Blast from the past: When Sir VS Naipaul enthralled the Zee Jaipur Lit Fest crowd

Speaking to Naipaul about his life and writings was Farrukh Dhondy, his long-time friend and eminent British novelist and scriptwriter, even as his wife, Lady Nadira, sat in a chair behind him, taking notes, holding the microphone when he became too tired to hold it, and prompting the words when he forgot what he was saying or ran out of steam. 

He may be old or ill, but Naipaul hasn’t run out of steam or his sense of droll. “I don’t like to talk about sunsets,” he told Dhondy who suggested, by way of opening line, that they pretend there were sitting in their homes in England, sipping wine and looking at the birds at sunset. “It can be used against me to infer that I am in the sunset of my life. Unhappy metaphor,” Naipaul replied, much to the amusement of the full house at the Rajnigandha Front Lawns. 

The conversation, with Dhondy filling in every time Naipaul’s memory of events or anecdotes seemed to fail him, ranged over how Naipaul came to be born in Trinidad (“I can assure you I had nothing to do with it,”), to how he came to be a writer, his early comic novels set in the Caribbean, the Caribbean authors he admires and the ones he doesn’t, and India, a subject on which Naipaul has written three books - An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977) and India: A Million Mutanies Now (1990). 
All three books were hugely controversial when they came out, with Indian readers taking exception to Naipaul’s unsparing critical eye that homed in on the chaos and dysfunction on the streets, the filth and “public nuisance”, and the venal hypocrisy of the politicians.

Speaking now, Naipaul says the title “area of darkness” was not a description of India, but a reference to the “dark place”, a place that he had never seen but one that had been a presence all his life. As such, Naipaul said he was bewildered by the reaction. “It was written with a desire to be true to the visual facts. I learnt to live with it.” To which his wife added the story about how Naipaul’s mother, who only knew the one Hindi word beta, had told him not to worry about the Indians. “Leave India to the Indians beta,” she is supposed to have told him.

Modesty or hindsight, Naipaul also seemed keen to demystify the “great writer” myth. Writing, he claimed, was as “hard for me as it is for most people in the audience. His writing, and the success of his books, he said, were a “great bit of luck”. His first book he wrote, Miguel Street, he said, he’d taken to an English critic who told him to give it up and do something else. The only reason he’d stuck to writing was his “inordinate confidence and faith in my talent. I felt that if I didnt stay true to my talent that would be the end of me”.