Writing to Vido:

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (August 17, 1932–August 11, 2018), Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, was a Trinidad-born writer whose work delved deeply into themes of identity, displacement, and post-colonial life. His most celebrated works include A House for Mr Biswas, Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River, and Guerrillas. Honoured with the Nobel Prize, David Cohen Prize, Trinity Cross, and a knighthood, Naipaul remains one of the greatest writers in English literature.

Yesterday, to mark Sir Vidia Naipaul’s 92nd birthday, the Friends of Mr Biswas, founded by Prof Ken Ramchand to preserve Naipaul’s homes and legacy, hosted a special event at NALIS.

The evening featured fictional readings inspired by Naipaul’s works, stirring performances, and a provocative talk by Prof Ramchand titled “Did Naipaul Hate Trinidad?”

Trinidadian writers were invited to write fictional birthday letters to VS Naipaul.

This letter was written by Ira Mathur and includes an excerpt she read at the event yesterday.

Dear Sir Vidia, Happy Birthday.

I still burn with shame when I recall our first meeting in April 1990. It made me agree with T S Eliot: “April is the cruellest month.”

As a starry-eyed rookie reporter for NBS Radio 610, I found myself at Piarco airport on one of my first assignments, interviewing you alongside Judy Raymond, an Express columnist, Maxie Cuffie, and then a journalist. That Sunday, my embarrassment deepened when I read Judy Raymond’s sharp and brilliant account of the encounter in the Sunday Express. Raymond, now a writer of note, had thankfully not named me—she simply called me “610 girl.”

I quote from her April 15, 1990 column, Waiting for Vido.

“By 5.30, we were wondering if Sir Vidia hadn’t already sneaked past us to do his duty-free shopping and board the plane. It was after six when we were summoned back into the VIP lounge to press the knightly flesh. First, he berated us for not having known that the press conference would start late.

“Why did you wait so long?” he demanded. We took that to be a rhetorical question.

In response to a preliminary inquiry about what he had been doing during his stay, he launched into what for a moment seemed to threaten to become a hypochondriac’s monologue on his health; the famous Brahmin sensibilities were showing. Maxie received the lengthiest and most thoughtful answers and concluded that this was evidence of chauvinism. But it so happened that it was Maxie who asked him about race and politics; although we had all thought of and pooled those questions during our wait, the 610 girl and I asked him about bookish and personal matters.

I got off lightly. In response to the 610 girl, he claimed, “I know nothing about the Rushdie affair.”

The 610 girl persevered. When she asked whether he was preparing to return to England and felt he was going home, he asked whether she did not think that was a shallow question.

She said she did not and that she had asked it because she sometimes felt “trapped between two worlds.” He repeated the phrase, exclaiming: “What language!” Another question elicited, “My goodness!”

She asked whether he thought West Indians in England were happy: “Do you think they’re happy?” he replied.

She had, she said, really only seen them in Tube stations. “Did they look happy when you saw them in the Tube stations?” he asked. “Was it a cold day?”

I had asked how he felt about being written about: he never read any of it, he said. The 610 girl pursued this line. Asked about varying reports that he had grown more bitter or more mellow, he mused: perhaps he was both; was he mellowly bitter, more bitterly mellow? Then, his patience wore thin. “What do they mean? What do they mean?” he snapped. “They’re just throwing words around.”–End of quote.

Now for some quick news. Prof Ken Ramchand and his NGO Friends of Mr Biswas have saved your father’s house on 26 Nepaul Street in St James, transforming it against all odds into a heritage home for your family.

The Lion House, in Chaguanas, your mother’s home, which you made famous as Hanuman House in A House for Mr Biswas, is a wounded creature waiting for its final collapse. The walls have alarming branching cracks, and tree-like bushes are shooting up through its foundation structure, the earth reclaiming the space. Your family is deadlocked over what to do with the house. It can’t be sold or donated.

If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’d recognise this letter as a woman’s writing—after all, you once claimed you could tell within a paragraph or two. You famously dismissed most women writers, including Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, and Toni Morrison, as inferior.

Perhaps you’d forgotten that you also admitted your late wife, also a woman, Patricia Ann Hale, was your most trusted reader. You didn’t spare yourself in your pursuit of the truth as you saw it, admitting that she became a victim of your cruelty, neglect, and infidelity as she was dying of cancer. “It could be said that I had killed her,” you confessed to your biographer, Patrick French.

I was shocked at my own laughter when I saw you during a BBC interview responding to an interviewer who asked you what the dot on an Indian woman’s forehead means. You answered that it meant that “I don’t have a brain.” You had to rip things into pieces to understand them.

Your biographer, the late Patrick French, wrote that your life “was one of perpetual exile and displacement, driven by a profound sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction.”

This restlessness, evident in your writing, seems to me a mirror of your struggles—your grappling with identity, belonging, and the deep wounds inflicted by a world that you often viewed with disdain.

French observed, “Naipaul’s greatest fear was of being ‘second-rate,’” a fear that haunted you throughout your life, pushing you to achieve literary greatness. This fear has been your gift and your curse. It drove you to produce works of unparalleled brilliance yet led you to push away Trinidad, the world you knew best.

You wrote so many books on Trinidad. Miguel Street humorously captures life in Port-of-Spain, The Mystic Masseur follows a teacher’s rise to power, and The Suffrage of Elvira satirises local elections. A House for Mr Biswas tells of one man’s fight for independence, and The Mimic Men explores exile and alienation.

In The Mimic Men, you wrote, “We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others.” This line resonates and captures the essence of how your own view of yourself was shaped by the expectations and judgements of others—expectations that you both rebelled against and internalised. Your need to prove yourself and be seen as “great” often led you to measure your worth against impossible standards, leaving little room for compassion for yourself or others.

As French wrote, you were “haunted by the ghosts of your own insecurities and doubts.” Your harshness towards the world and your biting critiques seem to me a way of coping with the pain you carried—a pain rooted in the complexities of your identity, your displacement, and your desire to be more than the world expected of you and everything your father expected. You’d be glad to know that your father’s stories and journalism were finally published by Peepal Tree Press in 2024, titled Seepersad Naipaul, Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953.

Of your father Seepersad’s death, you once wrote in The New Yorker that we are never finished with grief, that it is inescapable and proportionate to love.

Sixty years later, you found comfort in ys belief that your father, ever the humorist, was having a good laugh at the family’s grief.

You drew on this idea to console yourself when your beloved cat, Augustus, died.

You wrote, “My idea was that Augustus was considering everything in the house that no longer held him; he was considering everything and working out how he should respond intelligently.”

I like to think you’re doing that today, considering things among us all.

Of Augustus, you wrote, “A cat only has itself,” clearly approving of its self-containment.

But you didn’t just have yourself, you know. Your whole life, you railed against things and hurled towards writing, which is, after all, ultimately a way of speaking to the world—your life work.

On your birthday, I remember that meeting from so long ago and think you were almost not worth the wait, but your books will be worth everything long after all of us gathered here have joined you, where you’ll be laughing with your father, and Augustus will continue to consider everything.

Yours sincerely,

Ira Mathur

Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days. Website: www.irasroom.org

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