Doppelgänger

I: Doppelgängers

V.S.Naipaul died on 11 August 2018.

A year later, in the winter of 2019, after the foam of words that rose up in the aftermath of his death had settled down, I came upon a piece in n + 1: an exchange of letters between Nikil Saval and Pankaj Mishra that were a consideration of Naipaul, or maybe, a consideration of what they should think of him, which was reflected in their choice of title, The Painful Sum of Things. 

Painful because by the time he departed, the irascible, sulphur-tongued, misogynistic, woman-beating bigot had long overshadowed the young Trinidadian who in his prime was considered the finest writer in the English language. And whose exploits in the English language seemed to do for Mishra and Saval what the works of Rushdie and Roy would do for me years later.

I had never really read Naipaul until then. I had repeatedly read how great A House for Mr Biswas was. I had read a large chunk of the book years ago and found it funny but fusty. Despite being first published in London in 1961, Naipaul’s masterpiece seemed antiquated and provincial compared to Borges’ Fictions, from which the first stories came out in Buenos Aires in 1941. I had tried to read An Enigma of Arrival but lost my way in the mists of the early pages.

As literary providence would have it, the encounter with the piece by Saval and Mishra was followed by an encounter with The Wounder and the Wounded, the essay on Naipaul by James Wood in his collection, Serious Noticing, setting off a Balzac-ian chain of events, a web of interconnections that started propelling and surrounding me.

I say this because I first came across Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North in the NYRB catalogue quite a few years ago, but for some reason, I let it remain on my wish list. I read everything about its status as a post-colonial Arabic classic, but until I read James Wood’s piece on Naipaul, I always kept putting it off for later, as if I needed to be entirely free of other desires, other literary organisms floating inside me before I partook of it. After Wood’s piece on Naipaul, though, I could not resist the pealing of the words colonial and post-colonial and ran towards the bell towers.

2020 was a bit late to be starting on the words colonial and post-colonial. This was because while I have been a student devoted only to literature, I did not do so within the walls and gardens of a university. They weren’t a part of the discourse around me. This does not mean that I was unaware of their implications. For decades now, I have been meeting my daily quota of reading about the state of the world in newspapers, magazines and journals from far and wide. But I was utterly unaware of myself as a subject in a post-colonial world. And so, it was only forty years after my birth that the words colonial and post-colonial took on an urgency in a way they had never before. They latched onto my feet like giant leeches in a swamp, immobilising me until I gave up and sank into them.

It was thus that I came to Salih’s Season of Migration to the North in January 2020 after finishing the article by Mishra & Saval and the essay by Wood. Until then, I had had many memorable firsts with books, but nothing happened to me quite the way it happened with Salih’s Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl. For the first time, I re-read a book immediately after I reached the last page. Everything about it enchanted me: its cyclical structure that kept expanding in ripples, bringing you in rather than moving you out, the effortlessness with which one is almost dropped into every scene as it unfolds, the set piece of the night of lights in the desert, and many more things, but it was the character of Mustafa Sa’eed that would not leave me.

When I started on Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul, The World Is What it Is,  right after Salih’s afsana of Mustafa Sa’eed, nothing struck me as unusual in the beginning, for it was a common occurrence in the colonies: Great Britain established a system of giving a handful of brilliant students from its colonies, probably less than five every year, a scholarship to study in the mother country. Naipaul spent most of his childhood trying to thread the eye of this needle, an eye that his maternal uncle had already found a way through. It was the only way up, the only way towards an existence with pride, dignity and a future. Everyone at school knew the select few who would make it to the hallowed portals. In Salih’s novel, Mustafa Sa’eed moves from Sudan to the UK in much the same way.

Mustafa Sa’eed is a ghost that Salih’s narrator keeps encountering through the recollections of various people after the former’s disappearance, recollections that corroborate Sa’eed’s own recounting of his childhood to the narrator: everyone, including his teachers, found him absolutely brilliant, especially the way English rolled off his tongue, while everyone else struggled. When asked by French about his friends in school, Naipaul said, I had no friends, only admirers! Guess who says the exact same thing? Mustafa Sa’eed!

Naipaul was a flesh and blood ontological doppelgänger for Mustafa Sa’eed. A para-literary phenomenon if there ever was one! Come to think of it, it was not an improbable occurrence. It was bound to happen, given the way the system was set up.

Both make it to England and find a few people positively predisposed towards helping out our young scholars from the colonies, but both do not accept the seat at the table. Both do not stay put. They start wandering around the world. Sa’eed returns to Sudan after committing a crime and serving time. In his farewell letter to the narrator, who, like Sa’eed, has returned after receiving an education abroad, Sa’eed asks him to take care of his two young boys. He asks him to protect them from the seeds of wanderlust. For Naipaul, a return to Trinidad was out of the question. But he did not stay put in England. He became a reporter at large of sorts, roaming continents to churn out some fiction and plenty of non-fiction.

As I reached the end of French’s story of Naipaul’s life, Sa’eed had slipped out of the back door. The literary creation had been wholly replaced by his real-life counterpart, and it was just me and Naipaul left in the room‚ in the room that had now, during the pandemic, become the whole of my universe.

But it was not French’s biography alone that made Naipaul loom large in my head, for non-fiction can only do so many things.

II: Indar

In March 2020, as soon as I finished the French biography, I picked up Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Over the next few months, I re-read A Bend In The River twice and bought another copy, the Everyman’s Library edition.

And each time I read the book, I felt the unsteady ground under the feet of the Indians living there, in the nameless African country: Salim and the couple, Shoba and Mahesh. Right from the first sentence, there is a tension on the page that I have rarely seen any writer conjure up with such an economy of words.

Where did the roots of this precariousness of emigrant existence that Naipaul created lie? A precariousness that he wonderfully amplifies by contrasting it with the growing sure-footedness of the young local boy who comes to the town to study at the lycée and is placed under Salim’s tutelage by his mother, a regular customer of the former.

The condition that Naipaul manages to telegraph through the situation of the Indians stems from the questions that arose in his mind when he first travelled to an Africa in flux and encountered Indians there. What in the world are these people doing here running these random small businesses? Who in the world will look out for them here? 

In his short visits to the African continent during that turbulent time, he would have sensed the situation of the Indian community there, but it is remarkable that from such a short visit, one can produce a work of such intensity. But maybe that is what separates a work of non-fiction from literature: the former requires tons of fieldwork to unearth plausible, if not defensible, answers, whereas the latter requires one to work the field of one’s own person and imagination to unearth plausible, if not defensible, questions. But even so, a writer is always pulling out a novel from their own rib, so something of the rib must be in the novel.

There are people in our lives against whom we are always measuring ourselves. Their presence or absence in the quotidian of our lives and the nature of our kinship with them are always beside the point. They squat in a corner in our heads, and we debate every psychological stance we take, apropos of the position they will take in response to it. And it can happen that these squatters might not even think of us, most of the time, the way we do about them. It is we who are constantly making moves on their behalf across an imaginary chessboard.

For Salim, the person who remains the axis around which his ego revolves is Indar, a childhood friend from his hometown in another part of Africa. Unlike Salim, who moves to another part of Africa to take over a small shop, Indar, like Mustafa Sa’eed and Naipaul, aces the exams and goes to the mother country to study. Salim meets him again in the town at the bend of the river. Indar, dressed impeccably, is now a consultant for an outfit that is an international not-for-profit think-tank of sorts and is working with the government to set up a university that would help create an educated class to lead and negotiate their countries’ way out of the perceived darkness. Indar says that since he has an education and has no side, an Indian born and raised in Africa, everyone can use him whichever way they please. Indar says, All I want to do now is to win and win and win. 

Many pages later, in the scene that had me by the scruff of the neck, Indar describes how after the outfit folded and he was adrift trying to find other such projects worthy of him, he visits the New York home of one of the Americans, who was instrumental in getting him to take up working for the former outfit. The wealth in the house is beyond what Indar could have ever imagined belonging to this man. He had imagined them colleagues (and equals) and shared many confidences with the man, unaware that the latter operated from many rungs above in wealth and power. By the time Indar gets out of the fancy elevator and is out in the street, he is shattered, which is the last we hear about him in the novel.

Those two scenes sank into my consciousness like a red-hot brand into a horse’s hind. Indar made such an impact on me because, in French’s telling, he was the character who was the stand-in for Naipaul. Indar never feels at ease in post-war, post-Windrush London, just as Naipaul never did. Naipaul had dictated the final scene to his wife, Pat, over the course of an inspired night.

III: Paterfamilias

Maybe because I read his obituary first, even though that is the farthest from what Saval’s and Mishra’s n+1 piece is, or maybe because I followed up the obit with French’s biography, with Salih’s Season…sandwiched between them, I was no longer just reading the book in front of me.

I was constantly travelling back and forth between Trinidad and Africa, between Sa’eed and Vidia, and between Salih and Naipaul, but most of all, I kept going back into the world of Naipaul’s childhood. I could easily imagine the parallel lives he led: the life at school, the ambition to leave, the aspiration to become a writer, and the poverty of the circumstances governing the everyday life of his family, the Naipauls, of whom the most tragic one seemed to be Seepersad, his father.

While it might not matter to the people themselves, I always feel most depreciated when I read these mutilated versions of Indian names, names with spellings such as Seepersad. In River of Fire, Hyder says that the British never really bothered to learn the names of the locals; they never really bothered to twist their tongues — I don’t give a toss! I’ll call you whatever I please; I’ll spell it whichever way I please! What is in a name, you ask? A name is an entire cosmogony, a part of an epic of a particular people, of how their world came into being.

I felt so much for Seepersad. Coming from where he did, the son of indentured slaves from India dropped onto the Caribbean coast, slaves who laboured tirelessly in the sugarcane fields, slaves who made rice and dal and saved up whatever they could, he was a man who taught himself to read and write English, a man whose first writing gig was to paint signboards. From there, he somehow worked his way into writing for the local edition of The Guardian and dreamt of being a writer.

That in itself seems like an achievement: to be able to dream of being a writer in the English language in that milieu, from that history. A dream that remained unfulfilled. His sense of his own self as a reader and his aspirations of becoming a writer had no place in the lived reality of his life.

In his now-up-now-down career as a journalist, Seepersad wrote articles about Hindu life in Trinidad. Articles in which he lampooned the outmoded rituals and superstitions of the community and its ways. And when he had gone too far with a particular article, his wife and her extended family made him perform a goat sacrifice, not in the suit that he wore to the office, but bare-chested and in a dhoti, while the goat roamed around in a garland.

I imagine how Vidia would have felt when he turned the incident over in his head almost forty years later after discovering it in the back copies of The Guardian, which had reported the incident. The emasculation of his Pa, both by his mother’s family and the ersatz Hindu cultural mores, would have left him frothing at the mouth.

Despite his financial security being contingent on the dregs thrown towards him by his wife’s family, dregs paid for with interest through degradation of the soul, a literary soul at that, Seepersad had enough ambition and determination to bring out a book of his own, a small collection that for all practical purposes sank without a trace.

I was wrecked with emotion while reading snatches of his correspondence with his beloved Vido, who was now in England, separated by an ocean from him, but was closer than ever to fulfilling both of their vocations — to be a writer in the English language — a fulfilment Seepersad would never live to see.

Don’t be scared of being an artist…One cannot write well unless one can think well.

This is the time I should be writing the things I so long to write. This is the time for me to be myself. When shall I get the chance? I don’t know. I came home from work, dead tired. The Guardian is taking all out of me — writing tosh, what price salted fish and things of that sort.

I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.

One of Vidia’s replies:

I have always admired you as a writer. I am convinced that, were you born in England, you would have been famous and rich and pounced upon by the intellectuals.

The creation of literature demands distance and proximity. Distance to delineate natures, nurtures, and destinies, and proximity to the tragedies and madnesses lurking under the skin. I thought of the first time that Vido might have fully apprehended the arc of his Pa’s life, the first time he fully comprehended its tragedy: was it day, was it night, was it sitting by a window, was it sitting by a window many nights in a row, was he holding the urn that Pa sent him as a gift and that came into his hands only after Pa’s death?

Vidia acknowledged and embraced his patrimony — Gurudeva and other Indian Tales by Seepersad Naipaul — with pride and tenderness. He said, I knew I had been given a feeling for language, and it was very beautiful, and it was my own epic.

And it was from that epic and with the passage of time that I suppose Naipaul found the voice and the distance to view his father’s life through the lens of literature and baste it in the comic to write the book that made him — A House for Mr Biswas. He had no other option but to transmute the tragedy of his father’s life into a comedy, or else it would not have become literature.

I can imagine why Naipaul held such importance for Nikil and Pankaj. Imagine being from where he was, arriving in England, and through sheer will becoming the finest writer in the English language.

IV: Salih and Naipaul

Having gone to the mother country, having tasted success there, though belatedly and after a lot of hardship, and of a kind that perhaps only marginally changed his financial conditions, Naipaul refused to play the role of a representative of the Third World. By his own account, despite acquiring a cultural cache and a large circle of friends, Naipaul never felt a sense of security; his unease only increased despite the generosity he received.

Unlike his predecessor in the UK, Nirad C. Choudhari, he did not settle into the comfortable environs of a renowned university and become a part of a commonwealth of intellectuals. And unlike his successors, he neither embraced the role of the celebrity author in the first world nor chose the role of an activist in the third world.

I think he could never accept the idea of himself and his works as belonging to the Commonwealth. He did not want to be appropriated by the former master. A scholarship candidate, he was, in a sense, living on their dole. So he did his best not to appear domesticated by their charity and guilt. He chose to be a gadfly, always ready to snap, snarl and bite everyone at the table, revelling in the power betoken, at least at dinner, to a man of letters. He preferred to be seen as wild and feral, ranging far and wide, only to return briefly with a book in his mouth.

No one knows whether this refusal to fit in and be embraced as a writer was a matter of principle or a matter of temperament or a bit of both. It is easy to put it down to temperament, and maybe it is, but it is also illuminating to compare his relationship with the society and power systems he moved into with Salih’s equation with the same society and systems.

Born three years apart, Salih and Naipaul would have arrived in London around the same time and published their first works a few years apart. But unlike Naipaul, Salih was not a man at odds with the world. Wiki says: for more than ten years, Salih wrote a weekly column for the London-based Arabic language newspaper; he worked for the BBC’s Arabic Service and later became director general of the Ministry of Information in Doha, Qatar; he spent the last ten years of his working career, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where he held various posts and was UNESCO’s representative for the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

It would be lazy to infer from this that Salih was an establishment man or that he embraced the mother country. The only inference that can be drawn is that he wasn’t at odds, or rather, he wasn’t at odds enough to stop him from working and staying put.

Salih’s creation Sa’eed, though, cannot stay put — given his brilliance, he too gets posts similar to Salih’s — but eventually, he comes undone and heads back to a village by the Nile, the village that the narrator’s family had belonged to for generations. Was Sa’eed, Salih’s alter ego, who did what Salih could not? Or was Sa’eed a stand-in for a particular type of scholarship candidate from the colonies who inevitably came crashing down?

Unlike Naipaul’s Bend…, Salih’s Season…, is flawless. I must have read it at least five times in the last three years, and I have no doubt that it is the canonical text of post-colonial literature purely because of its literary merit. It is not easy to mix politics, ethics and aesthetics, and few have done it with such precision, economy, and delicacy. My favourite portions, though, have nothing to do with the politics but the sense of belonging that the narrator feels after returning to his village by the Nile seven years after leaving to study in England. The sense of belonging to the many moods of the river, to the sayal tree, to the families that have for generations stayed in the village along with his own, and most of all, his grandfather:

I lingered by the door as I savoured the agreeable sensation which precedes the moment of meeting my grandfather whenever I returned from a journey: a sensation of pure astonishment that this ancient being is still in actual existence upon the earth’s surface. By the standards of the European industrial world, we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather, I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. 

 You were born in Trinidad?

I was born there, yes. I thought it was a great mistake.

Naipaul to an interviewer in 1983.

Trinidad was not Naipaul’s country. Come to think of it, could it have been any other way? Naipaul was not born in the bosom of Indian civilisation. He was the descendant of indentured labourers who, oceans away from their motherland, were trying to set up a mimic Indian community under the yoke of colonialism. His childhood under the vice-like grip of his maternal grandmother was as far as could be from the word idyllic. And on top of it were the financial frailties of the Naipauls, which take up large parts of French’s book:

One day when Vido was coming home from school, he took shelter from the rain. ‘It was a custom of the place, if it begins to rain, you can go to the veranda of any house — just one of those civilities which we took for granted and didn’t fully understand. So I went to a house. It was a Negro house, not far from where we lived, and I heard them talking about us. About how we were all crowded in that little house, and I was so ashamed.’  

It is no wonder that Naipaul was a man at odds and Salih was not.

V: The Indian Writer in English (IWE) in England

…I was working very hard at keeping affection for him. I’d liked him very much when he was young because he was so clever and funny…He was this little, very shy person and I was delighted by his stories.

…I admired him enormously. What was wonderful was that he’d made himself – he’d set out to be a writer and he had done it. He must have had an instinct for it, but it was very deliberate. And of course I always liked his work but I began to dislike him more and more as a person, because of how he was about his wife, Pat…

…He was so moody and depressive. You only had to look at his face to see that he was genuinely suffering a lot of the time.

These are the words of Diana Athill, a celebrated editor who played a large part in bringing Naipaul’s initial works to the world.

The eighteen-year-old kid who arrived in England in 1950, the young man whose first book came out in 1957, and the man who created his masterpiece at twenty-nine have nothing to do with the man whom Diana Athill began to dislike more and more.

The shame and self-hatred in Naipaul are immense. The hatred of the self, however, does not stop at the self. It grows and grows and grows, transforming everything that it encounters. It rages and rages and rages, seeking an outlet outside of the self until it eventually finds an other to hate, an other that for the self is the very devil, the devil that is the reason for its fall from paradise. Once the hate is externalised, everything becomes easy — the only thing that needs to be done is to exterminate the devil.

The devil that created the circumstances that forced his forbearer aboard the Hereford and onto the shores of Trinidad was plain for everyone to see.

But that would’ve been too easy, for he wasn’t looking for answers solely for his specific condition. He was looking for answers that explained the abjectness he encountered in his motherland on his many travels here. He needed a more ancient monster, and he sure found one. His pronouncements post the 1992 destruction are still remembered among the educated bigots, his words legitimising their very real revenge for wounds so distant as to be imaginary.

One can see the transition of Naipaul from a young, likeable man who wrote piercingly astute books that laid bare the veins under the skin of a world changed by colonisation and migration — books that showed what happens when you take a body politic and infuse blood from all over the world into it from vials that have crossed the ocean not in search of knowledge but in search of bread, even if it was given along with the lash of a whip — to the irascible, sulphur-tongued, misogynistic, woman-beating bigot that he later became.

The reasons for the rage and self-hatred are all legitimate. One can be angry at the cards dealt by history and genealogy. Entire generations from the Global South have been dealt the same deck of cards. But there is no justification for his descent into bitterness and bigotry.

And for this, I could not find a path back to his childhood. As the first male child, he was loved and doted upon by his entire family: the boy had to study hard and get a scholarship to England, so he had to be given the eggs.

The only explanation is a malformed ego that feeds on feelings of inadequacy, feelings of smallness at one’s place in the larger scheme of things, feelings amplified by accounts of the grandeur of times past, accounts that the malformed ego equates with the rightful grandeur owed to its own self and which then proceeds to set off on a horse towards the past, a sword dangling from its hips.

In the early eleventh century, King Vidhiadhar had fought against Mahmud of Ghazni, the infamous invader who attacked and plundered India seventeen times. Almost a millennium later, Naipaul would say, ‘It’s such a grand name, a very special name — I cherished it for that reason. I think great things were expected of me.’