Bounty Of Barbs

 

- Shoma Chaudhury

CURIOUSLY, when history looks back on him, perhaps the thing we will be most grateful for is that Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was not built for the faint-hearted. As a man, he was famously short on skin and fanatically intolerant of fools. Talking to him was like tap-dancing on a minefield. You were always surrounded by imminent detonation. Over the past few days, since his passing, tributes and assessments alike have been awash with anecdotes of his sonorous assassinations. Writers he savaged. People he disdained. Self-perceptions he chopped for supper. All of it executed with his peculiar brand of music: phrases uttered in triplicates. As he told a hapless writer he once gave an award to: “You must promise never to write again. You must promise, you must promise, you must promise.”

The year of his Nobel Prize, at a gathering in Neemrana Fort, he immortally dismissed writers Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sahgal for their banality, told the American ambassador’s wife she must leave, then retreated in a huff into a circle of friends, ordering that none of them should go to the US embassy dinner being held in his honour. Writer Ved Mehta, who could not see, unfortunately walked into that citadel and, unaware that Sir Vidia was sitting there, asked: “Do you think Naipaul has become a mega­ lomaniac?” It took a daylong stream of cajoling authors to woo him back to his seat. Finally, it was Vikram Seth who managed to smoke him out.

Sir Vidia, the man, was marked by this capacity for the comedic and catastrophic, the petty and the prickly, the simmering and the sulky. As Paul Theroux found out to his heartbreak, signed copies of books given to a friend could wind up in an auction. Editors and agents, loyal for decades, found they could be flung aside in an instant. As could a wife.