The Other Naipaul Boy

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi April 15, 2008



At one of the older club libraries in Delhi, if you’re a patient browser, you might come across The Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers — Shiva Naipaul’s first two novels. The books are dusty, the pages stick together, silverfish scurry out from the spine in some alarm. The Fireflies was last borrowed in 1990, The Chip-Chip Gatherers in 1993.

Very few people read or remember Shiva Naipaul’s books today, and it is hard to find his work in bookshops. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, V S Naipaul’s younger brother was seen as gifted an author with a great deal of promise. He published The Fireflies at the age of 25 in 1970, The Chip-Chip Gatherers in 1972, and followed those up with two unusual exercises in journalism, North of South (1978) and Journey to Nowhere (1980).

His work seemed more fragmentary in the early eighties: there were collections of stories, essays, some journalism. It seemed as though Shiva Naipaul was drawing breath, preparing for a more ambitious work, but it never materialised. He was a heavy drinker, and perhaps that contributed to his heart attack in 1985. He was found at his desk by his son; Shiva Naipaul was only 40 years old.

I remember The Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers as well-turned but slight novels, and the passage of years has preserved them well without transmuting them into classics. Both were set in Trinidad; for both Naipauls, the island that one sought to escape and the other sought to explore was a necessary source of material. The Fireflies offered a haunting image to set against the plight of those who couldn’t get away: fireflies trapped in a bottle, casting a beautiful light, but unable to find an escape. The Chip-Chip Gatherers has often been compared to V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, to its detriment. It is clear from both novels, though, that Shiva had a way of seeing that was very much his own, and a fascination with the politics of identity that would never leave him.

For all the comparisons with his brother, and although he lived in Vidia’s shadow, Shiva was his own man, striving to find a voice that was not imitative. “It began as I was sitting at my desk, staring at a page of Chinese characters. It began when, for no reason I can fathom, a sentence came into my head. ‘The Lutchmans lived in a part of the city where the houses, tall and narrow….’”. That sentence, he wrote, took him a long way: “It gave me a reason to go on existing.”

His best writing would come from that fierce need to write himself into existence and to become “properly real”. When this drive, almost primal in its intensity, was married to his ability to step back and observe the world around him, Shiva Naipaul could produce alarmingly acute work. In North of South, he set out to explore the relationships between “black, brown and white” in Africa, to find out what ideas like “liberation” and “revolution” might mean to ordinary people.

He had a knack for the unusual encounter. In one, he is accosted by a shoeshine boy who presses a leather-damaging Deluxe Special polish on him. The episode rapidly moves from mildly funny to threatening, as the shoeshine man insists that Shiva owes him sixty shillings. “Why should he expect anyone to succumb?” Shiva writes in legitimate bewilderment, and then he finds his answer. It lies in the elaborate, typed rate card that the shoeshine man carries around with him: “The printed word imparted legitimacy; it invested — so far as he was concerned — patent absurdity with special substance.”

At every turn he meets with deception, suspicion, cheerful decay. He makes his travails sound engaging, he rarely vents his spleen. But he closes with a line that might have been written by his elder brother, down to the incantatory repetition of a phrase: “”Only lies flourished here. Africa was swaddled in lies — the lies of an aborted European civilization; the lies of liberation. Nothing but lies.”

Journey to Nowhere took him into the heart of the Johnstown massacre in Guyana: Shiva was not interested in the massacre as much as in its causes, the ideologies that drove a cult to commit mass suicide. It’s almost forgotten now, but it remains a startling and relentless exploration of cults and how they work.

At 40, Shiva had just begun to shake off his brother’s influence; there were fewer echoes of V S Naipaul in his work. Their interests had often overlapped. Now there was the sense that Shiva was heading elsewhere, but death intervened. Only one of the Naipaul boys is remembered today.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

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Rum till he die!

The other Naipaul, for all his brilliance, is hardly a good man.

VS's book A House For Mr. Biswas is the most brilliant work about my kind to date. I got goose bumps when I read the book.