Indian Writing

…one of the voices of a generation of middle-class Indian youth facing the choices and frustrations that come with the prospect of growing wealth.

Outlook has this extract from Patrick French’s new book about V.S.Naipaul. Here is Minoo Bhandara, a Parsi newspaper columnist who ran Pakistan’s only brewery, on his first meeting with the visiting writer:

“…I picked him up from the airport. He was standing there sullenly and I said, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ He went, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ I took him around for a few days. I had no idea he was romantically involved. Nadira was a good friend of mine, a journalistic butterfly. She was a chirpy little thing, bright, known to a lot of important people…. I mentioned that my sister was a novelist, Bapsi Sidhwa, but he wasn’t interested. When I asked him who his favourite writers were he said, ‘My father.’ Later I sent a letter to him in England, but didn’t get a reply. A friend of mine said maybe my letter contained grammatical mistakes….”

Also note Nadira’s description of how Naipaul proposed:

“When the party was coming to an end, Nadira heard that a girlfriend of Mazdak’s had been present, and an argument began. While she was screaming at him at around 3 am, the telephone rang and a voice said, “Is Margaret there? I have to speak to her.” “Margaret who?” asked Mazdak, and Nadira snatched the telephone, realising who was on the other end. “Come now to the hotel, I need to talk to you,” said Vidia. She refused, but agreed to come at 8.30. Nadira went to bed, furious, and when she arrived at the hotel a few hours later, Vidia was still wearing his clothes from the night before. In her recollection, “He looked wild. His hair was all over the place. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ He asked me not to go, and then he said, ‘Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?’ I knew Pat was dying and Margaret was finished…. It was not that I was trying to displace a dying woman and an old floozy…”

The rest, about Naipaul’s treatment of his wife and mistress, is even more sordid.

A Louise Gluck poem in the New Yorker.