A way with words
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.
