The Other Naipaul August 26
Naipaul waves to me at the front gate of our parking lot and laughs. He generally laughs when we meet, and I have little doubt that the joke is on me. After the earthquake the other day, when the power was out, he found me in a darkened corridor with my headlamp beaming and, after his initial surprise, asked with a smirk if I was some kind of cave-dwelling miner. Today he is laughing at my feeble attempt to maneuverer my vehicle in a world where left is right, and right is wrong. When I return his wave, I practically crash my car into a royal palm, causing the gangly West Indian to slap his side convulsively.
My security guard is a cousin of Trinidad’s most illustrious author, VS Naipaul, who died last week in London of what some critics call terminal misanthropy. Most of the great author’s estranged family lives in my immediate neighborhood of Westmoorings, and apparently none of them has any plans to fly to England for the funeral of Vidia, as friends and loved ones called him, of whom he evidently had none. All agree that the Nobel laureate of the West Indies was a great writer but a terrible person.
I had just finished reading The Killings In Trinidad and The Return of Eva Peron, and I was beginning A Way In The World when Naipaul passed into the posthumous category. On the day that word of his death broke, I stood before a newsstand covered with his images in tabloid print—and a copy of his book in my hand. I stopped reading it from thereon, fearing irrationally that I was somehow connected to, or even complicit in, his very timely demise.
The fact is that Naipaul’s vision of a post-colonial wasteland hardly offers solace to a wide-eyed newcomer searching for cultural acceptance. Here is what Vidia (sure, why not?) had to say about my new neck of the woods:
“Trinidad’s urban northwest is a parasitic suburb, through which money is magically recycled. Much of the population is superfluous, and they know it. Unemployment is high but labor is perennially short. The physical squalor, the sense of a land being pillaged rather than built up, generates great tensions; cynicism is like a disease. Race is an irrelevance, but the situation is well suited to the hysteria and evasions of racial politics. And racial politics—preaching oppression and easy redemption, offering only the theory of the enemy, white, brown, yellow, black—have brought the society close to collapse.“
For escape, I choose to seek light in my backwards automobile—to find some friendly faces in the farmers market on Queen’s Park Savannah, which is the largest open space in the city. Perhaps I will tour the botanical garden while feasting on a street-food called “doubles“, a pair of delicious fried-dough tortillas filled with green-curried chickpeas. Then, with a happy stomach, I might sit near proud parents as they watch their kids practice soccer in the park on a sunny Saturday morning, while lemon-tailed corn-birds sing from the nutmeg and poinsettia trees. By taking these actions, I may even silence the poisonous Nobel laureate in a way that death cannot. Meanwhile, Naipaul merely laughs—then he opens the electric gate and sets me free.