Mistaking the myth for the man

After a drink, he decides he should leave and go back to his suite in south Mumbai. Outside, as his car is fetched, he asks: ‘‘Will anything happen in the party? Will there be a change?’’ ‘‘There may be more notable arrivals, which the photographers and the aspirants will note, but not much else,’’ I say. I know what he is after. Will the party yield a narrative? No, most probably not. He is content to leave.

At the launch in Mumbai, he tells the audience that a writer’s myth lives perhaps longer than his work. The stories that circulate about writers, their quirks, their persona, their bon mots persist and survive their reasoned convictions. I tell the same audience that one of the reasons I took pen to paper (finger to keyboard, really) to write about V S was to dispel some of these myths and get back to the truth of his words on the page.

A prominent British-Mughlai writer, earlier this year, wrote that he had heard that Naipaul is a supporter ‘‘of the entire programme of the Sangh Parivar’’. I asked Vidia if he was. ‘‘What is the Sangh Parivar?’’ was his puzzled response.

In Vidia’s case, one can’t put one’s hand on one’s heart and swear that these myths arise fortuitously. His sense of mischief undoubtedly has something to do with stimulating them. Before the general election in India, when the NDA was still in power, Vidia happened to be in Delhi and was invited by the cultural wing of the BJP to a question and answer session. He and Nadira, Lady Naipaul, knew I was in Delhi and asked if I could accompany them to the meeting—‘‘to be a witness, because inevitably my presence there will be subject to mischievous and lying comment’’.

Reporters were kept out of the meeting. But they were waiting outside as it got over. From the way they fought to thrust their cameras and microphones over each other’s shoulders and live bodies, one would have thought that Madonna or some prominent and attractive female politician was doing a striptease for their benefit. The questioning was hostile. ‘‘Do you support the murders in Gujarat?’’ was the style—questions that could only be deflected with contempt. And of course the inevitable one about the Babri Masjid.

Inside the meeting, Vidia had answered a similar question with the observation that Zair-Ud-Din Babar had without doubt built mosques in the conquered territories with a sense of ‘hubris’—the building may have been an act of piety, but it was also an act of triumph. Vidia calmly proceeded to say something similar to the still-baying pack of reporters. I grabbed him by the elbow.

‘‘You must go, they are trying to stitch you up,’’ I said. He wasn’t in the least dismayed. He smiled. ‘‘I’m providing them with the needle and thread,’’ he said—or something to that effect. He left the reporters disappointed. The next morning, when the papers were published, the myths dominated the truth.

Yes, Vidia is mischievous, more in his observations than in his acts: ‘‘Indian writers are only good at boasting—they think their mamajis and chachajis are more interesting than the ones of the last writer to bag a hefty advance’’, or ‘‘my family is more incestuous than yours’’. But together with that mischief, that fundamental conviction that until the, albeit mixed, truths of history are discovered and told, there can be no plans and programmes for enlightenment or progress. It may be a self-evident proposition, but it has met with the deepest resentment in India and abroad among a stratum of intellectuals and writers committed to ideologies which even the ambivalent truth might disturb.

And this disturbance emerges as a howl of pain from those who have felt attacked by his observations, though any reading of his work would demonstrate that the intent to hurt is entirely absent. There is a deep modesty in his observations and in the man himself. When he won the Nobel Prize, I was in Bangalore, and the BBC tracked me down and asked for a comment for their radio programme. I made my delighted comment and then called Vidia to congratulate him. Nadira fetched him to the phone. ‘‘Ah, Farrukh,’’ he said, ‘‘You’ve heard of my little spot of good luck.’’