others." Naipaul himself he found to be "very helpful, endlessly giving bits of information". In a decade or two, French says, he might do another Naipaul book, one that might be "more judgmental", but in this, he "let the story speak for itself".
We remind the waiter once more we're waiting for French's lunch, and he nods and disappears into the kitchen. My pork gets cold. Did he have any trepidation about doing the book? "I didn't feel any personal fear of him," says French, sipping from his diet coke, "that's just part of his persona." He found Naipaul sympathetic to him (though "he told me I was a stupid nigger," over Ayodhya), and he in turn empathised with Naipaul's early struggles in colonial London where "doors were slammed in his face". He beckons the waiter again to ask for his lunch, and then decides to walk into the kitchen to enquire about it — unlike Naipaul, who might have blasted the management. "In London, people have probably forgotten how difficult it was for people like Naipaul," he says on his return, assured that his meal will soon be on the table. The biography, he explains, isn't introspective because neither is its subject. "His relationship with Pat is central to his life and writing. His relationship with Margaret? He pretends she doesn't exist at all. So it isn't confessional, no."
Naipaul's two books on India — the first coruscating, the second healing — were poles apart, and made him one of the most widely discussed and disliked writers of his time. French, finally his lunch in front of him, says, "Between the two India books, a personal softening had happened. He didn't have a sense of anger any more" — perhaps because he had arrived on the literary scene in England. "There was a temperamental change," French is cautious, adding slyly, "Plus there was more money, he now stayed in grand hotels — that can change your perspective."
In the book, he quotes Vidia saying, "People are at their most creative when things are very disturbed", and many of his readers might agree that the best of his works were Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas, but French says Naipaul saw that India was changing to an "extreme democracy", that "people were making demands" in a sense that "does not happen in neighbourhood countries, or China, or even the UK". Finishing the book (three years in research, two years in writing), he says he had to succumb to a legal process, "to endlessly clear permissions" against possible libel or defamation "but had to cut almost nothing for legal reasons".
Because ours has been a really long lunch, there's heaps more he shares — Naipaul likes to sleep a lot not because of his age (he's 75) but "because he gets exhausted" that Nadira "humours him, supports him, teases him to keep him happy" that though Naipaul "is highly intelligent", he's also "hyper-sensitive, which makes life very difficult" that his own next book is on the "speed of change" in India and Naipaul's next is on "sorcery and witchcraft in Africa".
He is now running late for a studio interview, so French leaves along with the packed salmon sushi, even though I'm the one settling the bill. That's something Naipaul might have done, I muse to myself; French has obviously been an observant disciple.