Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

1. Famous in Kampala

IT IS A GOOD THING that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness. But time passes, time’s torch illuminates, it finds connections, it makes sense of confusion, it reveals the truth. And you hardly know the oddness of life until you have lived a little. Then you get it. You are older, looking back. For a period you understand and can say, I see it all clearly. I remember everything.

It can be a brief passage, for a revelation. Only a few days after Julian first met him, he realized that what he had taken to be a smile on the face of U. V. Pradesh was really a look of exquisite, almost martyrlike suffering. The man’s whole name, Urvash Vishnu Pradesh, was the slushiest Julian had ever heard, a saliva-making name like a cough drop that forced you to suck your cheeks and rinse your tongue with sudsy syllables.

The fact that many people in Kampala had never heard of U. V. Pradesh made him more important in Julian’s eyes. He was said to be brilliant and difficult. He was smaller, more frenetic than any local Indian — the local Indians could be satirical, but they were sly. U. V. Pradesh’s face, tight with disapproval, gleamed in the Uganda heat. His hair was slick from his wearing a hat. Ugandan Indians didn’t wear hats, probably because Ugandan Africans sometimes did.

U. V. Pradesh seldom smiled — he suffered a great deal, or at least he said he did. Life was torture, writing was hell, and he said he hated Africa. He was afraid. Much later he explained to Julian that he felt intimidated by “bush people.” He had “a fear of being swallowed by the bush, a fear of people of the bush.” New to Uganda, U. V. Pradesh looked at the place with his mouth turned down in disgust. From some things he said about African passions and his own restraint, Julian had a sense in him of smothered fires.

Actually, U. V. Pradesh had reason to be afraid. The Kabaka of Buganda, Sir Edward Frederick Mutesa, whom Ugandans called King Freddy, was being threatened with overthrow and death by soldiers from the northern tribes. The mess came later, and was in turn buried by greater calamities that were much sadder and more violent even than U. V. Pradesh had predicted.

“Listen to me, Julian.”

Julian did nothing but listen, and he wanted U. V. Pradesh to call him Jules, as his family and friends did.

“Julian, this will go back to bush,” U. V. Pradesh said, sometimes in a scolding way, sometimes as a curse. And that suffering grimace again. He walked in the slanting sun of Kampala, his shadow like a snare. “All of it, back to bush.”

Sure of something, or pleased by the sound, he repeated the phrase, a verbal tic called bis. He was always sure, so his repetitions were frequent, a little chant and echo in his speech, still with the faintest singsong of the West Indies — U. V. Pradesh’s birthplace, the setting of many of his novels — lingering in the intonation.

Julian started out knowing nothing, not any of this, not even what the initials U. V. stood for, and it was only long after that he understood. He was too young to look back, and knew only the terror of always having to look ahead at the looming darkness, and instead of reassurance seeing uncertainty and awful choices, or no choices, and risk, and doubt, feeling afraid.

When Julian was young and he squinted at the big unreadable map of his life, even the magnificent light of Africa was no help. Yet he was hopeful. He felt he had what he wanted, and especially he had baraka, as they said in Swahili — good fortune, blessings. He was a teacher, but he spent most of his time writing. It did not matter to him that he was unknown in America. He was famous in Kampala.

“Be grateful for what you have, Jules,” his father had told him before he left home. “No one owes you a thing.”

It was wise advice for someone going to an African country. Julian felt lucky every time something good came his way, and luckiest of all his first full year in Uganda — his third in Africa. He had a good job, a reliable car, and a well-shaded house. Uganda was the greenest place he had ever seen. He was in love with an African girl. She was nineteen and he was twenty-four. He was at work on a novel. His life had at last begun.

The African girl, Yomo Adebajo, was Julian’s own height, nearly six feet, and slender, from a tall, stately tribe in Nigeria’s Western Region. Julian had been traveling there the year before. He invited her to East Africa and, just like that, she crossed Africa to join him. In Uganda, which was a hothouse of steamy gossip and expatriate scandals, their liaison was singled out — their not being married, their living together, their aloofness from others in Kampala, and the way she dressed. West Africans, rare in Uganda, were much more exotic than whites or Indians. Ugandan women wore skirts and dresses—“frocks” was their word — and Mother Hubbards, all drapes and frilly leg-of-mutton sleeves, oldfangled words for outdated fashions, designed by turn-of-the-century missionaries for the sake of modesty. Yomo stood out like a princess in a fable in her yellow and purple robes, her stiff brocade turban, and her sash that was woven with gilt thread.

This young woman had the dark, drugged eyes and sculpted face you see in certain bewitching bronzes from her region of Nigeria. In poor provincial Uganda she was taken to be an Ethiopian or an Egyptian—“Nilotic,” people said, believing her to be a visitor from the upper Nile, someone who, from her looks, might have arrived sitting upright, cross-legged, on a flying carpet.

Ugandans goggled at Yomo — they were smaller and had to look up — as though she were from some nation of the master race of blacks that lived beyond the Mountains of the Moon.

She just laughed at them and said, “These people in Uganda are so primitive.”

Yomo was even more sensual than she looked. When she and Julian made love, which was often and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child.

“Jules, give me a baby!”

“Why do you want one?”

“Because you are clever.”

“Who says?”

“Everyone says.”

He was well known in Bundibugyo; people said hello to him in Gulu and West Nile; he was famous in Kampala. Part of the reason was that he wrote recklessly opinionated pieces in the local magazine Transition. He defended the Indians, he mocked the politicians, he insulted the tea planters and the sugar barons. A white planter wrote to the magazine and said he would hit this man Julian Lavalle if he saw him in the street.

But the deeper reason for his fame in Kampala had nothing to do with his writing. It was the fact that he had been named in court, in a prominent divorce case, as the Corespondent, the delicate legal term for the outside party who fornicated in an adultery. He had been promised that nothing would be revealed, but the day after the case was heard, his name was published in the Uganda Argus. Everyone read it, and he was put down as a sneak and a rogue because the cuckold (called the Petitioner) was his best friend.

Julian had not laid a hand on this man’s wife (called the Respondent), though the friend swore Julian had done so repeatedly, as detailed in paragraph 5—“That on or about the 23rd day of August 1965 the said Respondent committed adultery with JULIAN HENRI LAVALLE (hereinafter called Corespondent) at Kampala”—and paragraph 6: “That from the 23rd day of August 1965 the said Respondent has frequently committed adultery with the said Corespondent on dates and at addresses unknown to the Petitioner save that some were in Kampala, Uganda, as aforesaid.”

There were more lies: “That the Petitioner has not in any way condoned the said adultery.” No, his best friend had said that if Julian wanted to make it true, and if this woman agreed, Julian could sleep with her all he wanted. And: “The Petitioner has not in any way been accessory to or connived at the said adultery.” No, he had urged it, he had set it up, he had begged Julian to connive with him. And: “That this Petition is not presented or prosecuted in collusion with the Respondent or the said Corespondent.” No, it was all collusion.

A disturbing knock on Julian’s door one day was that of an Indian solicitor’s clerk, who handed over a prettily made-up document. It was signed and sealed. The official seal of Uganda showed a native shield with wavy and dancetté divisions between the gules tincture, full sun argent above a native drum argent, crossed spears behind the shield, with two creatures shown, the dexter supporter a gazelle rampant and the sinister supporter a crested crane rampant. The compartment ground beneath the full achievement was strewn with native flora, and below that, Uganda’s motto on a scroll: “For God and My Country.”

The document was a Summons to Enter Appearance at the High Court of Uganda, signed by E. A. Oteng, the Acting Deputy Chief Registrar. It contained a warning. If Julian failed to enter an appearance by a specified date, the plaintiff — the Petitioner, his conniving friend — could proceed with the suit, and the judgment would be rendered in his absence.

“I wouldn’t ask just anyone to do this,” his friend had said. “I asked you because I respect you more than anyone else I know.”

Then the friend promised that nothing about the divorce case would appear in the newspaper. The ruse would remain a secret. So Julian agreed, and the two friends concocted the story of an adulterous relationship in order to speed the divorce. The man wanted to remarry. The woman wanted to enter an ashram in southern India. Fornication was unlawful, but Julian was much more a lawbreaker for his lies — in Uganda, connivance in such a case was a greater crime than adultery.

“Isn’t this Mr. Lavalle a friend of yours?” the magistrate had asked.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Some friend!”

The following morning, Julian’s name was published in the Argus. The tiny print in the “Court Proceedings” might as well have been a headline.

“These shenzi Africans let you down every time!” the friend said. Shenzi meant worthless. “I was a fool to trust those idiot typesetters on that shenzi paper!”

So Julian became notorious. This wickedness fit the image he had of the writer. Writers then were not the frequent and genial faces they are now in this age of promotion, when they are involved in the selling and distribution of their books — reading before a small, solemn throng of people you might mistake for early Christians at your corner bookshop; chatting to the bland man with fish eyes and lacquered hair on morning television; bantering on the radio or late at night with an interviewer, who is the authentic celebrity and the real reason for the vulgar and overfamiliar encounter.

Before this age of intense peddling, which is the selling of the author rather than the book, the writer was an obscure and somewhat mythical figure, inevitably a loner, the subject of whispers — an outlaw, an enigma, an exile. Writers were the more powerful for their remoteness and their silences; the name alone was the aura. In many cases, the author had no public face and all you knew was the work. Today the face is first, the book comes last. A writer then was gnomic, priestlike, a magician, not merely writing a book but making a world and creating a new language. This was when Julian was growing up, the fifties and early sixties. A writer was a hero.

In Kampala Julian was an upstart, known for his American brashness in this African town. He had an inkling of his impudence and considered it and thought: I am alone. I am making my own life. He had the freedom to do anything he wanted, but he had limited means. He saw himself staying in Africa, going deeper into the bush as the years passed, and finally setting up house somewhere beyond the Mountains of the Moon with Yomo, his Nigerian. He knew just the place, at a clearing near the village of Bundibugyo, in the shadow of the steep Ruwenzoris, in the damp mossy shade and vitreous greenness of the Ituri Forest, among the Mbuti Pygmies and the Bwaamba people, a small settlement on the Congo border in the heart of Africa.

He had made many visits there and loved it for its being unknown. The Verona Fathers at the Bundi mission just chuckled at the wilderness. They had long ago given up hope of a widespread conversion, and one priest in his mid-eighties working on a dictionary complained to Julian, reader confiding to reader, that the local Africans, Mbuti and Bwaamba alike, often contradicted each other on the definition or the precise pronunciation of a word. The language was uncertain. Ndongola was Creator — no, it was Gongora—wait a minute, it was Gangara. The old priest knew he would never finish his translation of the Gospels. But it hardly mattered. The priests had been there so long they had fallen under the spell of the Bwaamba and gone bush in many of their habits. They even chattered and procrastinated like the Bwaamba and the Pygmies. At least one priest had produced some of the coffee-colored children who played near the rectory and who filled Julian with the desire to see his own dark children playing on that frontier.

“These people are so primitive,” Yomo said, with her deep Nigerian laugh and haughty heavy-lidded eyes that made her beautiful. But she said she would go with him. She imagined that she and Julian would be the only true humans there. She also said that she would go anywhere with him, and he loved her for that. This small wet valley behind the mountains, hemmed in by the vastness of the eastern Congo, was an ideal place in which to vanish. It was not on any map, and so it was for Julian to draw the map. As a writer he wanted that most of all, a world of his own, and he could make it himself, basing it on this almost blank and inaccessible place. It was not Bundibugyo, it was near Bundibugyo, and where was Bundibugyo?

It suited Julian, trying to write, that he lived in a mostly illiterate republic. It did not matter that so few people could read. His secret was safe, the very act of writing was improbable, and he spoke to no one about it, because he had accomplished so little. He knew the worth of being famous in Kampala. Anyway, he was much better known for being a named adulterer than a published author. And Yomo, who knew the true story of the court case, found it a hilarious deception, of a Nigerian sort, and the better for there being no victim, except the law.

Yomo slept late, her black nakedness starkly mummified in white sheets, calling out “Julian!” and demanding a kiss, and kissing him, howling into his mouth, demanding a baby. Then he left to teach. After a few classes, he walked up to the Senior Common Room in the main building and had coffee and read the papers. He had lunch at home with Yomo, and then a nap, and she plucked off his clothes and they made love: “Give me a baby!” In the late afternoon he picked up his mail, went to the Staff Club, and drank until Yomo came by to have a drink and tell him dinner was ready. The Ugandan men flirted with Yomo, but when they got too explicit she said, “Fock you,” and they faded away.

The country was thickly forested, full of browsing elephants and loping giraffes, with soft green hills and yellowing savannah scattered with flat-topped thorn trees. The lakes were large. Lake Victoria was an inland sea. Even Uganda’s crops were pretty, for there was nothing lusher than a hillside of tea bushes, jade-colored with fresh leaves. Coffee plants looked brilliant and festive when the berries were ripe. The cane fields were dense, and for a reason no one could explain, the road past them, on the way to Jinja, was always carpeted with white butterflies, so thick at times that cars had been known to skid when their wheels crossed them. There were hippos wherever there was water, and there were crocs in the White Nile. At Mubende a witch tree was particularly malevolent, but an offering of a snakeskin or feathers served as counter-magic. An old smoky-brown skull mounted in the roots of a banyan tree at Mityana was so ominous no one dared remove it. The nail driven into the skull was not an afterthought but rather the cause of death. A prince had carried out the execution, but a king had ordered it. Uganda was a country of kings with extravagant titles — the Kabaka of Buganda, the Omukama of Toro, the Omugabe of Ankole, the Kyabazinga of Busoga — and all of them lived in fragile and tumbledown palaces surrounded by stockade fences of sharpened bamboo stakes.

Down the dusty roads Julian drove with Yomo, stopping in villages to talk to rural teachers. He was in the Extra-Mural Department, which required him to travel in remote parts of the country: in the north at Gulu, Lira, and Rhino Camp; in West Nile, where Yomo was taken to be a Sudanese; at Trans-Nzoia near Mount Elgon, a perfect volcano’s cone; to the border of Rwanda, where in the purple mist they saw a whole range of green-blue volcanoes.

Uganda had been a protectorate, not a colony, and had known such insignificant white settlement that there was no resentment against whites, and none had been hoofed out of the country as they had elsewhere in Africa. Muzungus were a curiosity, not a threat. Ugandans were proud of their kings, who were superior to any European — they had been more than a match for explorers as ingenious as Burton and for all foreign politicians. The lesson for missionaries was Uganda’s notoriety in having produced many of Africa’s first Christian martyrs, when King Freddy’s grandfather, Mutesa I, burned thirty of them alive. But these deaths only excited religious activity, and Uganda’s martyrology served as an inspiration to the missionaries who stalked the bush.

Indians were a separate category—muhindis, “Asians.” People muttered about them, but perhaps no more than Indians muttered about themselves, for they were divided between Muslims and Hindus, and they made jokes about each other, revealing some sense of insecurity. Many Indians seemed genuinely liberated from caste consciousness. Africans envied and disliked them for their supposed wealth and cliquishness. Indians regarded Africans as weak, unreliable, and backward “Hubshees,” which meant Ethiopians. Yet Indians also felt that Africans were unfairly privileged for their political independence, to which some Indians had contributed but from which they were excluded. Indians thought it was laughable that Westerners paid so much attention to Africans. Money given to Africans was money wasted. Indians and Africans were in constant contact, for Indians were shopkeepers and Africans were their customers. There were no marriages between the two groups. Each said the other smelled.

They were all colonials, Indian and African alike. Just a few years earlier they had all been singing “God Save the Queen.” Before each movie at the Odeon, on Kampala Road, there was a full minute’s footage of the Union Jack flapping in a stiff wind and a trooping-the-colors close-up of Queen Elizabeth on horseback, in a crimson tunic and black military beret. Now that was gone, though the memory was fresh. Some butcher shops labeled the poorer cuts “boys’ meat”—the stuff bought for servants to eat — and the “cook boy” might be a gray-haired man of sixty or more, and the “garden boy” another grandfather.

“The housegirl is hopeless,” Yomo said.

Yomo had the African monomania regarding diet. A country where pounded yam and palm wine were unobtainable was a Nigerian’s nightmare. She nagged on this subject effortlessly but with such passion that Julian was moved by how much she cared, how single-minded she could be on the subject of survival. She would be a good mother.

“The girl never heard of kola nuts!” Yomo said.

This housegirl was a married woman, thirty or so, with three kids whom Julian had allowed to play in the kitchen. Yomo exiled them to the back verandah.

“You said you liked kids,” Julian said.

“I want one of my own,” said Yomo. “Give me one.”

Two months of trying, at least twice a day, yet there was apparently no progress. Julian remained complacent. His luck so far had been wonderful. It seemed right to him to leave the matter of children to chance, as that priest on the Congo border had done. If Julian meddled or fretted, it would surely go wrong. Whatever happened would be right. He suggested that Yomo go to his Indian doctor, but she procrastinated. From her various oblique remarks, always referring to bush clinics in Yorubaland, Julian suspected that she was afraid of doctors.

Yomo did not know what to make of his Indian friends, could not understand a word they said; nor could they understand the way she talked. But she was patient. She sat and smiled and afterwards she always said, “They are so oggly!” She also said that Indian men smelled of Indian food, and Indian women of coconut oil.

The Indians in Uganda, despairing of India, loved living in East Africa — loved the weather, the mangoes, the empty roads, the greenery, and especially loved the parks where they promenaded every Sunday, airing their women and letting their children run. They put walls around their houses. The walls worked; the walls kept them private. There was profit everywhere, there was space. In many ways Uganda the republic resembled Uganda the British protectorate. Institutions worked well — the post office, the telegraph, the police, the railway trains, the ferries on Lake Victoria.

One day when Julian was talking with Indians about India, one of them mentioned U. V. Pradesh. It was the first time Julian had heard the name.

“You want to know the difference between East African Indians and the babus in India?” this man, Desai, said. “Read Mother India by U. V. Pradesh.”

No one knew what the initials stood for. The initials gave the name a blunt, impersonal sound, like a weighty name you might see lettered on the door — a large door that was closed — of someone in authority you were anxiously waiting to see: a dentist, a headmaster, an inspector, someone unfriendly, possibly intimidating. That was how the name seemed to Julian, unconsoling, and so far the name was everything.

Whenever a book was recommended to Julian by someone whose intelligence he respected, he read it. Mother India was a book he took to immediately. He skipped to the portrait of the East African Indian, in the chapter “Degrees.” This man was a liberated soul, a free spirit in Africa, but on a visit back to India he was lost, encumbered and bewildered by caste prejudice. Julian recognized the man, he trusted the book, and then he read the whole thing from the beginning. It was skeptical, tender, comic, complex, and the narrative voice was never raised, never hectoring, always finding the connection and the paradox. The dialogue was beautifully chosen and always telling. Yet U. V. Pradesh was only a name. At one point he made a reference to “my companion,” but that only confused the issue. “Companion” could not have been more ambiguous, and it also looked like deliberate concealment.

“You are still reading that book, Jules!” Yomo made his name sound like “Jewels.” She was stretched out on the couch, an odalisque, knees apart, touching herself, deliberately trying to shock him.

“I like it, so I’m reading it slowly.”

“Come over here and bring your friend and give me a baby.”

She said no more than that, but the way she said it and stroked herself did shock him, and tempted him. He loved her for being able to speak directly to his body, and she seldom failed to get a hook into his guts.

So life went on. Yomo waited for him to finish work and they were together the rest of the time. She laughed at the Ugandans for being primitive. They stared at her with bloodshot eyes. Julian wrote poems and worked on his novel and took George Orwell’s and U. V. Pradesh’s essays as his models for nonfiction. On weekends he gathered up Yomo and they headed into the bush.

“Always the bush,” she said.

“I like the bush.”

Every morning he was in Kampala, he had coffee in the Senior Common Room. All the lecturers and staff sat there in shorts and knee socks, like a lot of big boys, yakking. He read the Argus—now he was a peruser and student of the Court Proceedings. He drank coffee. He read his mail. In a country where telephones were rare and unreliable and no one phoned overseas, the arrival of the mail was an important event.

One day, a man named Haji Hallsmith sat heavily on the sofa next to Julian in the Senior Common Room. The exertion was intended to call attention to himself. His proper name was Alan, but he had converted to Islam in order to marry a Punjabi. The young woman’s brothers had objected, given Hallsmith a severe beating, and spirited the woman away, and all that remained of the adventure was the religion and his nickname, though he had not gone on the haj.

His face fattening with mockery, his eyes glassy, Hallsmith leaned towards Julian, who could see that he was drunk, could smell it too, the tang of waragi, banana gin.

“What’s in that cup?” Julian said.

Hallsmith laughed. He had probably been on a bender and was still drunk from the previous night, drinking coffee now to prepare himself for a class. He was a lecturer in the English Department.

“Just coffee.”

“You’ve been drinking more than coffee,” Julian said. “I think waragi, mingi sana.”

“So what?” Hallsmith said with a drunkard’s truculence.

“Isn’t that against your religion?”

“Drinking is sanctioned, except during prayers!” Hallsmith shouted.

Perhaps from the effort of summoning the strength to speak, he belched and brought up a mouthful of air, more banana stink.

“Do you know about U. V. Pradesh coming?” he asked.

Julian said that he didn’t but that he was pleased. He was more excited than he let on, not merely because he had just read Mother India, but because he had never met such an esteemed writer, one of the powerful priestly figures whom he thought about all the time.

The larger world was elsewhere, and the little town and university were seldom visited. Occasionally experts flew in — the Pygmy specialist, the cautious economist, the elderly architect, the agitated musicologist; never a poet, never a novelist.

People from beyond Africa were welcome. The expatriates needed company, for they had no society. They needed visitors and witnesses to bring them news of the outer world, to listen to their stories — because the expatriates were sick of listening to each other, irritated more by the sameness of the stories than the lies and liberties in them — and most of all they needed strangers to measure themselves against.

“I’ve ordered Pradesh’s books,” Haji said. “They’re in the bookshop. I’m planning a drinks party for him next week at my flat. He’s staying with me for a bit. Come and meet him.”

So Haji Hallsmith had appropriated U. V. Pradesh as his listener and witness. Haji also did some writing: confessional poems that embarrassed his friends. Yet they read them, always looking for clues to that brief, bewildering Muslim marriage.

“What about my malaika?” Julian asked.

It meant angel, and Hallsmith knew who he was talking about.

“Your splendid malaika is always welcome, Jules.”

That same afternoon, Julian went to the bookshop and bought all the U. V. Pradesh titles it had in stock—The Part-Time Pundit, Calypso Road, and several others. While he read The Part-Time Pundit, Yomo read Calypso Road.

She said, “These Trinidad people talk like Nigerians.”

“What do you mean?”

She read, “‘If you vex with she, give she a dose of licks, and by and by she come quick-quick when you bawl.’”

“That’s Nigerian?”

“For sure.”

The character Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Part-Time Pundit, was unlike anyone Julian had ever met in fiction. The narrative, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, was simple and strong, unusual, funny, oblique, very sure of itself. It described a world Julian knew nothing about. Every name, every character, every setting was new, and yet it was familiar in its humanity. Among other things, it was about transformation.

He read three more U. V. Pradesh books. They were also fantastical, assured narratives of transformation. He saw no literary influences, no antecedents. They were original and powerful, too plain to be brilliant, with a pitiless humor that gave them pathos.

The voice of the narrator he recognized from Mother India: impartial, remorseless, almost cold. In his essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell had said you could see a human face behind all third-person narration, yet there was no face that Julian could discern here. About U. V. Pradesh personally Julian knew nothing beyond the fact that he had been born in the West Indies, was educated in England, resided in London, had won a number of prizes, was about forty — nearly elderly, so Julian thought. The biographical note in the back of Pradesh’s books was short and unrevealing.

Pradesh took no sides in these works of fiction. One, about an election, was plotty and sprawled improbably. Another, set in London, could have been written by an old, wise Englishman, and its observations about age and frailty gave it a morbid power. Calypso Road was slight but charming, full of curious characters. They were all confident, fresh, spoke with the concision of poetry and with an originality that was like news to Julian.

“So what you tink?” Yomo said. Reading made her impatient, lust corroded her English. She was tugging at his sleeve, pulling his hand between her legs.

“I like this book.”

The extraordinary ending of The Part-Time Pundit, so unexpected and yet so logical a transformation, overwhelmed him. Why had he not seen it coming? It made him wish he had written it himself. The best of it was this: after all his changes of direction, the Trinidadian pundit Ganesh vanishes, only to reappear in London years later.

The nameless narrator, now a grown man in London, looks “for a nigrescent face,” sees the pundit from his island approaching him.

“Ganesh?” he says in disbelief.

The pundit seems utterly changed, wearing a tweed jacket and soft hat and corduroy trousers and sturdy shoes. He carries a walking stick and is marching through a railway terminal.

“Pundit Ganesh?” the narrator repeats, seeing Ganesh Ramsumair.

“‘G. Ramsay Muir,’ he said, coldly,’” and the brown man scuttles away.

“Why are you smiling?” Yomo asked.

Julian was thinking, I’m going to meet the real man.

2. “I’m Not Everyone”

HIS SMILE was not a smile but his laugh was more than a laugh, especially when he—

Wait, wait, wait. You know I’m lying, don’t you? This is not a novel, it is a memory.

The man is not “U. V. Pradesh.” It is V.S. Naipaul, and the book I mentioned in the previous chapter is The Mystic Masseur, and the hero is Ganesh Ramsumair of Trinidad, who turned into G. Ramsay Muir in London. Yomo is Yomo, and Hallsmith is Hallsmith, but the young man is not Julian Lavalle. It’s me, Paul Theroux, and I am shining my light upon the past. I cannot improve on this story, because Naipaul always said, Don’t prettify it, and The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength — aspire to that, and Tell the truth.

It is a morning in June on Cape Cod, bright and dry — hasn’t rained for more than a month — and I have set myself the task of putting down everything that happened thirty years ago in Africa, when I first met him, because it all matters. I cannot change any of this. I am writing with a ballpoint on a pad at my desk. How can this be a novel? This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction. It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing.

You would say “Isn’t that V.S. Naipaul?” in any case.

There is so much of it. This was going to be a short memoir, but now I see it will be a book, because I remember everything. Where was I? Yes. He was laughing.

— especially when Naipaul was laughing at one of his own pointed remarks. It was a surprised bellow of appreciation, deepened and made resonant by tobacco smoke and asthma. It made you wonder whether he saw something you didn’t see. I learned all this within seconds of our first meeting, at Hallsmith’s party. With a disgusted and fastidious face, Naipaul had commented on how dirty Kampala was. Having just read The Mystic Masseur—a better title than The Part-Time Pundit; I will stick to the facts — I said, quoting his shopkeeper in the book, “It only looks dirty.”

With his deep, fruity smoker’s laugh booming in his lungs, he showed me his delight and then gave me the next line, and the next. He recited most of that page. He could have given me the whole book verbatim. I was thinking how he knew his work well. He told me later that he knew each of his books by heart, storing them during the slow process of writing and rewriting them in longhand.

After he was introduced to more people, his martyred smile returned. He was soon in distress. When Yomo said, “Your characters in your books talk like Nigerians,” he merely stared at her and frowned.

“Really.”

To someone with no sense of irony, his tone was one of shimmering fascination. He was thrown by Yomo’s innocent statement, and perhaps by Yomo herself, who was very dark with high cheekbones and those drowsy eyes; in her stiffly wound turban she towered over him. She had the effect of making shorter people seem always to be ducking her. Naipaul behaved that way, moved sideways, nearer to me, dodging her, as if he were unused to discussing his work with such a tall, self-assured black woman.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“Here, I’m afraid,” he said, clearly intending to say more when his wife interrupted him.

“Vidia,” she said in a cautioning voice. That was the first time I heard his name, a contraction of it, which was Vidiadhar.

“Patsy,” he said, acquiescing, smiling in misery.

His wife, Patricia, was a small pale woman with a sweet face, premature gray hair, lovely pale blue eyes, and full lips with the sort of contour and droop that even in repose suggests a lisp. She was pretty, about ten years older than me, and though she was assertive, she seemed frail.

“They’ve promised us a house,” he said. “Mr. Bwogo. Have I got it right? Mr. Bwogo.” He nodded and seemed to recite it, giving it too many syllables: “Bah-wo-go.” “It seems nothing can be done without Mr. Bwogo.”

“He’s the chief housing officer,” I said.

“Chief housing officer,” Naipaul said, and just saying it, reciting it again in his gloomy voice, he made the title ridiculous and grand and ill suited to describe Mr. Bwogo.

“I’m sure he’ll take care of you,” I said.

With sudden insistence, as if demanding a drink, he said, “I want to meet people. Tell me whom I should meet.”

This baffled me, both the question and the urgent way he made me responsible for the answer. But I was flattered too, most of all because of the intense way he waited for a reply. Nerves of concentration tightened in his face, and even his muscles contrived to make his posture more than just receptive — imploring. On that first meeting I had an inkling of him as an intimidating listener.

“What is it you want to know?” I asked.

“I want to understand,” he said. “I want to meet people who know what is happening here. People who read books. People who are still in the world. You can find them for me, can’t you? I don’t mean only at Makerere.”

He smiled, making a hash of the university’s name, pronouncing it “Maka-ray-ray.”

“Because I suspect a lot of fraudulence,” he said. “One hears it. One has vibrations.”

Pat had winced at “Maka-ray-ray” and said in an exasperated way, “He has no trouble at all with the most difficult Indian names.”

“Do you know Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata?” Naipaul said, and laughed hard, the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics.

I introduced him to my head of department, an expatriate Englishman named Gerald Moore, who was an anthologizer as well as an evangelizer of African poetry. Having spent some time in Nigeria, Gerald occasionally attempted a Yoruba salutation upon Yomo, whose way of replying was to mock his mispronunciation by repeating it in a shriek, opening her mouth very wide in Gerald’s pink face. But he was a friendly fellow, and he had hired me. He mentioned his African anthology to Naipaul.

“Really,” Naipaul said, mocking in his profoundly fascinated way, and now I understood his tone as utter disbelief and dismissal.

The irony was not lost on Gerald, who fidgeted and said, “Some quite good poems.”

“Really.”

“Leopold Senghor.”

“Isn’t he the president of something?”

“Senegal,” Gerald said. “And Rabearivelo.”

“Is he a president too?”

“Dead, actually. Madagascan.”

“These names just trip off your tongue.”

“I could give you a copy,” Gerald said. “It’s a Penguin.”

“A Penguin, yes,” Naipaul said. “You are so kind.”

“I also do some writing. I’d like to show you. See what you think.”

Naipaul smiled a wolfish smile and said, “Are you sure you want me to read your poems? I warn you that I will tell you exactly what I think.”

“That’s all right.”

“But I’m brutal, you know.”

Gerald winced, and later on the verandah he said to me, “He’s different from what I expected.”

“In what way?”

“Rather patrician.”

But I thought: I want to show him my work. I want to know exactly what he thinks. I had never shown anyone my novel. I wanted him to be brutal.

I saw Naipaul talking to Professor Dudney, an authority on the pastoral Karamojong people of Karamoja, one of the northern provinces of Uganda. The Karamojong went mother-naked, and the men were often photographed posing unashamed, letting their penises hang as impressively as prize aubergines. Dudney had married a Karamojong woman, who was just as attracted to Kampala cocktail parties as Dudney was to Karamojong rituals during which the blood of cattle was guzzled.

At about five o’clock, Haji Hallsmith started turning the knobs of a large wooden radio. He urged the guests to be seated, to listen to the program, one he had made himself with his African students. I knew the producer, Miles Lee, an authentic Gypsy whose training for Radio Uganda consisted of working for many years as a fortuneteller at the Goose Fair in Nottingham. He too had become a Muslim, changing his middle name, Allday, to Ahmed, and could be found drinking with Haji Hallsmith. He was another one who said, “Of course Muslims can drink. But not during prayers.”

The radio program was called In Black and White, and its subject was African writing. After some music, the pluckings of a seven-stringed instrument called a nanga, Hallsmith, suffering mike fright, began to introduce the poets in a shrill old-auntie voice.

Naipaul settled into his chair, his face darkening as the program continued. It was a look of intense concentration, or perhaps of desperate boredom. Poems were being read on the crackly radio, Africans reciting African poems, muffled by the cloth on the grille of the big speaker. Naipaul might not have realized that the hour for this welcoming party had been chosen because it was also the hour for the weekly In Black and White.

— And now Winston Wabamba is going to read his poem “Groundnut Stew.”

Naipaul’s face hardened into an expression of extreme impatience. I could see it was also a martyr’s death mask. When Hallsmith smiled at him, Naipaul’s eyes went out of focus, for it was a hot afternoon, the sun blazing through the windows over the tops of palms and tulip trees. There were jeers and curses from the low brick warren of huts where the servants lived.

Everyone else in the room was attentive, gathered around the radio, our heads cocked to one side or bowed in a meditative way. Gerald Moore massaged his eyes with his fingertips in concentration. We were mocked by the parrot squawks and cockcrows out the window, and as the sun dropped there was another sound, almost unearthly, like a riot of radio waves in a Martian invasion, a squealing and a mad ripping of the air.

Naipaul was startled.

“Bats,” I said.

He looked wildly at the bats streaking past the window and slumped again.

I had never before heard the whole radio program. It was broadcast at the time of day when I was usually headed to the Staff Club. Now that I was compelled to listen to the entire thirty minutes, I was reminded of how sentimental and inept the poetry was. It did not look so bad on the pages of the university’s literary magazine, but when declaimed on Radio Uganda, under the supervision of Miles Ahmed Lee, it sounded hollow and clumsy, and the clichés were the feebler for being spoken aloud with an attempt at feeling.

Was I also hearing it with Naipaul’s ears? He was a newcomer. He had never heard it before. The poems sounded awful to me. The room was hot with the exhausted air of the day, the last blaze of the low sun, the dust and humidity and bird complaints, the servants’ curses and bus horns.

When the program was over Naipaul got to his feet and, staggering slightly because of his mood, said, “Splendid, splendid.”

“Can we go home now?” Yomo said, reaching into my front trouser pocket.

Naipaul was surrounded by party guests, but by the time we got to the door he had broken away from them, and he called out, “Find me some people — I want to meet people.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” I said.

He followed us through the door to the verandah.

“I read Miguel Street last night,” Yomo said. “The whole thing.”

Naipaul stared at her pityingly, shaking his head. He said, “You must sip it like good wine.”

“Ha! I don’t sip wine!” Yomo was laughing. “I drink up the palm wine! I’m from Nigeria.”

“Really.” Naipaul looked indifferent. “Uganda must fascinate you.”

“These Uganda people are primitive.”

Naipaul’s mask slipped and he laughed. Then, sizing me up, he asked me what I thought of the radio program.

At first I hesitated to tell him I really had not liked it, because it seemed too unkind to Hallsmith, the host. And when he’d been seated in his armchair, Naipaul had looked enigmatic, if not disapproving, and afterwards hadn’t he said “Splendid"?

But I liked him, I liked his writing, I wanted to take a risk, I wanted to be truthful.

“I thought it was awful,” I said.

“Yes!” he said, and he laughed his deep, appreciative laugh. “Dreadful! Dreadful!”

He looked happier saying that, less lonely and less tormented than he had appeared in the room. With conviction and a solemn friendliness, he touched my arm.

“We’ll meet soon. We’ll talk.” It meant everything to me. Then he said, “Do you have a motorcar?”

“He doesn’t talk like the people in his book,” Yomo said on the way home.

That was true, but I was thinking how I wanted him for a friend. I mentioned this, but Yomo said he was just an ugly little Indian man, and what was the point in talking so much about him?

“He’s a wonderful writer,” I said.

“You are a wonderful writer,” she said. We were home now, and she was saying “I want a baby. Give me a baby!” as she pulled off my clothes.

Within a few days I knew him much better. I showed him some of my poems, one of which began “Mirrored images of bitches’ murderous beauty,” and another, “The girl who came with doves to sell will die.”

He said, “Lots of libido.”

That made me smile.

He said, “But I have given up sex, you see.”

We were alone, driving to the market.

“What about your wife?”

“I give her a chaste kiss at night.”

That was not my question, but I left it, because my car was now surrounded by market traders showing us baskets of fruit.

“I hate food that is uncovered,” he said. “I have a horror of dirt.”

The Kampala Central Market was the wrong place for someone with a horror of dirt.

“The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” he said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Flayed, stringy goat and sheep carcasses hung from iron hooks among buzzing flies, and some hacked-apart chunks of meat and cracked bones were stacked on plates under the sign Boys’ Meat. He liked that sign. He lingered, murmuring the expression. He said he was a vegetarian. I asked him why.

“The sinew. I could never chew through it.”

He would go without eating rather than touch meat, he said. He had had arguments in restaurants after being served vegetable soup made with meat stock. He gave me a running commentary on his health and digestion.

“Meat is nyama,” I said, instructing him.

“Yes.”

“The word for animals is nyama.”

“Yes.”

“Prostitutes — the slang. Same word. Nyama.”

“Really.”

We passed the locust stalls, where behind bulging sacks of locusts fried in hot mafuta fat, men and women sat measuring out single portions of the greasy insects on squares of newspaper. The wood-colored locusts gleamed, looking freshly varnished, and the locust sellers called out, “Nzige!”

It was the season, I said. They gathered the locusts under street-lamps all night.

“Nzige, nzige.” Naipaul said “Nah-zeegay” and chuckled and greeted a locust seller who was making up a large package for a man. “Chap’s absolutely mad about them, I imagine.”

He frowned at the baskets stacked around the basket sellers. He found the fish flyblown. He said that some vegetables, plantains especially, reminded him of his childhood.

“What sort of a family did you have?”

“I couldn’t even begin to tell you.” He smiled helplessly, appealing to me, raising his hands to indicate that this was not a fruitful line of inquiry.

“I come from a large family,” I said, hoping to interest him.

“We’ve done the market,” he said. He had not heard what I said. He wanted to leave. And later: We’ve done the bus station. And: We’ve done the park. And: We’ve done the museum. And: Churches depress me, man. He was able to size a place up fairly quickly, and then he was ready to go. He had an inspector’s gait, hands clasped behind his back, moving fast yet looking at everything. He was inquisitive, he was brisk. I think we’ve done this.

He seemed eager for me to know him. He said he slept badly, he was abstemious about alcohol, he got headaches, he had asthma. He claimed to have an explosive temper. He liked playing cricket and wanted me to help him find a pitch where he could practice bowling. He asked me about Gerald Moore, and when I said that Gerald had found him patrician, he seemed pleased.

“Jerry said that, did he?”

We never called the department head “Jerry.”

“What about Dudney?” he said. “His wife is incredibly ugly, which of course is why he married her. Unbelievably ugly.”

I said that in most parts of Uganda she was considered a beauty — plump and loud and fertile and maternal, and probably circumcised, with big lips and quarter-inch gaps between her teeth.

“That’s precisely what I mean.”

The whites he had met in Uganda so far were most of them degenerate, he said. They drank too much. They were intellectually dead. They were low class. Sometimes he used that expression, but more often he said, “They are common.” They were inferior.

“Infies” was his usual name for them. “Listen to the infy,” he would say while one of the expatriates held forth in the Senior Common Room. “Most of them are buggers, too.”

He found Swahili unpronounceable and was especially lost in nasalizing sounds, as when a consonant, following the rule of all Bantu languages, was softened or rubbed down by an initial m or n. He could not nasalize words such as mbuli (folly) or its opposite, mwambo, and while the meanings of more complex words, such as mkhwikhwiziri (b.o., the smell of an unwashed body), interested him as much as they did me, he found them impossible to say. Yet he sometimes made attempts, and it was difficult to know whether in garbling the words he was mocking them or simply making mistakes. “Mahboya” he said for the name Mboya. “Mah-zee” he said for mzee. An expatriate noted for his effeminacy and for patronizing African boys he called “Mah-bugga” and sometimes succeeded with “Mbugga.”

Looking for clues to his writing, I asked him what he read.

“One is reading the Bible. It’s frightfully good, you know. And Martial — delicious. You read Latin, of course you do.”

He quoted salacious epigrams and poems, many of which were about buggery. He said they were lyrical. “And so concise.”

He said frankly that coming to Uganda had been a great mistake, which he regretted. Although his trip had been financed by the American Farfield Foundation, he said he was losing money. But he had a book to finish.

Sure of himself and very direct, he commanded attention. He strode through Kampala, assessing it all, “being brutal,” as he said, like a man sent from headquarters to inspect a lagging field office. His conclusions: Mass sackings were called for. Eliminate all funding. Shut it down. Seal it off. Say goodbye.

And that was after only two weeks or so. I had never met anyone so certain, so intense, so observant, so hungry, so impatient, so intelligent. He was stimulating and tiring to be with, like a brilliant demanding child — needy, exhausting, funny, often making a po-faced joke just to please me, and who was I? But he seemed to like me. He asked to see more of my writing. Watching him evaluate it, I could hear the crackle of the circuits in his brain, a succession of satisfying clicks, and the fastening of synapses, like buckles being fixed, as he processed information. “Keep it up” was all he said. He had no small talk, and he pounced on incidental remarks.

“This is a pretty prosperous country,” I said casually.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean a successful agricultural economy. The tea, the coffee, the sugar—”

“Define the difference between success and achievement,” he demanded.

And he listened closely to all answers. It was hard to drive a car and hold this sort of conversation, but I did my best.

“We see the institutions that exist here,” he said. “What matters most is how they are maintained. Maintenance of a civilization is the proof that it has meaning and is coherent. Here in Uganda, other people are doing it for them. Outsiders are the key. Take them away and Uganda will go back to bush. All this will be jungle.”

On one of those early days in my car he plucked at the plastic seat cover and said, “American writers always know the names of these.”

“That’s a grommet,” I said.

“And these.”

“That’s a gusset.”

“And this.” He ran his thumb and forefinger along a seam.

“That’s called piping.”

A laugh had been building in his throat from the moment I had said “grommet,” and now he was laughing hard. No sound, except that of a lifelong smoker, was more satisfying than the dense laughter of an asthmatic, forcibly compressed, struggling and echoing through thickets in his lungs.

“You see? But they are silly words. They are purely technical. There is no picture. They say nothing. Don’t be that kind of writer. Promise me you won’t use those words.”

He was sure of everything he said, like a leader or a teacher, a man with no obvious doubts. So I listened, and I promised.

“Tell me what to read. I want to read something about this place.”

I recommended The White Nile.

“If only Alan Moorehead knew how to write.”

I told him I liked George Orwell.

“I have been compared with Orwell. Imagine. In a review. It was meant to be a compliment.” And he laughed again. “It was lost on me. I have a very low opinion of Orwell’s writing.”

I was reading Camus, I said.

“His collected fiction is a very slender book. I wonder about the achievement.”

He knew his own mind. He knew what he wanted. It was clear that he would not find what he was looking for in Uganda — anyway, he had already given up on us. He had impossibly high standards. He said there was no point in having standards unless they were high. He did not compromise. He expected the best, in writing, in speaking, in behavior, in reading. Martial? The Bible? Surely there were other books and writers he admired.

“It would be easier for me to tell you who I don’t like,” he said, and then listed, with a sour-taste-in-the-mouth expression, like the visible memory of a bad meal, the giants of literature: Jane Austen, Hardy, Henry James. “People tell me I should read James. I tried. I couldn’t see the point. There’s not much there.” He had not read widely in American literature. I was reading Emily Dickinson. He borrowed my book. The next day he said, “I’m afraid I don’t share your enthusiasm. Not much there for me.”

“What about African literature?”

“Does it exist?”

“Wole Soyinka. Chinua Achebe.”

“Did they write anything?”

“Novels,” I said.

“Mimicry,” he said. “You can’t beat a novel out on a drum.”

Naipaul was thirty-four but seemed much older, almost aged. He was opinionated and dissatisfied and restless, hard to please but still searching. This was a bad place for the search, however. For one thing, the whites were seriously unhealthy.

“Don’t be an infy, Paul,” he said. “I know I don’t want to be an infy.”

Africans were not infies. Most whites were. Some Indians in town he liked. Others he despaired of. He interrogated them, demanded to know their backup plans. He predicted that they would be thrown out and their businesses taken over. Some of them were infies.

To battle inferiority in the equatorial heat, he came with me to the sports field. He would practice bowling the cricket ball while I ran around the track, six times usually, sometimes more. He tried to do the same but his lungs gave out, and he ended up panting and sweating. “Must not be an infy!” The exercise gave me an appetite and a sweet tooth, and after each session we went into town and had tea and cakes. Stuffing myself, wolfing them down, I apologized, yet kept at it.

“The body knows,” he said. He was truster of instinct and hunches and cravings. “Keep it up. Your body needs it. Let’s get some more off the trolley. Waiter!”

To vary my craving for sugar, he introduced me to Indian sweets: laddhu, kachowri, rasgullah, gulabjam.

“These gulabjam are made from broken milk.” He repeated it. He liked saying “broken milk.”

In time he adopted, article by article, a mode of dress — first the bush shirt, then the bush trousers, the walking stick, and finally the bush hat. It was a floppy hat, the brim pulled down all around. Indians in Uganda never dressed that way, though tourists did. We saw them at the hotel entrances, climbing into zebra-striped safari vans or Land Rovers, heading west into the bush.

“Those African drivers tell me that the women tourists are always after them,” I said.

“That must make them frightfully happy.”

In his safari outfit, perspiring heavily, he walked in a district of Kampala called Wandegeya, where, following several steps behind him, I called out directions. I wanted to show him the colony of ten thousand bats.

He was not impressed by the bats. Instead, he said, “Notice how there are footpaths everywhere — across every lawn, crisscrossing the campus, up and down. There are paths, but Africans don’t keep to them. They make their own. Have you noticed that? They ignore the proper paths.”

I had not noticed, but it was true: a town of obvious shortcuts and trampled footpaths. I wondered why.

“Because,” Naipaul said, “the Africans did not make the proper paths in the first place. This society was imposed on them.”

A six-foot circular medallion in bronze, at the top of the arched gateway in front of the Uganda Parliament building, depicted the prime minister, Milton Obote, his toothy frown, his bushy hair, a likeness of his disapproving face and gappy teeth. The medallion was crude enough to seem satirical. It had been put there after Uganda’s first election, and the idea was that it would remain there forever, though no one ever questioned why. It was customary for African politicians to put up statues of themselves and give their names to colleges and main roads. We were, in fact, standing on Obote Avenue when Naipaul saw the Obote medallion.

“That is what is wrong with the country,” he said. “That is the reason Uganda will go back to bush.”

Until Naipaul arrived I had not paid much attention to these details. I was grateful to be here teaching rather than in Vietnam fighting. Kampala was a small, friendly town with no society to speak of. The Kabaka kept to himself, in a regal way, inside the stockade that surrounded his palace on Kabuli Hill, one of Kampala’s seven hills. Naipaul asked what I knew of the king and whether I had met him. It seemed an odd question, for the Kabaka of Buganda was much more remote than any American president, and in a place where each hilltop was occupied by an important structure — the main mosque on one, the cathedral, the university, the broadcasting service, the barracks, and so forth on others — the Kabaka’s was just another bushy and inscrutable hilltop.

Obote was the Kabaka’s main antagonist, but no one cared much about that. No one cared that Obote named streets after himself. No one paid much attention to politics. What was the use? In spite of Naipaul’s misgivings, Kampala was a prosperous place, busy on weekdays, full of picnickers on weekends, strolling Africans, promenading Indians. The villages were sleepy, the townships were drunk. The city’s bars and cafés were meeting places, and when I was not with Yomo at the Staff Club, I was with her at City Bar on Kampala Road. It was not a town of dinner parties or social functions, except among politicians and diplomats. It was movie theaters and nightclubs, restaurants and brothels. But I was happy with Yomo and she liked Kampala, although she always enjoyed pointing out how backward it was.

Into the green town of tall trees and friendly faces and natural wonders — the road carpeted with white butterflies, the tree branches full of bats, the marabou storks standing watch on the road to the dump, hungry for garbage, the crested cranes in the parks, and in many of the low-lying watery places masses of papyrus that had somehow crept on sodden roots up the White Nile from Egypt — into this drowsy place, where the locusts’ whines were as loud as machinery, came the forbidding figure of V.S. Naipaul, with his hands behind his back, doing calculations. He could be severe. He could also be funny. But his style of conversation was mainly interrogatory. He had many questions. He demanded answers.

“What is the name of that valley?”

We had gone for a drive. He had liked the view. He had got out of the car and stopped a passing African.

“I am not knowing the name, sah.”

“But what do you call it?”

“We are calling it just ‘the valley,’ sah.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“I am born here, sah.”

“What do you do?”

“I am wucking, sah.”

“Where do you work?”

“Wucking in shamba, sah.”

“He has a garden,” I said.

“Matoke, sah.”

“Bananas,” I said.

“Bwana. Mumpa cigara.”

“He wants a cigarette.”

And when the man had moved on, Naipaul waved his walking stick in a generalizing way over the lovely landscape and said, “Nothing has a name. They don’t name things.”

“They name some things.”

“Tell me.”

“The hills in Kampala.”

“That’s very much a colonial thing. The Africans were told those names — wait. What’s that noise?” He lifted his hat brim and winced. “You see? Even here. Bongo drums!”

“Bongo drums” was an all-encompassing term for the sound of a radio, for people singing or dancing, or for drums, which were never bongo drums but usually hollow logs that were beaten with sticks or tall upright cylinders that were thumped at sundown.

What he was hearing was Congolese music, trumpets and drums and marimbas, blaring from a radio in a hut.

“Music,” I said.

“I hate music,” he said as we walked on. “All music. Not just that shit.”

“Really.”

He looked sideways at me, and when I glanced over at him I saw he was still peering at me, intensely but obliquely, as though watching to see what I would do next.

He said, “You didn’t react. Good. I once told someone that and he burst into tears.”

It was not a pose. He really did hate music. He hated most sound, whether it was music or the human voice; he regarded all of it as noise. Loud laughter appalled him too, although he himself laughed a good deal. He had come to the wrong place.

Out of the blue, on one of those early days he said, “May I see your hand, Paul?”

He studied my palm, holding it to the light, squeezing it gently to make the lines more emphatic. He pressed his lips together and blew out his cheeks. He nodded, said nothing, but I had the feeling he liked what he had seen.

I was his interpreter, his guide, his companion. I was, most of all, his student. After a month or so he bought a car, a tan Peugeot, but at the beginning, when he had no car, I was his driver, and we went out every day. He had a sort of visiting professorship, courtesy of that dubious American foundation which was rumored to have links with the Central Intelligence Agency. He hated the foundation. He disliked his duties. He refused an office. He gave no classes. He ignored the other lecturers, though when they asked him his opinion of the university, he said, “It’s pretty crummy, but you know that, don’t you?”

It was largely a waste, he said; it was a farce. Here were these overpaid expatriates patronizing Africans and giving the impression of imparting an education. But it was theater. They were going through the motions, flattering themselves with notions of their own importance. The worst of it was the tameness of it all, the absence of criticism, the complacency, the extravagant way African effort was praised.

“Did I hear someone say ‘parliament’? ‘democracy’? ‘socialism’?” Naipaul made his disgusted face and repeated a bit of literary criticism he had just read. “The words are all wrong. These fraudulent people are trying to prettify this situation. It’s a huge whitewash, man. No—” The laughter began to tumble in his lungs. “It’s blackwash, that’s what it is. Blackwash.”

He avoided the Senior Common Room. He made one visit to the Staff Club, and mainly for his benefit, one of the jollier members told jokes that all of us had heard before. Naipaul sat stony-faced. Afterwards he said he hated jokes. He hated the English when they tried to be colorful characters.

“Your infies,” he called them. And he was remembered in the Staff Club for having referred to Britain as “that socialist paradise.”

“I’ve been a socialist all my life,” Haji Hallsmith said.

Hallsmith’s apartment revolted Naipaul. “It smells,” he said. “And have you noticed the way Hallsmith dresses? Those African shirts he wears are ridiculous. I had always thought of a university lecturer as someone rather grand. Why, he’s just a common infy.”

In an almost constant state of niggling annoyance, incessantly judgmental, he developed the notion that nearly all the expatriates were homosexual, living out a fantasy of sexual license in Uganda. He believed that their political views were insincere and mocking, merely a transparent justification for chasing boys. He laughed at the thought that they regarded themselves as liberals and intellectuals.

We were driving when he told me this. He was holding a cigarette — he tamped them and played with them as though fine-tuning them, packing the tobacco, smoothing the paper with his thumb, before he smoked them.

I said, “So I guess you would agree with George Wallace in thinking of them as ‘pointy-headed intellectuals.’”

He loved that. He repeated it twice, saying it was true.

“This place is absolutely full of buggers.”

“Please, Vidia,” Pat said from the back seat.

“And pointy-headed intellectuals.” He was smiling grimly out the window. He lit the cigarette and smoked it awhile, tapping the Sportsman pack on the back of his hand.

“How do you stand it, Paul?”

I was about to say how happy I was, living in Uganda with Yomo. It seemed a dream at times, to be in such a beautiful place with someone I loved. She was brave; she mocked the men who leered at her or who made remarks because she was holding hands with a white man. She didn’t mind the long dusty drives or the spiders or the snakes or the little crawling dudus. Even the thought of living in the bush behind Bundibugyo did not faze her. I liked my job. I found my students vague but teachable.

But before I could say any of this, Naipaul piped up, “Your writing, of course. If you didn’t write, you’d go out of your mind.”

He had read only a small amount of what I had written, but he seemed to see that it stood for more. I had written many poems and published some in American and British literary magazines. “Little magazines,” Naipaul called them, making a face. “Lots of libido,” he always said of my poems, but it was not a criticism. He liked one I had published in the Central African Examiner about an old car I had seen rotting in the bush. He quoted it word for word to me a few days afterwards. It was a trenchant comment about colonialism, he said; it was about Africans letting things go to ruin. I reread it and thought: Maybe.

My writing project at the time was an essay on cowardice, inspired by Orwell’s clear-sighted and confessional essays. I had been writing it for the American magazine Commentary. Naipaul had approved; it was not a little magazine, but the essay needed work. “I warned you, I’m brutal,” he said. “Forget Orwell for the moment.” I was on my fifth or sixth revision with him. It was like whittling a stick, but I was learning.

“It’s true, Patsy. You know that. He’d go out of his mind.”

I kept driving, heading back to town, wondering whether it was true. I had been content for two years at a bush school in Malawi. I had been writing the whole time. Had the writing kept me sane?

“More bongo drums,” Naipaul said as we passed a roadside market.

There was noise, for sure, but no bongo drums. I said, “The only bongo in Uganda is an animal that looks like a kudu. They’re hunted with dogs by wealthy tourists who go on safaris here. When the bongo turns to battle the dogs with his horns, the hunters shoot him. They’re mostly in the Ruwenzoris. In the bundu.”

“I want to see the bush,” Naipaul said. “The bush is the future.”

We were on the outskirts of Kampala, passing a row of Indian shops, where on the verandahs some African men sat at Singer sewing machines, working the treadles with their bare feet, running up missionary-style dresses. Another African was squatting at a box, looking serious and intent, writing a letter in clear copperplate script for a customer, a woman who knelt, wringing her hands.

“And the president of Gabon is called Bongo,” I said. “Omar Bongo.”

“Omar Bongo! Did you hear that, Patsy? Omar Bongo. Oh, how I don’t want to go to Gabon.”

He brooded for a moment, then asked me to slow down at the next row of Indian shops.

“It is hopeless for them,” he said. “They should leave. You know that Indian boy, Raju? I told him to go away, to save himself. Of course I didn’t say it so simply. I asked him, ‘What is the message of the Gita?’ The Bhagavad-Gita. You’ve read it, Paul, of course you have.”

From the back seat, Pat said, “You were too hard on Raju.”

“‘The message of the Gita,’ I said to him, ‘is action.’”

“It’s just as bad for him to go as to stay here,” Pat said.

“Action. He’s got to take action. These people”—Naipaul was gesturing at the little shops and the people on the verandah, who were baffled by the gesticulating Hindi in the bush hat in my car—“will be dead unless they read the Gita and take action.”

“No, no!” Pat Naipaul cried out from the back seat. “How can you say that?”

A growling in my guts told me that a quarrel was starting. I had never been in the presence of a husband and wife having an unself-conscious quarrel. I felt fearful and helpless.

“They should forget England. The bitches will lie to them. India is the answer. It is a real country. A big country. They make things in India. Steel. Paper. Cloth. They publish books. What do they make here? Nothing, or some rubbish that no one wants, while the infies tell them how wonderful it all is.”

“It would be worse for them in India. You’ve seen it,” Pat said with passion, and she seemed to be sobbing. “They’d be licking the shoes of those horrible people.”

Coolly facing forward, Naipaul said, “You always take that simple senseless path.”

“India would destroy them,” Pat said, and I could see in the rear-view mirror that she was wiping tears from her eyes and trying to speak.

“I was offering him a real solution,” Naipaul said.

Pat replied, but her weeping made it difficult for her to speak, and while she faltered, saying how unfair he was, Naipaul became calm, rational, colder, and did not give an inch.

“Stop chuntering, Patsy. You’re just chuntering, and you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”

The tears kept rolling down Pat’s cheeks, and though she dabbed at her face she could not stanch the flow. There were tears on her pretty protruding lips. I was shocked, but there was something in her tear-stained face and her posture that aroused me.

“I think we’ve done this,” Naipaul said, tapping the cigarette pack.

After I took them home, I told Yomo about the Naipauls’ argument. She said, “Did he smack her?”

“No. Just talked, very coldly.”

Yomo laughed. “Just talked!” She was not shocked in the least. She shrugged, pulled me to the sofa, and said, “I want to give you a bath.”

The next afternoon, in the blazing sun, Naipaul and I were on the sports field again, being watched by urchins from the mud huts in the grove of trees beyond the field’s perimeter. They jeered at the perspiring runners — it was so odd for them to see white people run or sweat or suffer. They mimicked the movements of the cricketers. I ran around the track while Naipaul flung cricket balls at a batsman. Naipaul seemed to know what he was doing. He knew cricket lore. He had told me it was a fair game — that it was more than a game, it was a whole way of thinking. “There is no sadder sound of collapse than hearing a wicket fall,” he said. “The best aspect of cricket is that no one really wins.”

He did not say anything about the argument with his wife until we were on our way into town afterwards for tea and cakes. He lit a cigarette and faced away from me, looking out the window — the same posture as the day before, the same time of day, the sun at the same angle, him smoking, me driving.

“I hate rowing in public,” he said, and nothing more.

At the teashop I had chocolate cake, he had cucumber sandwiches.

“These are cooling, but you need your cake. The body knows.”

He clutched the empty teacup.

“They warm the cups at the Lake Victoria in Entebbe. That’s nice. But not here.” He poured the milk, he poured the tea, he added sugar, he stirred, he sipped. “We’re moving into our house tomorrow. Do you know those houses?”

“Behind the Art Department, yes.”

“They’re pretty crummy.”

He was more restless than usual. When he had gone without sleep his eyes became hooded and Asiatic. He looked that way today. He began talking about the Kabaka again, asking questions. People in Uganda, even expatriates, seldom mentioned him. He was an institution, a fixture, a symbol. No one ever saw him.

I said, “He is fairly invisible, but people say that he knows what’s going on. He has his own prime minister, the Katikiro, and even his own parliament, the Lukiko. He takes an interest in things.”

“He has taken no interest in me,” Naipaul said.

I smiled to show my incomprehension. Why should the Kabaka, the king of Buganda, even be aware of Naipaul’s existence? The Kabaka was forty-two, handsome, androgynous, aloof, a drinker, the ruler of almost two million people. He had been a thorn in the flesh of the British. He was a thorn in Obote’s flesh. The Kingdom of Buganda belonged to him.

“I sent a little note to the palace. I had a letter of introduction. He hasn’t replied. Not a word.”

What a good thing it was that we were alone. Any local person overhearing him go on about not receiving an invitation from this king would have found the complaint absurd. And a more delicate aspect was that the Kabaka was never discussed in public; his name was not spoken. It was bad form to do so if you happened to be in the presence of one of his subjects, and politically unwise if you were in the presence of one of his enemies.

“He has other things on his mind,” I said.

Naipaul chewed his cucumber sandwich and faced me, as though challenging me to give him one good reason why the Kabaka could not reply to the note informing him that V.S. Naipaul had arrived in Kampala.

“They want to kill him,” I said, lowering my voice in this crowded Kampala teashop. “Obote wants to overthrow him.”

This was news to Naipaul, who I felt had mistakenly lumped the king together with the clapped-out maharajahs and sultans he had come across in India — men down on their luck, feeling wronged and dispossessed, grateful for a sympathetic hearing. The Kabaka was strange but he was vital, and he had a palace guard and a whole armory of weapons.

“It’s not a good idea to talk about him,” I said.

“Excellent. I have no intention of doing so. I have lost all interest in him.”

Leaving the teashop, we bumped into Pippa Broadhurst, a lecturer in history, who had been at Hallsmith’s party. A feminist, hating the prison of marriage, the jailer husband, the life sentence, clucking “I am a human being too,” Pippa had found in the smoky bowl of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania a hospitable manyatta (village) and had had a brief affair with a spear-carrying moran (warrior) of the Masai people — another blood drinker, like Dudney’s Karamojong missus. The upshot was Flora, a brown long-legged daughter, with whom Pippa went everywhere. The warrior was still in his thornbush kraal in Masailand.

“Hello, Vidia,” said Pippa. “And congratulations. I understand Mr. Bwogo’s found you a house.”

“The house is pretty crummy.”

“Everyone gets those houses,” Pippa said, snatching at Flora.

“I’m not everyone,” Vidia said.

The house, one of a dozen just like it, was newly built and raw-looking, set on a hot, rubbly slope of baked earth above a brick warren of ruinous servants’ quarters. The afternoon sun struck the house and heated it and made it stink of risen dust. The small brick buildings down the slope, too close together, were jammed with squatters and relatives, and I could hear music and chatter coming from the area of woodsmoke. Cooking fires and laughter: it was life lived outdoors, people eating and cooking and washing themselves. The clank of buckets and basins and the plop of slopping water reached me as I tapped on the front door.

“Come in,” Naipaul called in an irritated voice.

I could see what he disliked about the house. It was new and ugly, it smelled of fresh concrete and dust, it had no curtains.

“Paul,” he said in an imploring way, “do sit down.”

Pat said, “Go on, Vidia, please.”

“Listen to the bitches!”

“Vidia,” she said, trying to soothing him.

He continued to do what he had been doing when I entered, which was to read aloud from closely typed pages a scene about a farewell Christmas party in London, a meal at which presents were being given and toasts proposed. It was something from his novel, I supposed, the one he had brought to Uganda to finish. He went on reading, speaking of the tearful meal and the emotion, of people weeping.

Pat pressed her lips together when he finished, pausing before she spoke. The last time I had seen her was in the back seat of my car, when she had been sobbing openly and trying to speak (“Stop chuntering, Patsy”), her face contorted, her hair a mess, her cheeks and lips wet, her large breasts tremulous with her grief.

But today she was cool and very calm. In the most schoolmistressy way she said, “Too many tears.”

I was seated by a small table on which there lay a carefully corrected paragraph of small type, which I glanced at. The first words, in boldface, read Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. It was his Who’s Who entry, with meticulous proofreader’s marks in the margin in black ink, Vidia’s precise handwriting, deleting a semicolon, adding a literary prize and a recent date.

He had only briefly interrupted the reading of his novel when I entered. I felt he wanted me to hear it, to mystify and impress me. I was impressed. He was admitting me to this ritual of reading; he trusted me.

He turned to me and said, “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?”

No bongos, but I knew what he meant.

“Do you suppose we could flog them?” He knew it was an outrageous suggestion, but he wanted to gauge my reaction. He took a harmless pleasure in seeing people wince.

We went to the window and looked downhill at the roofs of corrugated asbestos, moldy from the damp, at the woodsmoke and the banana trees, at barking dogs, crying children, all the elements of urban poverty in Uganda.

“That’s what they need, a good flogging.”

“Vidia, that’s quite enough of that,” Pat said, strong again, no sign of the tears and sobs of the other day.

His reading from the typescript and his unembarrassed candor in allowing me to hear it encouraged me to ask him again about writers he liked. So far, all I knew was that he disliked Orwell and that for pleasure he read the Bible and Martial. I had Nabokov’s Pale Fire with me and told him how much I liked it.

“I read Pnin. It was silly. There was nothing in it. What do people see in him?”

“Style, maybe?”

“What is his style? It’s bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?”

His interest, his passion, was located solely in his own writing. He saw it as new. Nothing like it had ever been written before. It was an error to look for any influences, for there were none; it was wrong to compare it with any other work; nothing came close to resembling it. It took me a little while to understand his utter faith in this conceit, but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, and that he was a new man, was the day our friendship began.

Some people mistook the apparent spareness of his sentences for a faltering imagination, or a lack of stylistic ambition, or sheer monotony. But he said he was deliberate in everything he wrote, calculating each effect, and the simplicity was contrived. In his view, he was like someone making a model of an entire city out of the simplest material, a Rome made of matchsticks, say, a Rome whose bridges a full-sized human could stand on and run carts over. He detested falsity in style, he loathed manner in writing. He said he never prettified anything he saw or felt, and “prettified,” a new word to me, like “chuntering,” was added to my vocabulary.

“The truth is messy. It is not pretty. Writing must reflect that. Art must tell the truth.”

But early on, I had kept after him for the names of writers he admired. He shrugged. “Shakey, of course,” he said. “Jimmy Joyce. Tommy Mann.”

What books, I wondered, and why?

“Forget Nabokov. Read Death in Venice. Pay close attention to the accumulation of thought. Notice how each sentence builds and adds.”

What about American writers? Surely there was someone he liked.

“Do you know the first sentence of the short story ‘The Blue Hotel’ by Stephen Crane? About the color blue?” he asked. “I like that.”

His own work served as a better example of how complex and yet transparent prose fiction could be. It was original, freshly imagined in both form and content. Its brilliance was not obvious — he did not use the word “brilliance,” but he was wholly satisfied with the work, had no misgivings, saw nothing false or forced in it.

“Miguel Street is deceptive,” he said. “Look at it again and you’ll see how I used my material. Look at those sentences. They seem simple. But that book nearly killed me, man.”

Marlon Brando had read Miguel Street with pleasure, he had been told by a mutual friend, the novelist Edna O’Brien, who had also reported that Brando was attracted to women with dark nipples. It pleased Naipaul to know that Brando admired the book, and that knowledge made Naipaul feel friendly towards the actor. The Teahouse of the August Moon was a film he had liked, he said. He had not gone to many films lately, but he had seen every film that had come to Trinidad between the years 1942 and 1950, when he left for Oxford.

“You know what Brando says about actors?”

I said I did not know.

“An actor is a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.” Naipaul laughed his deep appreciative laugh and repeated the sentence.

Yomo was in bed when I got back home.

“Bibi gonjwa,” the housegirl said in a low voice, sounding as though she had been scolded. “Your woman’s sick.”

Yomo said in a feeble voice that she was feeling awful and wished she had some kola nuts. I made a cup of tea for her and then rooted through my bookshelf and found an anthology of American short stories, which included “The Blue Hotel.”

This was how the story began: “The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.”

Then Yomo was at the door, wearing the bed sheet like a toga, blinking in the lights and saying, “Please read to me.”

Naipaul complained so heartily about his house that I told him about my upstairs neighbors — newly married, a middle-aged man and a much younger woman — who giggled and chased each other around the house. They splashed in the bathtub and clattered plates and silver when they ate and called out constantly from room to room, “I can’t hear you!” But we could hear everything they said. It seemed at times they were carrying on for our benefit, using us as witnesses, proving something. They made love noisily — she was a screecher in her orgasms; it was a noise that built in volume and frequency, like someone working hard, pumping a tire, sawing a log. Their bed rocked and squeaked. At times it sounded like a muffled inquisition, the ordeal of someone whose confession was being painfully extracted.

“Who are they?” Naipaul asked.

“New people. From Canada.”

“Infies,” he said. “Doesn’t it make you hate all Canadians?”

I said no, and Pat laughed.

“Well, it would make me hate them,” Naipaul said. “Do you speak to them?”

“Sometimes.”

“You should cut them.”

“You mean not speak to them?”

“I mean not see them. You walk past them. You cut them. They don’t exist. Nothing at all.”

Not even the G. Ramsay Muir treatment — you just walked on.

The point about the rocking, squeaking hobbyhorse of a bed was that when I heard it, its first murmurs and jerks and hiccups, hesitating, just foreplay, nothing rhythmic yet, I prepared myself, and soon it was swaying and calling like a corncrake, and the woman was urging this late-night plowing. Then, almost against my will, I became aroused and woke Yomo and we made love.

One of those nights Yomo turned me away, hugged herself, and said she was really ill.

“You might be pregnant,” I said. “You have to see the doctor.”

“I don’t want the doctor. I don’t need him.”

“He’s good. He’ll need to examine you.”

“Indian doctor,” she said. “Bloody shit.”

Dr. Barot was a Gujarati, Uganda born, trained in the Indian city of Broach, who in the past had treated me for gonorrhea and for malaria. I asked him if he would see Yomo. He said of course, that he was also an obstetrician, and that it was important that he see Yomo soon.

Sleepy-eyed, reluctant, slightly sulky, Yomo finally agreed. She always took pains to dress up before leaving the house, but this was a greater occasion than most. She put on her brocade sash, her expensive cloak, her best turban. I loved seeing her dress up, and she became haughty and offhand when she wore her elegant clothes.

The February heat was oppressive. In the car Yomo said, “You don’t know. Black people get hotter than white people. It’s our skin.” I wondered whether this was true.

Dr. Barot greeted her and took her into his examining room. I heard the scraping sound of her disrobing, stiff colorful clothes sliding away, of her folding them. If she was going to have a baby, I would be happy. It was not what I had planned, but really I had no plans. There was something wrong with the very idea of a plan, and anyway I half believed that my life was prefigured — perhaps, as people said, like the lines on my palm. My random life was pleasant enough, and everything good that had happened to me had come accidentally. I just launched myself and trusted to luck. Mektoub—it is written.

I sat waiting, thinking of nothing in particular. When the examining room door opened I smiled, having just been reminded of why I was there.

“What’s the verdict?”

“Four months pregnant,” Dr. Barot said.

Yomo looked shyly at me and slipped next to me as we watched Dr. Barot write his bill on a pad. While he wrote, he said that Yomo was healthy and that she should see him regularly from now on so he could monitor her blood pressure.

In the car, sitting on the hot upholstery, I said, “How can you be four months pregnant? You’ve only been here three months.”

I felt innumerate and confused and was not blaming her but rather trying to explain my bewilderment.

Yomo said, “I had a friend in Nigeria before I came here to see you.”

Now it became harder for me to drive. The road was full of obstacles, and it was much hotter in the car.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

She was silent, but I could see she was sad, and her sadness seemed worse because she was dressed so beautifully.

“Do you think you should see your friend?” I asked.

She said nothing. She did not cry until that night, when her clothes were neatly folded on the chair, all that stiff cloth in a deep stack. She was in bed, hiding her face, sobbing.

I did not know what to say. I did not have the words. I loved her, but I had just discovered that I did not know her. Who was this friend, and what was this deception? It must have been obvious to her that she was at least one month pregnant soon after she arrived in Uganda.

“I want to go home,” she said in a voice that broke my heart, and it was awful to hear the Canadians upstairs fooling around and calling out.

“This is your home.”

“No,” she said, and went on weeping.

Yomo was one of only three passengers on the plane from Entebbe to Lagos a week later. Her posture was different, her sadness making her slower and giving her a halting way of walking, and she sighed as we moved towards the barrier, where I kissed her goodbye. It seemed a kind of death, because it was as though we were losing everything.

“I liked it when you read that story to me,” she said. She began to weep again.

The road from Entebbe to Kampala was known for its frequent fatal car accidents. I drove it that day feeling fearless and stupid, not caring if it was my turn to die on this road, because hadn’t everything else come to an end? I was numb, but when I got to my house I knew that I had lost my love and would have to begin again, and all that helped was my knowing that for Yomo it would be worse. So I helped myself by sorrowing for her.

Naipaul asked me where I had been. He had not seen me in the painful week that had just passed.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice cracked, his face was tormented. “Are you all right? Of course you’re not. Paul, Paul, Paul.”

He was truly upset. He was sharing the burden. That was the act of a friend.

He took my hand and turned it over and studied it again, this time tracing it with his finger, and this time he spoke.

“You must not worry. You’re going to be all right.”

“Thanks, Vidia.” It was the first time I used the name.

“That is a good hand.”

3. The Kaptagat Arms

IT WAS THE MONTH of bush fires, smoky skies, black hills, fleeing animals; the season of haze and hawks.

With all my love lost, I lay in the bedroom alone where we had slept together, staring at the long-nosed stains on the ceiling, goblins with the voices of the yelling Canadians upstairs. I was sorrowful without Yomo and her laughter. Naipaul — Vidia, as I now called him — was kind, but kindness was not enough. I needed a more intimate friend or else no one at all, just the consolation of the African landscape, which was a reminder to me that life goes on.

It was the season when Africans set fire to the bush, believing the blaze to be helpful to next year’s crops. I set off for the north, drove almost to the Sudan, and walked among the elephant palms to the shriek and twang of the same insects the people ate there; then I drove on to Arua, in West Nile province, on the Congo border, with its scowling purplish Kakwa people, of whom the chief of staff of the Uganda Army, Idi Amin, was the stereotype.

Hawks hovered above the grass fires and swooped down on the mice and snakes and other small creatures that were roused and panicked by the flames. There were hawks all over the smoky sky. Something about the wildfires and the hovering birds and the scuttling mice spoke to me of sex and its consequences.

At Kitgum, in the far north, I hiked in a hot wind, sinking in sand to my ankles, kicking at dead leaves to scatter the snakes. Each night in the village where I stayed a toothless old woman squatted on the dirt floor of a hut and sang a lewd song in an ululating voice. “She is beautiful and has a neck like a swan, but she has stroked the spear of every man in the district” was the way her song was translated for me. It was coarse and upsetting, but this hidden corner of Africa was peaceful for being hot and remote. Black water tumbled over Karuma Falls. To justify my trip to my department head, I traveled southwest and slipped between the Mountains of the Moon and visited schools at Bundibugyo, where Yomo and I had planned to lose ourselves in the bush. One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.

Hawks, bush fires, heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.

A sign reading Very Big Lion was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said Good News — To See A Very Big Lion — It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily. A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.

“Simba! Simba!”

Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle’s perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion’s eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.

“Bwana. Mumpa cigara.”

Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion’s being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal’s captivity — that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.

“Someday you will use it,” Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.”

I said, “For anyone who lives in Africa — for me, at any rate — Hemingway is unreadable.”

“Nevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.”

Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.

He said, “I know when I make comments on it you listen and get very tired.”

That was exactly how I felt.

“It’s normal. But this is an important statement — how you feel about Vietnam, how you feel about your life. You must get it right.”

The problem was language, he said. He was passionate on the subject of misapplied words and meaningless mystification. I had lived too long in a place where the wrong words were used. Africans called Kampala a city. But it was not a city. “‘University’ is a misleading word for this crummy place, and is this a government?” The teaching was not teaching, these were not real academics, the daily newspaper, the Uganda Argus, contained no news. “This is all fraudulent!” The writing by credulous well-wishers about African literature had corrupted the language. He emphasized that I must pay close attention to the words I used and evaluate how they worked. Putting his fastidious finger on the page, Vidia made me justify each word in the essay. “Why ‘fat’?” “Why ‘hapless’?” “Don’t use words for effect,” he said. “Tell the truth.”

“I have said before that writing is like sleight of hand. You simply mention a chair and it’s shadowy. You say it’s stained with wedding saffron and suddenly the chair is there, visible.”

This was spoken at his house, which smelled of fresh cement and red floor wax and new paint; the sun streaming through the windows that had no curtains; the house he hated, within earshot of the noise from the brick-and-thatch servants’ quarters.

“And that is not music. Listen to the bitches!”

Sometimes students brought him their work. He did not encourage them, but he allowed them. He saw the occasional lecturer. Sometimes he was asked a question about literature or the world.

I was present when he told a man with a serious inquiry, “I can’t answer that. I would need written notice of that question.”

After the man left, Vidia said, “That’s what he wanted to hear, you know. He didn’t really want me to answer his question.”

A female student brought him an essay. She had come to his house because he refused to hold classes.

“Your essay is hopeless,” he said. He chose a few examples to illustrate how bad it was, and then he said, “But you have lovely handwriting. Where did you learn to write like that?”

Another student, celebrated as a rising Ugandan poet by Hallsmith, sent Vidia a poem, entitled “A New Nation Reborn,” and showed up some days later at VIdia’s house wearing his crimson student’s gown. These gowns, introduced by the same English vice-chancellors who had contrived Makerere’s Latin motto—Pro Futuro Aedificamus, We Build for the Future — mimicked those worn by Oxford students. The young poet gathered his gown like an older woman taking a seat at a doctor’s office. He said, “Have you read my poem?”

“Yes, I’ve read it.” Vidia paused, tapped a cigarette, and said nothing for a long while. “I have been wondering about it.”

“It is about tubbulence.”

“Really.” Vidia found the boy’s eyes and fixed them with his weary stare. He said, “Don’t write any more poems. I really don’t think you should. Your gifts lie in some other direction. A story, perhaps. Now, promise me you won’t write any more poems.”

The boy shook his head and made the promise in a halting voice. He went away baffled and dejected.

“Did you see how relieved he was?” Vidia said. “He was glad I told him that.”

Vidia rubbed his hands and disposed of other students in the same fashion. I was surprised when he agreed to be the judge of a university literary competition, but he carried out his duties his own way. He insisted that there be only one prize, called Third Prize, because the entries were so bad there could be no first and second prizes.

“Make it absolutely clear that this is Third Prize,” he told the people in the English Department.

Some of the members objected to this.

Vidia said, “You are trying to give the African an importance he does not deserve. Your expectations are misguided. Turn away and nothing will happen. It’s the language again. Obote is just another chief. You call these politicians? They are just witch doctors.”

When the term “Third Prize” was converted to “The Prize,” Vidia smiled and said, “Blackwash.”

“The Africans who carry books around are the ones who scare me, man,” he said around that time.

He was dimly aware of, but not impressed by, some of the distinguished men and women who were living in Kampala or doing research at the university. An anthropologist, Victor Turner, was then at Makerere. You would not have known that this small, soft-spoken man with the diffidence of a librarian had spent years in mud huts on the upper Zambezi and on the Mongu floodplain and written pioneering studies of the Lozi people of Barotseland. Colin Turnbull had studied the Mbuti Pygmies. In the course of illustrating his encyclopedic studies of the mammals and birds of East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon, a painter and naturalist, had discovered at least two new species of mammal and several birds that had never been described. Michael Adams, a friend and contemporary of David Hockney’s, was our Gauguin. Colin Leakey, son of Louis Leakey, was our botanist. Rajat Neogy, the editor and founder of Transition, published Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer.

“What should I think about Africa?” Vidia demanded of an anthropology professor one day.

“Mr. Naipaul, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have too many opinions about Africa,” the man said. “If you do, you miss too much that’s really important.”

“Really.”

Later, walking back to his house, Vidia said, “Foolish man. He refuses to see the corruption. He accepts the lies.”

But he blamed himself, saying he should never have come, should not have accepted money from the Farfield Foundation. “Don’t ever accept money from a foundation,” he said. “It will ruin you. There are strings attached to all money you don’t earn yourself.”

This mistake in coming to Uganda inspired him, he said, to write an essay about all the rules he had made for himself and how disastrous it had been when he had broken one.

“Every time I’ve broken one of my own rules I have regretted it. Like this… Maka-ray-ray. Or the weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.” He kicked a stone. “Like that.”

His own behavior alarmed him.

“This is turning me into a racialist, for God’s sake. What a dreary, boring thing to be.”

Until I met Vidia, I had never known a person who recognized no one as his equal. He’s a Brahmin, the local Indians said: all Brahmins are fussy like that. Early on, seeing me solicit directions from a villager, he stood silently by, listening to the flow of Swahili, and then said, “You talk to these people so easily.”

I told him I had made a point of learning the language. People told the truth in their own language. They were nervous or inaccurate or more easily mendacious in a second language.

“I don’t mean that,” he said.

What did he mean? Perhaps that I spoke to them at all, and that I listened. His manner made him an impossible colleague but a natural bwana and employer of servants. He said I was too easy on my staff. “Your housegirl is an idler.” My cook, he said, was dirty. My gardener was a drunk.

“Your gardener is a drunk too,” I said, unwittingly indulging in the asinine debate between bwanas: my Africans are better than your Africans.

“Only on Sundays. A servant has a right to get drunk on Sundays. You have no right to criticize him for that, Paul.”

One of his pleasures was in taking his houseboy, Andrew, to the market and buying him half a pound of fried locusts and watching the man devour them, the dark mafuta grease smearing his cheeks.

“Good, eh, Andrew? Delicious, eh? Mazoori, eh?”

“Ndio, bwana. Mzuri sana.”

“You see, Paul. The occasional treat. The occasional reprimand. Works wonders. He’s frightfully happy now.”

He complained that we were out of touch in Uganda. I said that we got the London newspapers on Sundays.

“Bring me the English papers this Sunday,” he said. “We will read them and then go for a walk.”

But he was in a foul mood when I arrived. I knew the reason: Sunday was the day when African families congregated outdoors. There was music, laughter, singing, fooling. “Bongos.” I thought the London papers might help.

“If there’s nothing about me in those papers, I am not interested in reading them,” he said in a sharp voice.

“Vidia,” Pat said, chastising him with his name.

“All right, let’s go for that fucking walk.”

His fluctuating temperament fascinated me, because it was so unusual, even self-destructive. Expatriates in Africa were generally even-tempered, and the farther into the bush you found them, the more serene they were. In Africa, nitpickers were those people by the side of the road plucking at someone’s louse-ridden head. The expression described no one else. So it was strange to find someone losing his temper, almost constantly on the boil. Such people never lasted. Vidia was especially fanatical in the matter of timekeeping.

“Come at seven,” he said to me one day, inviting me to dinner.

I took this to mean drinks at seven and then dinner. I showed up casually at seven-fifteen and found him at the table with Pat. Pat looked embarrassed; Vidia said nothing. He ignored me. He was eating quickly, like someone who was himself late. He was gobbling prawns.

“We’ve finished the first course,” he finally said. His mouth was full, to put me in the wrong and make a point. “You’re late.”

His obsession with punctuality governed his relationships. I was lucky in having merely been reprimanded for my lateness; the usual penalty was rejection: “He was late. I wouldn’t see him.” An African painter I knew ran out of gas on his way to an appointment with Vidia and, having to walk the rest of the way, arrived half an hour late. Vidia sent him away.

“The oldest excuse in the book, man. ‘I ran out of petrol.’ All the lies!”

He began to rant more often, which was now most of the time. He stopped working. He grew morose.

One day, all he wrote was the word “The” on a piece of paper, nothing more. He showed it to me. It was large and very dark. “It took me seven hours to write that.” He smiled insanely at it, a grin of satisfaction, as if to say, See what they made me do! He looked crazy, but he said he was sad. The problem was his house. The noise was also an assault. “Those bitches!” He hated the smells — cooking fires, rotting vegetation, human odors. “No one washes. Is soap expensive here?”

There had always been a note of humor in his rage, but today he was not joking. He looked older, angrier, insulted, trapped. He was miserable.

“I had to take to my bed,” he said.

In her gentle, trembly, imploring voice, Pat said, “We’ve heard of a hotel…”

The hotel was outside the town of Eldoret, in the highlands — the White Highlands, as they were still known then — of western Kenya: a wooded refuge in the middle of the plateau. It was called the Kaptagat Arms and was run by a man known as the Major, who was noted for his rudeness. He was an Englishman, a retired army officer, Sandhurst trained, who had spent his military career in India. He was in his late sixties and very gruff. Stories about him circulated in Uganda, emphasizing that the Kaptagat Arms was a place to avoid. The most recent story, one I told Vidia, concerned a woman faculty member who had asked the Major for a Pimm’s Cup in the hotel bar. The Major had said, “We don’t serve that muck. Now get out,” and showed the woman the door. Woman-hating was a recurring theme in the Major’s rudeness.

Vidia had told me he loathed colorful characters. He hated clowns, comedians, yakkers, virtuosos, village explainers, and hollow jokesters, vapidly Pickwickian, who spent their lives monologuing in country pubs. He felt insulted by their insincerity and foolishness. Buffoonery caused in him a deepening depression. Yet he liked my story about the Major for its rough justice. The woman in question he had singled out as an infy. Pimm’s No. 1 Cup was an infy drink.

“One of these suburban drinks,” Vidia said.

I was apprehensive. It seemed to me that the Major was the sort of colorful character who would either antagonize Vidia or lower his spirits. He had told me of a fistfight he’d had in a London restaurant once with just such a presumptuous person. It was hard to imagine this tiny man provoked to physical violence. But he never lied, so I believed him.

The three of us, Vidia, Pat, and I, went to the Kaptagat together. It was a long drive. First the Jinja Road out of Kampala, with its sugar estates and clouds of butterflies that settled on the road and posed a skidding hazard at the curve near Iganga. Then Jinja itself, the cotton mills, and Owen Falls — the headwaters of the Nile — and the conical hill outside Tororo where a dangerous leopard was said to live. Near the Kenyan frontier and the customs post, we came to the end of the paved road. Eighty miles of dusty, stony road had to be traversed, and on it, outside Bungoma, which was just some Indian shops and a bicycle mender, we saw six or seven naked boys with white-powdered bodies running along the road, having just “danced,” as Africans said, meaning they were initiates in a circumcision ceremony. Their white faces were ghostlike. Farther on, seeing the sign Beware of Fallen Rocks, Vidia muttered the words to himself, liking the sign for its precise language.

After we left Eldoret and its single gas station, we traveled north down narrow red clay roads, past corn fields, following wooden arrow-shaped signs saying To the Kaptagat Arms. We found the place in the early afternoon. It was utterly silent and abandoned-looking: no guests, no cars, only flitting birds and a few Kikuyu gardeners work ing in the flower beds. The hotel had one story, a converted farmhouse with an added wing of single rooms that looked out on the flower garden.

“Hello?” I said. “Jambo.”

No one answered. Inside in the reception area there were Indian artifacts on shelves — Benares brassware, carved ivory, wall hangings, some baskets — as well as the sort of paraphernalia found in English country pubs: horse brasses, pewter tankards, tarnished trophies, old blurred photographs of anglers struggling to hold prize fish upright, hunting horns, ribbons, and the sort of fluted glass that offered a yard of ale. There were mounted racks of gazelles and oryx and kudu. There was a shoulder mount of a zebra on one wall and a zebra skin on the floor. The most ominously impressive object was a large, dusty tiger skin nailed to one whole wall, where it sprawled disemboweled in an arrested growl.

I rang a tinkly bell that was propped on the gold-stamped leather of the reception book and blotter, whereupon a tall craggy figure marched out from the back office. His posture was crooked and peevish. He had white hair and a deeply lined chain smoker’s face and a burning butt between his fingers. Undeniably the Major, he looked cross, with an English scowl that meant “nothing impresses me.” Staring with puzzled, just-interrupted eyes, he stuck his chin out and said, “Yes, what is it?”

“We’ve just driven from Uganda,” Vidia said.

“Shocking road. But we do get quite a few people from that side.”

“We are inquiring about your hotel,” Vidia went on. “We’d like to have lunch and look around.”

“Give me a moment to get sorted out,” the Major said. “Have a shufti at the garden. I’ll give you a shout when we’re ready to seat you. What was the name?”

“Naipaul.”

“Are you the writer?”

It was an inspired response. The heavens opened. A trumpet sounded, flocks of doves soared, and all the malaikas, the choirs of black angels, in the skies of western Kenya burst into song.

“Yes,” Vidia said, stammering with satisfaction. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

He was home, welcomed, at ease, in his own element, in the presence of a reader, happier than I had ever seen him.

“And what can I do for you?”

The Major had to repeat the question. He was speaking to me. I was lurking near the tiger skin, feeling awkward, but also wondering how you managed to kill one of these enormous creatures without making a mark or leaving scars.

“I am with them,” I said. “And I am looking for the bullet hole in this thing.”

“You won’t find it,” the Major said. “I shot him in the eye.”

The big glass eyes of the tiger stared like a martyr’s into the room with its ridiculous curios.

“How did you find us?” the Major asked.

“I had a vibration,” Vidia said.

Over lunch in the dining room, where we were the only diners, the Major was attentive. He said that business was terrible and that he planned to sell the place. He was breezy and somewhat stoical, as though fighting a rear-guard action and about to announce his surrender. He pulled the cork from a bottle of wine. “This is an Australian hock.”

“But this is awfully good,” Vidia said, examining the label as he worked his lips together.

“Try some of that sherry sauce in your soup. Joshua will be right back with your entrées,” the Major said, marching away.

Pat had begun to cry. She sobbed miserably and said she could not eat. It was the thought of the hotel’s closing, she said. All the flowers, all the order and nearness, all the hope. And they were shutting up shop.

“Oh my, Vidia, look,” she said, and gestured towards a waiter. “His poor shoes.”

There was something pathetic in the shoes. They were broken, without laces, the counters crushed, the tongues missing, the heels worn. They seemed to represent battered, tortured feet. The sight of the shoes reduced Pat to tears once again. Each time she saw the man wearing them, she began to sob. I did not tell her that Africans got such shoes second- and third-hand. Used to being barefoot, the Africans who owned them rarely found that they conformed to their misshapen feet; the shoes, like the torn shirts and torn shorts they wore, were often merely symbolic.

“Don’t be sad, Patsy,” Vidia said. “He’ll be all right. He’ll go back to his village. He’ll have his bananas and his bongos. He’ll be frightfully happy.”

Later, the Major said that after India’s independence, he had followed some other Anglo-Indians in coming to East Africa. Kenya, for its good climate, had been a choice destination. Tanzania was regarded as a rough place, difficult to farm, full of Bolshie Africans in Mao suits. Uganda was black, an agglomeration of incoherent kingdoms with bad roads. In any case, the Major had come reluctantly. He had liked India. Africa was all right, but Africans infuriated him. His Swahili was just a stern litany of orders and commands, and I saw something rather strict, even domineering about him, a coldness, and a defiant cynicism. He embodied the worst of the settler severity and the woman-hating mateship of the officers’ mess.

Ignoring her tears, the Major took a dislike to Pat from the first, and afterwards he sometimes mimicked her to me — clumsy, overstated mimicry that betrayed a kind of rancor. To him she was the bibi, the memsahib, the whiner, but for Vidia’s sake he was polite to her. Vidia used the old-fashioned-sounding word “pathic” to describe the Major. I had never heard the word before. Vidia said English prostitutes used it, which seemed a curious attribution and an even more questionable authority. Oh, tarts said it, did they? I took it to mean that the Major was bent. Vidia’s more particular word “bugger” was never uttered here at the Kaptagat Arms.

They talked of India: the beauty of Punjabi Muslims, the ferocity of Sikhs, the plains of Uttar Pradesh, the Englishness of hill stations, polo at the Poona Club. The Major had been posted all over. He said to Vidia, “I could tell you some smashing stories. I am sure you’d be able to use them.”

“No, not me,” Vidia said. “You must write them yourself.”

Over the years, I heard him give that same advice to everyone who offered him a story to write. He could not write their stories; it was for them to do. When they protested that they could not write, Vidia said, “If your story is as good as you say, you’ll write it.”

The Major was also a reader and had admired Vidia’s book An Area of Darkness. Soon after we arrived, I saw him reading Graham Greene’s The Comedians, which had just been published in Britain.

“What do you think of it?” I asked.

“Characters called Smith and Jones and Brown. That’s no bloody good. What should I think of it?”

He did not like Americans, he said. He made no secret of his contempt for me. I had a sissy way with the sherry sauce. “Yanks!” he cried, and then told long, implausible stories. Once, the Major said, while in the United States on a military errand, he had ordered a slice of ham in an officers’ club. Unbidden, an American officer at the table had spooned a dollop of marmalade on the ham and said, “That’ll make it taste a whole lot better”—spoken in one of the Major’s cruelly inaccurate accents.

“Bloody Yanks,” the Major said. “I couldn’t eat it.”

With minor variations, he told me the same story four times. I did not mind. I felt that this casual abuse would give Vidia a perspective on an American’s life among these English settlers in Africa.

Vidia found a room in the hotel he liked. He negotiated a weekly rate, and soon he and Pat moved in. The idea was that Vidia would finish writing his novel there, and it was at the Kaptagat Arms that he told me its title, The Mimic Men. Pat did some writing too. She kept a diary. She also had literary ambitions — she wanted to write a play — but she seldom discussed her plans, always deferring to Vidia. From time to time she broke into helpless blubbing, either as the result of a disagreement or simply because of some sorrowful sight — broken shoes, a snotty-nosed child, a woman bereft, a gardener laboring on his knees. Often her tears roused me. I did not know why, but her weeping made me want to hold her and fondle her breasts.

There were no other guests at the Kaptagat Arms. The Major had several mild-mannered Labrador retrievers, which nuzzled our legs, their tongues lolling, hoping to be scratched. Some British teachers from a nearby prep school came to the bar most nights and got drunk.

“That silly Jewess,” a male teacher shrieked one night.

Vidia said to avoid them. “Infies.”

He understood the Major, he said. The Major’s Indian Army nickname had been “Bunny.” The poor man was tormented by passion and frustration. Clearly, he was a very sensitive soul, Vidia said. “Look at those eyes.” (To me, the Major’s blue eyes seemed cold and depthless.) The Major had a feeling for India, which was a mark of his sensibilities. He had heart. He was a good soldier and respected his men. He understood the culture. He was intelligent. He had brought this sense of order to Africa, where, imparting skills, building an institution, he was in a way running a miniature colony of his own.

Vidia, suspecting that the Major found him to be a puzzle, seemed to look for ways to make himself more puzzling. Yet Vidia had such simple, inflexible rules that, if they were strictly followed, he was happy. For example, Vidia’s vegetarianism caused a dilemma in the kitchen. Omelets were a frequent solution. “I have had to buy more cookery books,” the Major told me.

I visited Vidia whenever I could, at first for weekends and then for weeks at a time. The Kaptagat routine was quite different from my life in Kampala, and I grew to like playing bar billiards and eating steamed chocolate pudding, putting sherry in my soup and walking the Major’s dogs.

What occupied me — though I never spoke of it — was my own novel. It was understood that my writing consultations with Vidia were just about over. My cowardice essay was nearly done. “I think it’s an important statement,” Vidia said, “though you might have revealed too much of yourself.” I had moved on. I did not say what I was doing. Anyway, no one asked. I was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

“My narrator has something to say about that,” Vidia would say in the middle of a conversation, and it was often as simple as a reference to the fluctuating price of land. He was close to all his characters — he quoted them, and he often quoted the narrator, who was a wise, if world-weary, forty-year-old with opinions on politics and oppression, friendship and money. Vidia was happy with his novel’s progress now that he was the resident of this comfortable hotel. All his needs were seen to. He had rusticated himself and was looked after by the Major and his Kikuyu servants, whom in Kenyan fashion he had begun to call “Cukes.”

Pat said, “Amin asked, ‘What work does the bwana do in his room all day?’ I told him that your work is like praying. So he has to be very quiet.”

“‘The bwana is praying,’” Vidia said. “Yes. It’s true. I’m glad you put it that way.”

He had started the novel in a hotel in the southeast London district of Blackheath, having deliberately checked in to find atmosphere and enter the mood of his narrator, who was a temporary hotel resident writing a novel-memoir. It was appropriate that he was finishing the book in another hotel. He said many times, “My narrator likes hotels. I like hotels.” He enjoyed the attention he received, the tidy rooms, the staff toiling away, the illusion that this was a manor and he was the lord. And such conditions were perfect for the writing of a book.

“This is an important book,” he said of his novel. “These things have never been said.”

It’s just a book, I thought. It amazed me that he could talk about his work so admiringly and with such fondness. But I also thought: I want to feel that respect about something I have written. I want to value it. I want to have that confidence. I want to invest all my intellect and my effort in it. I want to be rewarded.

“Patsy objects to something I wrote,” Vidia said over dinner one night. “Patsy doesn’t want me to say ‘wise old coon.’”

“Oh, Vidia,” Pat said, and her eyes became moist.

“Patsy wants me to say ‘wise old negro.’”

They both seemed awful to me, but I could tell from Pat’s anger and the argument that ensued — more tears at the dinner table — that she would prevail.

He worked on an Olivetti portable, one of those lightweight flat machines that seemed modern to me and that went chick-chick-chick. I used an old black Remington that clacked loudly when I typed, going fika-fika-fika.

“I love to sit in the garden and hear you both typing,” Pat said.

In the bar one night Vidia said, “How do you spell ‘areola’?”

I thought he was saying “aureole” and began to spell it, but he said no. He asked the Major for a dictionary and found the word.

“Isn’t it a nipple?” asked the Major.

“It’s the portion that surrounds the nipple,” answered Vidia.

While they talked, I looked up the word “pathic,” but it was not in the Major’s small student dictionary, which must have belonged to one of the Kikuyu staff.

“Is that for your book?” the Major was asking Vidia.

“My narrator mentions it, yes.”

“I must read this book.”

Pat smiled at this but said nothing. She had a smooth pale face, a slightly jutting jaw, and a pendulous lower lip that made her seem thoughtful, on the point of speaking. She was shy, she spoke sweetly, she was modest and always polite. I was careful never to swear in her presence. I had seen how the word “fuck” upset her when spoken by a man in the Kaptagat bar. I did not want to ask myself why her reaction stirred me.

In the garden, beyond the hedge of purplish bougainvillea, she read, she wrote in her diary, always looking lonely and somewhat embarrassed, as though she were obviously waiting, keeping an ap pointment with someone who would never show up. She was small and demure and shapely. I give her a chaste kiss at night.

“Keep Pat company,” Vidia would say. He was wholly occupied with his book.

I wondered what his words meant and wanted them to be less ambiguous, or for her to take the initiative. I was twenty-four and still missed Yomo badly, although in Kampala I sometimes took women home from the Gardenia bar.

Pat and I drove to nearby villages or to Eldoret, where there was a post office. We went for walks. It was not unusual to stumble across an African couple rutting, or a boy chasing a girl through a field, or to hear, as we did one day, shrieks of pleasure from a corn field. This sort of thing roused me. Pat appeared not to notice, as a well-bred woman will avert her eyes from two dogs copulating in the road. She was friendly and receptive but always polite. Was her politeness her way of keeping her distance?

Wooing was unknown to me. I did not know anything about the rituals of English courtship. I had so far, in the four years I had lived in Africa, made love only to African women. That sex had liberated me and given me a habit of straightforwardness. Once I asked an American woman in Kampala if she was interested in having sex. She said, “You’ll have to be a little subtler than that,” and when I attempted subtlety — though I knew it was too late — she confessed that she was a virgin. I was so shocked at her innocence I lectured her, warning her to be more careful. We were all dogs here, I said.

“Come home with me. I want to make love to you,” I would say, but the statement was even blunter and without euphemism in Chichewa or Swahili. It was as unambiguous as describing the insertion of a cork in a bottle, but wasn’t that better?

“Mimi nyama, wewe kisu” usually worked when I said it with a smile. I am the meat, you are the knife.

“No,” one woman laughed. “You are the knife, I am the meat.”

“Sisi nyama mbili,” I said. We’re both meat.

Sometimes no words were necessary. Just being alone with a woman in Africa meant that you had complete freedom. She might not say “Let’s do it,” she might make no sound at all. Her silence or her smile meant yes. I had lived what I felt was a repressed life in the United States. It was a relief that no negotiation was necessary. If I met a woman I liked, I soon mentioned sex. It seemed to me, and nearly always to the woman, that what was being proposed was no more serious, or lengthy, than a game of cards.

“I have given up sex,” Vidia had said to me. The statement strangely teased me. I regarded Pat in light of that disclosure and saw both timidity and hunger and a hint of frail susceptibility that only made her more desirable.

We went for walks and were often together, yet I could not find the words to broach this subject. I had no technique and I knew straightforwardness would not work. She was simply too polite and circumspect for me to speak bluntly to her. I wished that she would help me, either by frankly putting me off or encouraging me. Her politeness was like the reaction of a coquette, and perversely that attracted me as much as her delicate face and pale damp eyes and lovely hair — only thirty-three, and yet her hair was silver-gray, another provocation.

She caught me staring at her one day and she became self-conscious. “My clothes have shrunk so,” she explained, and tugged with her tiny fingers. Tight slacks, tight blouse, and her pretty lips. This never went further than my lingering gaze, but my feelings of desire for his wife made me guiltily hearty towards Vidia whenever Pat and I returned to the hotel from a walk or a ride. I would not know until much later that in the novel he was writing, Vidia’s Indian narrator-hero’s English wife, who somewhat resembled Pat (a whole page was devoted to the pleasures of her breasts), has an affair with a young American. The narrator looks on; the American who cuckolds him is “slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him.”

Eldoret had a noisy bar on a back street called the Highlands. In spite of the music there were not many people inside, and most of them were women from that area, very dark, from the lakeshore town of Kisumu. I went to the Highlands one night after dropping Pat at the hotel. I took a seat at a table and saw an African woman nearby smiling at me. Her face gleamed like iron in the badly lighted bar.

“Mumpa cigara.”

I gave her one and asked in Swahili, “Do you want a drink?”

“Yes. If you buy it, I want a pombe,” the woman said, and joined me.

“So what are you doing?” I asked.

“I have been waiting for you,” she said.

This is how it should always be, I thought, because I knew that it would not be a question of if or when, but merely of finding a quiet place afterwards where we would not be disturbed.

The car the Naipauls had acquired before leaving Kampala, the tan Peugeot, was a popular model in East Africa; it was used as a bush taxi because of its solid suspension and reliable engine. Their driver’s name was Aggrey. His English was poor. He often told me in Swahili what he wished to communicate to the bwana. When, as frequently happened, Vidia was annoyed with him, he pleaded with me to explain why the bwana was angry. I was never privy to Vidia’s petulance, and it could last for days at a time, like the master-servant fury in a Russian novel. While it was in progress, Vidia drove the car himself and made Aggrey sit in the back seat. It was a cruel reversal of roles, and as Vidia was an erratic driver — he had never before owned a car — it was a peculiarly humiliating punishment for the driver to be turned into a passenger, stuck in the traditional bwana’s seat while the bwana blunderingly chauffeured him.

To Vidia, all of East Africa was a single maddening place, but anyone who lived there knew it was three distinct countries. Uganda Protectorate had had a peaceful transition to independence. Tanzania, perversely ideological, was a Maoist experiment throughout the sixties: the leaders wore Mao suits and parroted Chinese slogans, and in return for this flattery (the Cultural Revolution had just begun) the Chinese began building a railway that would connect Dar es Salaam with Zambia. Kenya was a cranky tribalistic place with polarized political parties and deep regional and ethnic resentments. The Mau Mau conflict, still fresh in people’s memories, had been violent and divisive, full of rumors of ritual murder and blood ceremonies and cannibalism. Kenya had been a battleground and was now presided over by the sly and sententious old warrior Jomo Kenyatta, who regularly extorted money from foreign governments and Indian businessmen. The governments played along, but sometimes businessmen jibbed and refused to pay up.

Six Indian businessmen who refused to pay were deported from Kenya while Vidia was at the Kaptagat Arms. Vidia inquired and discovered what we had known all along, that Indians in Nairobi had helped lead the Kenyan struggle for independence. They had been discriminated against by the British, barred from living in certain areas, forbidden to grow cash crops, and kept out of clubs. After uhuru (independence) they were treated shabbily by Kenyatta’s government. Now some were being thrown out.

Vidia was visibly a muhindi, an Indian. Even he said that he had gone several shades darker in the equatorial sun. His bush hat and walking stick were a poor disguise. He was now living in a country where a muhindi was unwelcome. “Bloody Asian” was one of the less offensive ways Africans in Kenya referred to Indians, and muhindi was what the Kaptagat’s servants called Vidia when they spoke among themselves.

Tough-minded, Vidia reacted in much the same way as he had in Uganda. Whenever he met Indians in Kenya, he challenged them, demanding to know their backup plans in case of trouble. He called it “crunch time.” “Very well then,” he would say after the first pleasantries, “what are you going to do when crunch time comes?” He urged them to leave for India or Britain and to take their money with them — to teach the Africans a lesson. He quoted the Gita. He said, “You must act.” But they smiled uneasily and said that he did not understand. He decided that Pat and I should go with him to Nairobi to discuss this matter with the Indian high commissioner and the U.S. ambassador.

“Do you remember what I told you?” he said to me as we drove through the Rift Valley (Beware of Fallen Rocks) toward Nairobi. “Hate the oppressor, but always fear the oppressed.”

I recognized the tone of voice from the main character in his novel in progress. It was also often Vidia’s own tone of voice. Vidia and his hero agreed on most things, it seemed. They even used the same expressions, or “locutions,” as they called them: “latterly,” “crunch time,” “some little time.”

“I have been contemplating this visit to Nairobi for some little time,” Vidia said. “Yes. Some little time.”

Nearer the Rift Valley escarpment we saw a sign saying Hussain Co. Ltd. Sheepskin Coats for Sale. Vidia said he wanted to see them, though I suspected he merely wished to lecture Mr. Hussain. The coats were cheap. They were thick and bulky. Mr. Hussain took our measurements and said he would make the coats to order. He would send them in a month or so.

“And what are you going to do when the crunch comes?” Vidia said to Mr. Hussain after we paid our money.

“I have plan,” Mr. Hussain said, wagging his head ambiguously.

When we were back on the road Vidia said, “He was lying, of course,” and then, “I wonder if I can bring it off?”

He was speaking of the sheepskin coat.

“Of course you can,” Pat said from the back seat, always the encouraging spouse.

“Perhaps in Scotland,” Vidia said.

There were giraffes in the distance, crossing the valley, and a herd of grazing zebras and clusters of gazelles.

“Frosty weather. Snow. I can see that coat being useful. But I don’t know whether I can bring it off. I don’t think I’m big enough in the shoulders.” After a moment he said, “Paul, you must come to London. Meet real people. Bring your sheepskin.”

Nairobi was a small town with wide streets and a colonial air. “Mimicry,” Vidia said, but he liked the Norfolk Hotel, its cleanness, its comfort. He quoted his narrator on the subject of hotels. After we checked in, he said he had the address of a Nigerian man here in Nairobi who had access to the Kenyans. At first Vidia wondered if it might be too much trouble — Pat had already decided to stay behind in the hotel room — but then he grew curious. It was always this curiosity that overcame his reluctance. The Nigerian at the very least would have a West African point of view. His name was Muhammed, and he was a Hausa, from the north of his country. He met us at the door of his apartment wearing a blue pinstriped double-breasted suit. Vidia introduced himself.

“Jolly good,” Muhammed said. He led us to a room with a large bookcase and offered us tea.

“That would be very nice,” Vidia said.

“What about some music?”

There were stacks of record albums on one shelf.

“No music. No music.”

“Jolly good.”

While we drank tea, Muhammed spoke with Vidia about the persecution of Indians in Nairobi, but instead of interrogating him, Vidia grew laconic and impatient. I just looked at the books. I saw Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Kama Sutra, Naked Lunch, Lolita, Lollipop Lady, A Manual for Lovers, and others — variations on a theme.

Vidia was rising. “We must go.”

Muhammed, stopped in midsentence, said, “Jolly good.”

In the car, Vidia said he was disgusted.

“What’s wrong?”

He made a nauseated face at Muhammed’s building and said, “Masturbator!”

It took him a while to calm down, but when his mood eased I said, “I have to see Tom Hopkinson.”

“Hopkinson? The chap who was editor of Picture Post? He’s in Bongo-Wongo?”

“Yes. Want to come?”

“One has no interest.”

I dropped Vidia at the hotel and spent the afternoon with Tom Hopkinson. He was a well-known editor and journalist, and his highly successful Picture Post had been Britain’s answer to Life magazine. Hopkinson, in vigorous semi-retirement, ran the Institute of Journalism in Nairobi. It was my hope that he would come to Kampala and speak about freedom of the press at a conference I was trying to organize. A tall, thin, white-haired man, he was friendly and straightforward and clearly a Londoner: wearing a tie and long trousers and black shoes, he was overdressed for Kenya. We talked about novels — he had published two. He said he was too busy to give the lecture, but I suspected the rumors of violence in Uganda put him off. Most people in Kenya regarded Uganda as the bush.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said that evening in the Norfolk’s bar. He said nothing else, but I knew it was his way of asking about Hopkinson.

“He’s writing a novel,” I said.

“Oh, God.”

“It’s his third.”

“Oh, God.”

“He spoiled the first two, he said. He rushed them. He said he was not going to rush this one.”

Vidia gagged on his tea and released great lungfuls of laughter, his smoker’s laugh that was so fruity and echoey.

“He’s just playing with art.”

“He was a friend of George Orwell,” I said.

“One has been compared to Orwell,” Vidia said. “It is not much of a compliment, is it?”

The Indian high commissioner in Nairobi, Prem Bhatia, gave a dinner party for Vidia. Now, as at the Kaptagat, I saw a contented Vidia: a respected visitor in the house of a man who admired his work. This role of guest of honor calmed Vidia and made him portentous and unfunny and overformal, and at the table he became orotund.

“One has been contemplating for some little time…”

Bhatia had been a distinguished journalist in India. He had lively talkative teenage children and the sort of ambassadorial household that was like a real family. It was not a stuffy party. Two dining tables had been set up in the courtyard of the residence for the Kenyan, Indian, and English guests. Vidia and his host sat at a head table.

As an elderly Sikh servant in a red turban poured wine, Bhatia followed him and said, “Now do enjoy your wine, but be very careful of the glasses. They cost five guineas each. I had them sent from London.”

Hearing this, one of the Englishmen picked up his wine, drank it down, and flung the glass over his shoulder at the courtyard wall. The glass made a soft watery smash as it hit the flagstones.

There was a sudden hush. Bhatia kept smiling and said nothing. The Englishman laughed crazily — he might have been drunk. His wife, her head down, was whispering.

“Infy.” It was spoken loudly from the head table.

After the party, when all the guests had gone and the servants had withdrawn, Vidia talked in his pompous visiting-elder-statesman manner, which was also the tone of his narrator, whom he had told me was a politician. The subject was the Indians who had been deported.

“This is disgraceful,” Vidia said. “How are you planning to respond?”

“We’ve lodged a very strong protest,” Bhatia said.

“You must do more than that,” Vidia said. “India is a big, powerful country. It is a major power.”

“Of course—”

“Remind the Africans of that. Latterly, the Africans have behaved as though they were dealing with just another shabby little country. Latterly—”

“I’ve sent a letter.”

“Send a gunboat.”

“A gunboat?”

“A punitive mission.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shell Mombasa.”

“Who would do this?”

“The Indian Navy,” Vidia said. “One has thought about this extensively. Send the Indian Navy on maneuvers off the Kenyan coast. Anchor off Mombasa — a fleet of ships. Remind them that India is a formidable country. Shell Mombasa.”

The high commissioner was frowning.

“Punish them,” Vidia said. “When Mombasa is in flames they will think twice about persecuting Indians here. Aren’t there fuel depots in Mombasa? Yes, they will leave the Indians alone for some little time.”

The following noon we were having drinks by the pool at the residence of the American ambassador, William Attwood. Vidia was in the midst of his punitive-mission speech when, without prelude, a large, smiling, familiar-looking African appeared. He said he wished to consult with the ambassador. They went into the house.

“He’s asking for money, of course,” Vidia said. “What else would he want? And did you see how fat he is? He’s just another thug.”

After ten minutes the ambassador returned. He said the man was Tom Mboya, a leading politician and government minister.

“Mah-boya,” Vidia said.

“Very impressive man,” Attwood said. “Mboya’s going to be the next president of Kenya.”

Vidia simply stared. He was thinking, Fat thug.

Mboya never became president. Within a few years he was murdered by his political enemies.

The ambassador’s wife joined us for lunch while Vidia continued describing the maneuvers in a possible punitive mission. The rant may have made the ambassador nervous, for, passing the sugar tongs to his wife, he bobbled them and dropped them. They skittered toward the edge of the pool and fell in.

“Never mind,” Attwood said.

We stared as the silver thing swayed downward and settled into the deep end of the pool.

Vidia said, “Do you have a bathing costume that would fit me?”

“Lots in the changing room there,” said Attwood. “We keep them for visitors.”

Vidia excused himself and was back in a few minutes wearing a blue bathing suit. Without a word he dived neatly in and propelled himself to the bottom — eight feet or so — and brought up the dripping sugar tongs, which he handed over. While the ambassador was still marveling at his athleticism, Vidia changed his clothes, and lunch resumed.

It was a reminder of his island childhood. He had been brought up near water and was clearly a wonderful swimmer — I could see it in the way he had launched himself off the edge of the pool, diving with hardly a splash, going deep without apparent effort. At that moment I saw him as a skinny child, diving off a splintery pier in Trinidad, in view of the anchored cruise ships. All his pomposity had fallen away and he had become graceful, a child of the islands.

The ambassador thanked us for coming.

“I think he needed to hear that,” Vidia said of his proposal to shell Mombasa and set it aflame. “Did you notice how attentive he was? He at least realizes there is a problem. I know your people can do something.”

Over the next few days, in Nairobi’s Indian restaurants and shops, Vidia demanded to know what the Indians would do when they were expelled. They had no future in Africa, he said. They had to make plans for crunch time now.

“Yet one has a vibration that the Indians won’t rise to the occasion,” he said to me.

Passing Khannum’s Fancy Goods shop on Queen’s Road, Pat said she wanted to buy a few yards of printed cloth to use as a dust cover for a table in the room at the Kaptagat. Vidia and I waited on the verandah, where a small Indian girl of about seven or eight was sitting on a wooden bench being fanned by her African ayah. The girl wore a pink sari and long Punjabi bloomers and had the prim look of a child on her way to a party.

“Jina lako nam?” I said to the girl, asking her name in Swahili.

The ayah smiled and nudged her gently, a tender gesture that made the girl recoil and scowl at the servant in a bratty way. Vidia sighed — perhaps because I was speaking Swahili, perhaps because of the little-princess look of the skinny girl in her partygoing sari.

“Wewe najua Kiswahili?” I asked. Did she speak Swahili?

The ayah made the soft tooth-sucking cluck with pursed lips that meant yes in East Africa, but no sooner had she sounded this cluck — answering for the girl — than her mistress, silly little toto, scowled again and folded her arms.

“I am knowing wery vell how to speak Inglis!” she said.

“What a horrible child,” Vidia said, looking away. “People are always writing magazine pieces about children — parents and children. They are foolish. I have no children. My publisher, André Deutsch, has no children. My editor has no children. It has been a conscious decision. People say, ‘You’d have lovely children’—the Indian-English thing. I do not want children. I do not want to read about children. I do not want to see them.”

Watching Vidia, the little girl seemed to understand that she was being insulted. Her large eyes had darkened with anger, and as she looked up at the man maligning her, Pat came out of the shop and said, “Hello. What a sweet little girl. What’s your name?”

“Nadira.”

I might have misheard. She spoke just as we were stepping off the verandah into the sunshine, but at the sound of her sharp voice, like the squawk of a mechanical toy, the three of us glanced back — Pat smiling, Vidia frowning in contempt. I was shaking my head, thinking, Wahindi!

Time is so strange in its logic and revelation. The little girl would go to Pakistan, and after thirty years passed (and Pat lay dying in a spruced-up cottage that was at that Nairobi moment tumbledown and lived in by a pair of elderly Wiltshire peasants) Vidia would meet the girl again, now grown up and divorced, never guessing where he had first seen her — nor would she — and fall in love.

How were we to know that little girl being fanned on the Nairobi verandah by her African ayah would be the future Lady Naipaul?

Back at the Kaptagat Arms, Vidia resumed his novel. He was also reading a Victorian account of travels in West Africa in which he came across the expression “our sable brethren.” He began using the expression, building sentences with his other favorite phrases: “For some little time, our sable brethren…”

Before I left for Uganda he asked me, “So what are our sable brethren up to in Kampy, eh?”

There were rumors of trouble in Uganda, though nothing to do with Indians. I said, “People say there’s going to be a showdown between Obote and the Kabaka.”

“One will watch from here,” he said. “Eh, Patsy? Latterly, one has begun to think that one’s returning to Uganda would be completely foolish. Anyway, we were thinking of spending some little time in Tanganyika.”

The country had changed its name to Tanzania five years before, at independence, but Vidia went on using its colonial name, as he did Ghana’s, always calling Ghana the Gold Coast. When he saw that using these names enraged Africans he did it even more, teasing them. He pretended not to know the new names, and when he was angrily corrected, he said “Really” and expressed effusive thanks.

From Dar es Salaam he reported “extensive buggery” and asked for news.

The news was bad in Uganda. This was in late May 1966, during the confrontation between the prime minister and the Kabaka — King Freddy. One Sunday four of the king’s important chiefs were arrested on charges of sedition. Because they were so closely linked to the king, the chiefs’ subjects, their villagers, became a mob and stoned the police. Early the next morning the Uganda Special Forces, commanded by Idi Amin, launched an attack on the Kabaka’s palace at Lubiri.

All day there was fighting — the sound of cannon fire and automatic rifles firing in stuttering enfilade, raking the bamboo pickets of the stockade. From my office desk at Makerere I could see smoke rising from Lubiri. The shooting was continuous. In late afternoon there were still gunshots, and much darker smoke — the fires had taken hold.

“The Kabaka is holding them off with a machine gun,” my colleague Kwesiga said.

No one knew what was happening, though.

“Whose side are you on?” I asked him.

Kwesiga was of the Chiga tribe from the Rwanda border, a despised people who practiced wife inheritance — passing the widow on to the dead husband’s brother — which was based on a curious marriage ceremony that involved the bride’s urinating on the clasped hands of the groom and all his brothers. One of the wedding-night rituals required the bride to fight the husband, and should he prove weak — for she was expected to struggle hard — his elder brother was allowed to take charge, and subdue and ravish the woman while the groom looked on. Kwesiga was being summoned to take his recently widowed sister-in-law as one of his wives.

“I am an emotional socialist,” he said. “But Freddy is a good king.”

In the evening the explosions were louder — mortars, perhaps. And flames were visible where during the day there had been smoke. At last the palace was captured, but when Amin and his men rushed inside, the Kabaka was not there. The clumsy siege of this wood and bamboo palace had taken an entire day and had not accomplished its objective. The Kabaka had escaped to Burundi — dressed as a bar girl, one rumor went.

That was the first night of a curfew. It was illegal to be out of the house from seven in the evening until six in the morning. It was still light at seven, so confinement in bright daylight seemed strange. The enforced captivity and severe censorship also produced many rumors, often conflicting and violent-sounding: stories of arson and beatings and killings, the murder of Indians, cannibal tales and incidents of vandalism, humiliation of expatriates at roadblocks. The Uganda Army was said to be wild — furious that they had failed to capture the king. When darkness came, the gunfire started. I collected rumors in my specially begun curfew notebook.

Besides King Freddy, Kabaka of Buganda, there were three other kings. Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, a fat little man noted for his bizarre robes and blustery speech, was Kyabazinga of Busoga. The Omukama of Toro was a twenty-year-old Mutoro named Patrick, whose sister Princess Elizabeth was a Vogue model. The Omugabe of Ankole was a cattle owner. When the Kabaka fell, the other kings caved in and went quietly, and the government commandeered their palaces — though “palace” was a misnomer for what were actually comically lopsided houses.

The curfew was a period of intense confusion and fear. There was widespread drunkenness too, which added to the atmosphere of insanity. People boasted of their boozing. No one worked. The urgency about drinking was marked, because the bars closed at six P.M. in order to allow people time to get home. Food was scarce because the trucks from the coast were held up at the Ugandan frontier. Matches became unobtainable, no one knew why. There was much petty crime: robberies, looting, a settling of scores. People traveled in convoys if they were headed upcountry. Mail was suspended for a week. The distant gunfire continued, pok-pok-pok, until dawn.

The curfew was for me an extraordinary event; it was also the perfect excuse. I did no teaching. I got on with my novel. I spent the day collecting rumors — always violent, always of massacres. Indi ans often figured in them. My curfew notebook thickened and I considered writing a book like Camus’s The Plague, describing the deterioration of a city during a siege and curfew.

I realized that in time of war or anarchy people lived out their fantasies. There were many fights, but just as many love affairs. Scores were settled because the police were not a presence — the army was in charge, but its roadblocks were used for intimidation and robbery and, if the rumors were true, killings. Roadblocks were always manned by the most thuggish and rapacious soldiers. Most were from the far north, from a minority tribe noted for its ferocity.

I carried my curfew notebook to the Staff Club. Each rumor had a date, a time, a place.

“What is the point of that?” one colleague asked.

I said, “I want to calculate how many miles an hour a rumor travels.”

The breakdown of order had its excitements. People became reckless and slightly crazed. A Muganda man committed suicide after an atrocity in his village. His friends and family were summoned over the radio.

“He has hanged himself,” the announcer said.

My own fantasies took the form of being a real writer and writing all day. I had two books on the burner: my novel and this detailed curfew journal. In the late afternoon I hurried into town and got drunk as quickly as I could. I was energized by the tumult and the noise, which would, I knew, stop dead at seven, when we had to be indoors.

“Can you come home with me?” I asked when I saw a woman I liked.

Sometimes, without my asking, a woman would say, “Take me home with you,” because it was more pleasant to be stuck in a large house than in a small hut in a turbulent township.

Boredom was the cause of all sorts of unruly behavior, and the streets were always littered with broken glass. I enjoyed the drama, the release from the routine, and found it a period of stimulating turmoil.

One day, hurrying home with a woman in my car, worrying about beating the curfew, I took a side road and a bat crashed against my windshield. It was a large fruit bat, and my thought was that it could have broken the windshield. I stopped the car, and before I knew what I was doing I began stomping on the bat, killing the injured creature. The woman in the car was screaming, “Let’s go!” The curfew was changing me, too.

Vidia was shocked by it. The curfew seemed to confirm his fears of African anarchy — casual violence and a climate of fear. From a distance it must have looked awful. He wrote from the Kaptagat Arms saying that he was just about through with his novel and that as soon as the curfew was over, and law and order was restored, he would return to Kampala.

And, “May I use your spare room?”

I was just a young man in Africa, trying to make my life. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met, and absolutely the most difficult. He was almost unlovable. He was contradictory, he quizzed me incessantly, he challenged everything I said, he demanded attention, he could be petty, he uttered heresies about Africa, he fussed, he mocked, he made his innocent wife cry, he had impossible standards, he was self-important, he was obsessive on the subject of his health. He hated children, music, and dogs. But he was also brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best.

I said, “Of course.”

4. On Safari in Rwanda

THE EVENING before we left for Rwanda, Vidia asked, “What would you normally be doing tonight?”

I said, “Going to the Gardenia.”

It was what I usually did before I left for the bush. I explained that it was a bar where strangers were welcome, and there were always women around.

He said, “I want to see it.”

To tell him the Gardenia was a brothel would have made it seem more efficient, more of a business than it was; to describe it as a pickup joint would have misrepresented it as sleazy. It was an African bar, outwardly a hangout but in its complexity and character a sorority of rebellious women. Far from having the sexual ambiguity and low self-esteem of cringing, pimp-bullied Western prostitutes, these African women were as liberated as men. They were not castrators. The Gardenia was a sisterhood of laughing adventuresses and cat-eyed princesses.

Young and old, they had left their villages, because African villages were full of restrictions on women. Fleeing bad marriages, ditching boyfriends and family quarrels, escaping blood feuds and hoeing and child rearing and agonizing circumcisions in mud huts, they had come to Kampala for its freedom. Most came from upcountry districts, but some were from the coast and from as far away as Somalia and the Congo. At the Gardenia every woman’s face was different. These women were not coquettes; there was no wooing involved — they wanted to dance — and as for sex, they were more direct than most men. If they wanted it, they said so, and if not, they did not waste your time. I went there to be happy; always I left in a good mood. If I happened to be going on safari, it was the best farewell.

I knew I was a dog, but so what? Such a lively place made me hate polite company and loathe the tedium of dinner parties — parties generally, all chitchat and ambassadorial bottom-sniffing. Most of the expatriates lived at a great remove from the real life of Kampala, and the diplomats were even more remote, and consequently paranoid. From the embassy residences on Kololo Hill this would have seemed like lowlife, yet African women fascinated me. Their common language was Swahili. Many spoke better English than my students. They lived by their wits. They fluttered like moths around the lights of these bars.

On the way to the Gardenia, Vidia said that Pat had gone to London to put their house in order and prepare for his arrival in about a month. She awaited his return. I thought fondly of her. I said I hoped that, in time, I would be married to a woman who would treat me this way.

“Marry a woman who can earn a few pence,” Vidia said. “Then you can get on with your writing.”

He smiled at the Gardenia. It was a friendly-looking place, a three-story building on a side road at the edge of town, beyond Bat Valley. It was brightly lit, with strings of light bulbs on its two verandahs and more bulbs in the mango trees next to them. Several women who stood on the upper verandah called out softly, welcoming us.

It was early, so there were many more women than men. The miniskirt, popular that year in London, had arrived in Kampala, but some of the women wore wraparounds and robes, and the Somalis were dressed in white gowns. We were the object of their attention. The women stared and smiled, but they would not sit with us until they were beckoned.

Seeing us on the upstairs verandah talking, the women were more teasing towards Vidia, because he apparently was not interested. They saw him as a challenge. Vidia debated what to drink. He disliked beer and cheap wine. He asked for sherry. There was none. He decided on a glass of waragi, banana gin — the word was a corruption of “arrack.” I drank pale ale and called to a woman I knew, Grace.

“What is your muhindi friend’s name?” Grace asked me in Swahili.

“Bwana Naipaul,” I said. “But my friend is not a muhindi. He is British.”

She laughed at the notion of this Indian’s being British. Vidia looked content. He had picked up the word rafiki, friend. And this was clearly an abode of good humor and ease. The Gardenia had private rooms where people could lounge and canoodle without disturbance, but I never used them. I usually stayed awhile in the bar, talking, and then asked a woman if she wanted to go home with me, or go dancing. She nearly always said yes. Afterwards I drove her back to the Gardenia. A present was expected, but there was no set fee, never a specific sum. Often no money was asked for, and the woman feigned surprise when I handed over some twenty-shilling notes.

“Muhindis have lots of shillings,” Grace was saying.

“He is a writer. He has small-small shillings.”

Vidia frowned at the mention of shillings. Money was on Vidia’s mind, and therefore on mine. He constantly talked about the money he had lost in coming to Uganda.

The front door opened, a woman muttered muzungu, and I saw two burnt-nosed planters heave themselves into armchairs and yell for beer. The best-dressed drinkers were Africans, wearing suits and ties, and they mingled with Indians — the hard-drinking Sikhs, the more abstemious Gujaratis, the teetotal Muslims.

“I see perfect integration here,” Vidia said, and he laughed, repeating it in his usual way. I suspected that such a pronouncement was like a rehearsal for something he intended to repeat in another place (And I sat back in the brothel and said, “I see perfect integration…”).

At just that detached and observing moment, as he was being so objective, I realized that, pleasant as he was, I did not want to be with him. How could I take a woman home with me? I was too self-conscious. And yet I wanted to, because we were leaving for Rwanda in the morning and I needed some sort of farewell.

As I brooded, Vidia said, “When you come to London I want you to tell my brother that you sleep with African girls. I want you to shock him.”

“I don’t get it. Why should he be shocked?”

“Because he’s always talking this liberal nonsense. And he was brought up in Trinidad. Yet it would not occur to him to make love to a black woman.”

“That’s too bad. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

And I also thought: This brother of his is a fool. I knew that he was at Oxford, studying Chinese, and that Vidia thought he was lazy. His name was Shiva.

“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

“So you are leaving, then?” Grace said, seeing us stand up to go.

“Safari tomorrow,” I said.

“I want to dance,” she said. She raised her arms and took a few dance steps, African dance steps, swaying her hips. A whole message, an unmistakable promise, moved through her body.

“I am coming back for you,” I said, and I meant it.

At home, Vidia noticed my kitchen was dirty — dishes in the sink, food left uncovered, some scuttling cockroaches on the floor.

“Sack Veronica,” he said fiercely. “Sack her!”

I said I would speak to her. I hated anyone criticizing my servants, especially Vidia, who didn’t know her.

“At least have a row with her. It will keep her on her toes.”

A safari was not a hunting trip but any long journey upcountry. “He’s on safari,” people said when someone was out of town. But for our safari Vidia was kitted out like a hunter or a soldier: bush hat, bush shirt, thorn-proof khakis, and a stout walking stick that doubled as a club, should he wish to disable or brain an attacker. He wore heavy, thick-soled shoes that he called veldshoen, an Afrikaans word meaning skin shoes. Though he had a purposeful, marching way of walking, what wrecked this attempt to seem soldierly was his small size, his delicate hands, his tiny wrists. He had bought an expensive camera at a discount from an Indian shopkeeper in town. He wore it as an accessory, a big thing thumping on his chest or smacking his hip as he strode along. With his downturned hat brim and his downturned mouth and the way he sweated in these heavy clothes in the Ugandan hot season, Vidia appeared conspicuous and comic.

In those days of roadblocks and sneering soldiers, it was not a good idea to dress in a military way. Casual clothes were best, the less serious the better, to advertise nothing but innocence or naivete. Any ostentation was seized upon. If you wore an expensive watch it would be taken. I worried that the simple brutes who manned the roadblocks outside Kampala would wonder about this muhindi in bush clothes with the severe expression. Soldiers wore hats identical to Vidia’s khaki one. Indian shopkeepers never dressed this way, and being an Indian, Vidia would be seen as a shopkeeper. But I hadn’t the heart to tell him any of this.

We set off through early morning Kampala just before dawn, when the roads were still clear. Africans got up with the sun and mobbed the roads in daylight; their bicycles and animals made it slow going. Even in the murky light we could see the effects of what was now known as the Emergency. The fall of the Kabaka meant that his kingdom was no longer the dominant province, and as if to prove it the soldiers had become an army of occupation. The whole city looked vandalized and neglected, there was garbage in the road, cars had been tipped over and burned — another rumor confirmed — and some houses and shops looted and torched.

“Good God,” Vidia said. “But you see? I told you. It is going back to bush.”

We were stopped at a succession of military roadblocks and asked where we were going. At one of them the soldiers took an interest in Vidia’s bush hat and sunglasses, but Vidia scowled back. One soldier said, “Nice goggles,” and I thought he would demand them, but he just smiled in admiration.

Soldiers made Vidia nervous. These men had a fearsome reputation for incompetence and bad temper. They had recently been engaged in a messy full-scale siege and many of them had been involved in killing. I told Vidia how, during the Emergency, a Ugandan soldier had stopped an Indian friend of mine. The soldier’s friends had called “Hurry up!” to him from their Land Rover.

“What should I do with this muhindi?”

“Kill him and let’s go,” one of the soldiers yelled.

“Please don’t kill me,” my Indian friend said.

“Hurry up! Kill him and let’s go!”

The soldier waved his rifle back and forth and was so flustered by the nagging of his comrades and the pleading of the Indian that he left the man standing, gibbering in fear, beside his car. There wasn’t enough time to kill him. Many of the murders had happened in that casually violent way. Kill him and let’s go!

“That scares the hell out of me, man,” Vidia said.

But soon there were no more roadblocks and we were on the open road, in sunshine, heading southwest in a swampy area near a stream called the Katonga, which drained into Lake Victoria a few miles south. The Katonga was famous for the density of its reeds— masses of papyrus, a lovely pale green plant with a feathery crown on its stalk that always reminded me of Uganda’s connection to the Nile. Papyrus was Egyptian in its beauty; its image had been carved into ancient tombs along with hieroglyphics; it had been prized for its many uses — not just to make paper and cloth, but its pith was eaten and its root used for fuel. Yet in Uganda it was just another plant that choked the waterways and was good for nothing.

“Do you find those African girls frightfully beautiful?” Vidia asked. “The ones at that bar?”

“Some of them, yes. Very beautiful. A few remind me of Yomo.”

“What do you hear from her?”

“She had an abortion and is planning to go back to college.” I had recently had a sorrowful note from her and a letter from her brother. “The father of the child wouldn’t marry her.”

“Oh, God.”

I could not say anything more. I missed her badly and my life had been empty since she left. We traveled ten miles before I spoke again.

“Do you find them beautiful?”

He thought awhile, “No,” he said. Then “No” again. And “No” after another pause. “But Derek Walcott is married to a woman of mixed race who is very beautiful.” He considered this. “I could just imagine myself with her. Do you know Walcott’s poetry?” He recited:

This island is heaven — away from the dustblown blood of cities;

See the curve of bay, watch the straggling flower, pretty is

The wing’d sound of trees, the sparse-powdered sky, when lit is

The night. For beauty has surrounded

Its black children, and freed them from homeless ditties.

“That word ‘ditties’ sounds precious, but it is right somehow,” he said. And then he made his disgusted face and said, “The narrator of my novel goes to prostitutes.”

He had a way of letting his narrator stand for him, and so I knew what he was driving at and we discussed the narrator.

“Frequents prostitutes,” he said, trying out the literary phrase. His expression was still sour. “Afterwards, you hate yourself for being a man.”

That shocked me. Making love to a woman did not have that effect on me at all. Afterwards I was calm, happy, tired, at rest, the opposite of disgusted. I felt rewarded and fulfilled. Sex was magic, mind-expanding, enacted in energetic postures that I recalled later, seeing myself kneeling, standing, knotted, on all fours. It was knowledge, too — not blind lust, though wild monkey-lust was part of it, helping to illuminate the act, which was for me a source of serenity.

I enjoyed every aspect of it, from its first intimation, which was the woman’s returned glance, to the quiver of anticipation, sensing my scalp tighten at the prospect, the warmth on my skin and my fingers becoming tremulous, the sense of blood beginning to pound behind my eyes and my breath coming in gasps, my chest tightening, my mouth dry, as though I were on a narrow path, working my way slowly into a jungle, following a bird with brilliant plumage and a flicking tail.

To touch a woman who wanted to be touched was for me the height of pleasure; to kiss her and be kissed with the same desire, to feel the great excitement of being touched by her, the pressure in every fingertip a wordless promise. I changed by degrees from a reflective smiling soul sifting through my dreams to an engine of desire, and my whole body burned. However casual the act may have seemed — for I had a tendency to mask my desire when I mentioned it — it was passionate and serious. It was the slap of bodies, the crack of bone on bone, and it left me breathless. There were groans of pleasure, but it was a profound raking of the nerves and a wrenching of muscles: no laughter, no jokes. In this descent into the deepest part of my body, I felt an inarticulate animal fury, like a worker bee in pursuit of the queen, frantic to mate. It exhausted me and helped me understand the single-mindedness of desire, the urgent monomania of the libido.

I said this in a simple form to Vidia, not wishing to reveal too much: that I loved being with a woman; that I was alone the rest of the time because there was no one in my life; that I hoped to meet someone and fall in love.

“But prostitutes can be so depressing,” he said.

“Maybe in Europe, but not here. This is Masaka, by the way.”

Mid-morning in Masaka, which was a stretch of Indian shops on either side of the road: fruit vendors and hawkers crouched near verandahs, the open-air businesses of bicycle mending and cobbling shoes, the bright clothing of the rural African women. Vidia fingered his camera but took no pictures.

“In Britain, I suppose they hate their customers,” I said. “They’re famous for hating men, aren’t they? Here the women are eager, they’re hungry. They take pleasure in it. Half of them are looking for husbands. They’re not prostitutes in the classic sense. A lot of times they don’t mention money. They just want to go dancing afterwards.”

“I was a big prostitute man at one time,” Vidia said. “I was with a prostitute in London one day. It was in the afternoon. When we got to her room she said, ‘I saw you on the telly last night.’ It was one of those panel games.” He laughed at the incongruity of it, then murmured the woman’s words again.

“Then what happened?”

“We talked about the television program!”

That I could understand. The African bar girls were full of opinions, about other tribes, about politics, about neighboring countries, about Indians. The women were sometimes religious and always superstitious. Many had children, some had husbands, but they were on their own. I knew that Vidia saw a vast cultural difference, and of course there was, but living in Uganda there was also common ground and like-mindedness. I saw aspects of my own temperament in them.

“I have often gone to Amsterdam and made myself sick, eating and drinking,” Vidia said. “And then getting a woman, one of those Dutch prostitutes.” He made his disgusted face, frowning miserably, looking poisoned. “You hate yourself.”

“I’ve never felt that, actually.”

“It’s so dreadful,” he said. He was still talking and watching the road ahead but probably seeing the red-light district of Amsterdam or a whore’s tiny room with its meretricious decor, the clock and the calendar and the horrible little dog.

“I’ve never been to Amsterdam.”

“You’re a man and you’re sick with it,” Vidia was saying.

“I hate it when they say ‘Hurry up.’ But that’s not an African thing.”

“Or ‘Are you done yet?’”

“That’s more your clock-watching Western hooker.”

Vidia laughed and said, “Graham Greene goes to prostitutes all the time. He’s absolutely addicted, so I’m told. Greene will be walking down a street at night. He will see one, catch her eye, then move on. Ten minutes later, still thinking about her, he will go back. You see, he becomes obsessed.”

“That has happened to me — a lot.”

Vidia had made it sound like a distraction, but it was deeper than that. When my work was done and I was alone, I looked for a woman and always hoped to find one who was looking for me.

“You’re young. And I’ve seen your poems, Paul. All that libido!”

“Lord Rochester, that’s me,” I said. “But I sometimes get jealous if I see a bar girl I know with another man. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Paul, Paul,” he said in an uncle-like way.

We jogged along the dusty road past thorn trees.

“I’d like to find a woman to marry,” I said.

“I met Patsy at Oxford. We got married in 1954. The ceremony was a small affair. She has always worked. That’s good, you know. And it’s rather grand being the history mistress at an English girls’ school. She earns a few pence.”

“It would be great to be married to a woman with money.”

“I don’t know,” Vidia said. “But I was at university with a chap who was studying Malory. He had no money. His fiancée was very well off, though — had a sort of stipend. I used to say, ‘It will work beautifully. You have your Malory and she has her salary.’”

Smiling beneath his sunglasses, he said he loved the expression “lots of money.” Someone saying “I have lots of money” tickled him. As we drove along he tried out the words, saying them in different ways: “Lots of money… Lots of money…”

The road was dustier now, and in this rural district where passing cars were rare, Africans walked in the middle of the road, always barefoot, sometimes with their cattle. The women carried heavy-looking burdens on their heads, baskets of fruit or stacks of firewood.

We were traveling along the dry savannah to Mbarara and could see gazelles and antelopes and African buffalo and herd boys tending goats. I refueled at a new Agip station in Mbarara. We bought some fruit and ate it. Vidia would not eat anything he could not peel — a healthy rule in Africa. There would be no more fuel or food until Kabale, several hours down a winding road that climbed through the hills. The road slowed our progress, but there was hardly any traffic except the enormous trailer trucks that came at us down the center of the road from Rwanda and the Congo.

Vidia was alert the whole time, and talkative. At one point, speaking of discipline, he quoted a calypso song with approval.

“I thought you hated music,” I said.

“I do. But the calypso is something else.”

“Harry Belafonte.”

“A complete fraud.”

I sang, “Ma-til-da, she take me money—”

“No, no.”

Vidia cleared his throat with the sudden scouring and hoicking of an asthmatic cleaning his pipes, and after a moment a reedy sound vibrated in his throat — his voice, of course, but the words were fragile, rustling scraps of dusty tissue paper being slowly torn. I recognized at once the rattly sound of a wind-up phonograph, the needle on a revolving black disk, a quavering dirgelike song coming out of a huge scallop-edged horn: “It was loooove, love alone, cause King Edward to leave his throne.”

“That sounds like an old record,” I said.

“I heard it on an old record.”

It was also the title of a story in Miguel Street, a book in which ten calypsos were quoted. So what was all this business about hating music? I didn’t ask.

He had perfectly imitated the sound, as when my parrot, Hamid, mimicked the agony of the hinges of my door squeaking. I thought, Now I’ve heard everything.

On the subject of the calypso singers of Trinidad he was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The culture they sang about was tough, breezy, unsentimental. Vidia had written, in The Middle Passage, “It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form.” It was important and peculiar, dealing with local life in the local language. Tell your sister to come down, boy. I have something here for she. That was Mighty Sparrow, whom Vidia called Sparrow. Lord Invader, another calypso singer, he called, familiarly, Invader.

One of Lord Invader’s songs was “That Old-Time Cat-o-Nine,” which Vidia sang in his scratchy needle-on-record voice:

The only thing to stop these hooligans from causing panic in the island;

Well, I go by the government,

Say they need another kind of punishment,

I say one thing to cool on this crime

Is bring back that old-time cat-o-nine—

He took a breath and, in the same tone-deaf voice that oddly affected me, sang the chorus:

That old-time cat-o-nine

Bring it back!

That old-time cat-o-nine

Hit them harder!

Send them to Carrera where it licks like fire

And they bound to surrender!

“Words to live by,” I said.

“Where are we?”

We had left the Kingdom of Ankole, ruled by the now emasculated and chastened Omugabe, and filled with wild game — antelopes (specifically, the Uganda kob) and elephants and zebras. We were approaching the Kigezi district, in the southwest corner of the country, where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo met. But the borders were obscure because they lay at a high altitude, among the volcanic Virunga Mountains, which were forested and thick with browsing gorilla families. The people here were called the Bachiga, who were sneered at for their diminutive size and their unusual customs. In addition to the urine ceremony, there was something called the fire dance, which encouraged sexual precocity in young boys. And, unlike the cow-tending, beef-eating Banyankole, the Bachiga ate monkeys.

Vidia wanted to know this. He wanted to know much more. He was the most wide-awake person I had ever traveled with. He needed to know the name of that river, that large tree, that flower, that mountain range, and when he saw a peak on the horizon, he had to know what it was called. It was called Mount Muhavura, 13,500 feet and beautifully shaped, like all these mountains, which were symmetrical cones, the very emblem of vulcanism, some of them still smoking.

He asked about my name. What was my reaction when people spelled it wrong?

“Everyone spells it wrong.”

“That’s an insult,” Vidia said. He said he had once received a letter from Penguin Books addressed to “V.S. Naipull.” It was from a man named Anthony Mott. Vidia replied, typing on the envelope, “To A Mutt,” and began his letter, “Dear Mr. Mutt…”

It was a long journey. We talked about everything. After circling through the terraced gardens and stepped fields of the Virunga foothills, we came to Kabale, which lay in a steep green gorge. I stopped at the White Horse Inn, which was known for its hospitality. It was mid-afternoon, and we had hardly stopped since leaving Kampala in the early morning.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

Vidia did not move. “You go ahead.” He smiled. “I’ll wait here.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

He yanked his bush hat lower on his head and said, “Please go on. Don’t worry about me.”

“Vidia,” I said. “This might be a good place to stop for the night.”

“Oh, no. Not that. Not that.”

I could not understand his reluctance. I said, “The only places between here and Kigali are two really tiny towns, Kisoro and Ruhengeri. The border might be closed by the time we get there.”

“We’ll stop at Kisoro then, at the Traveler’s Rest.”

“What’s wrong with this hotel?”

At first he hesitated. Then he said, “I couldn’t possibly stay here. I’ve quarreled with the manager.”

“You were here before?”

“With Patsy.”

This was news to me.

“Quite a while ago. You were in the north. We stopped for lunch. I was quite taken with the place. It’s Oldie Worldie, isn’t it? But”—he made his disgusted face, his sour mouth—“it was a mistake. I said I wanted to talk to the manager. When he came to our table, I said, ‘You have very strange rules here.’

“‘Strange rules? What do you mean?’

“‘Rules governing the condition of your staff uniforms,’ I said.

“‘We have no such rules. Only that they wear them.’

“‘Don’t you have a rule saying that all staff uniforms must be dirty?’

“‘No,’ he said.

“‘Oh,’ I said, “I thought that, because they were all dirty, your staff must be obeying a rule.

“The manager glared at me. But I was not through. ‘The other rule I noticed was the one about serving. Whenever a plate or bowl is brought to the table, the waiter has his thumb stuck in the food. That’s surely a rule, because they all do it.’

“The manager fumed and said that if we did not like it, we could leave. I said, ‘With pleasure.’ But you see, he wanted to have a row. I’m afraid I obliged him. So it’s better that I stay here. Take your time. Enjoy your lunch.”

But lunch had ended, so an African waiter told me. The manager confirmed this. He was a thin, irritable-looking man in a crumpled white shirt and club tie and black trousers.

“I’ll have tea, then.”

“You’ll have to take it in the lounge. We require a jacket and tie in the dining room.”

Over two hundred miles from Kampala, in the Virunga forest of wild Kigezi, among the pissing, monkey-eating Bachiga, where gorillas were commonplace and bird squawks filled the air, where everyone went barefoot and many women bare breasted, I could not enter the dining room of the White Horse Inn without a tie knotted around my neck.

Sniffing defiantly at me, the manager shuffled papers and was gone. I had tea in the lounge: cookies, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and fruitcake. An elderly African hovered next to me, pouring tea through a silver strainer, adding hot water to the teapot, smoothing the napkins.

“Did you see him?” Vidia said when we were under way again.

“Yes. He was rude to me. He said I needed a necktie to eat in the dining room. He stuck me in the lounge.”

“Infy.”

Before Kisoro, misreading a sign, I took a wrong turn. We traveled down a narrowing road that seemed to be going nowhere except into deeper forest, one that had only thickened and risen and never been cut, where there were no huts, no straying chickens. Such a place, like the Ituri and the woods near Lake Edward and some others, was distinctive for its darkness, the green-black shadows of dense ferns under a tall canopy of foliage.

After twenty minutes in that dark forest we came to a border post with a wooden shed, a barrier, and a few men wearing colorful shirts. They were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I saw the pack in one man’s shirt pocket with the name Belga. It was Primus beer. Congolese brands. We were on the wrong road.

“Bienvenue à la frontière congolaise,” one man said, swigging beer and welcoming us.

Vidia was delighted. The Congo! He spoke to the man in beautifully accented French. “Incroyable! Nous n’avons aucune idée que nous nous dirigeons vers le Congo!” he said. We had no idea we were headed for the Congo!

“Monsieur, vous êtes au Congo,” said the beer-drinking man with the loudest shirt, its pattern of big red poppies like a mark of his authority. The Congo is here, sir. His foot was propped on the barrier, a rusty horizontal pipe.

They bantered for a while and Vidia finally said, “C’est dommage que nous allons à Rwanda.” It’s a shame that we’re going to Rwanda.

“Rwanda est par là,” the man said. Rwanda is that way. “Mais re-tournez un jour et visitez le Congo.” Come back sometime and visit our country.

I reversed the car and drove away from the shed, heading back the way we had come. This was the easternmost border of the Congo, as distant as it was possible to be from Leopoldville. I kept thinking of that Congolese frontier post, the little shed, the tiny postern to a great and enigmatic castle of a country.

“They seem far less foolish when they’re speaking French,” Vidia said. “It doesn’t sound like rubbish in French.”

At the Rwanda frontier the formalities were cursory, and Vidia muttered the French words the soldiers used as they examined our papers, repeating their mispronunciations.

As we left the border post I said, “I forgot to ask them what side of the road to drive on.”

“Oh, God.”

Just then a large trailer truck approached, throwing up dust, traveling down the middle of the road. In Uganda we drove according to British custom, on the left, but Rwanda-Burundi had been a Belgian colony, and surely they drove on the right.

“The moment of truth,” I said, and swerved and began driving on the right.

The truck, a beer truck, carrying a load of loudly jingling empty bottles in wooden crates, passed us in a fury of noise and gravel, and a dust cloud obscured the road for the next two hundred yards.

The dust settled like a view in a telescope twisting sharply into focus, and the looming scene was that of a mob, the road filled with people moving like a ghost army through the sifting-down dust particles in a distortion that was splashed with light. They were tall and thin, the women carried bundles, there were many children and some animals — dogs and goats. It was the sort of exaggeration for effect that could have been a stock scene in a Tarzan movie — a crowd of toothy implacable natives, and a terrifying sight because the whole road was claimed by them. There was no space for us to proceed.

“What is this?” Vidia was nervous.

The mob parted slowly, reluctantly, as my car penetrated it like a dinghy nosing through an ocean of breaking chop. Passing the car, the people peered in, screwing up their faces and pressing against the windows.

“Probably the market just closed and they’re heading home,” I said, trying not to sound as alarmed as I felt.

“They’re blocking the road, man.”

He was very jittery, whispering wildly — a whole crowd of Rwandans compressed into a narrow road and no other traffic, just my little car inching along against the chop of gaping people.

“I don’t like mobs at all,” he said.

But even after I got past them and the road cleared — although there were always crowds of people on Rwanda’s roads — it was still slow going. The road was a deeply rutted track lined with elephant grass. Farther on, we went higher and could see Mount Muhavura close up: the intensively cultivated slopes, the masses of mud huts. I told Vidia that Rwanda was the most densely populated country on earth.

“What are these people like?” he asked, returning the stares of the people passing.

“Pretty violent,” I said, and told him how, four years before, at independence, there had been a gruesome uprising, the Hutus against the Tutsis. The Hutu people had been a despised underclass, and their tremendous resentment erupted into a massacre. A journalist friend of mine had actually witnessed Hutus torturing Tutsis. They hacked the Tutsis’ feet off and forced them to stand up. Then they cut their legs off at the knees and laughed as the Tutsis were propped on their bleeding stumps. More mutilation followed: the cutting off of ears, of noses, eye gouging, castration, all of it while the victims were alive. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been butchered in this way, and so the country had been partitioned, the Tutsis taking Burundi, the Hutus Rwanda.

Vidia listened, horrified, grimacing. The car filled with dust that whirled into the open windows. To close the windows would have suffocated us. Now Vidia had started humming a tune.

“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he sang in an Al Jolson voice. “Toot-toot-Tutsi, don’t cry.”

We came to the crossroads of Ruhengeri. To the left was the road climbing to Kigali, to the right was the way to Kisenyi and Goma. We sat and pondered this in the slanting sun. Vidia ate a cheese sandwich and drank a cup of coffee from a thermos. Even in this remote place, where food was scarce, he kept to his strict dietary rales.

“There’s a better chance of finding a place to stay in Kigali,” I said, and he agreed: it was, after all, the capital. We had no reservations, no prearranged route; we were simply on safari, winging it in the bush.

Dusk like ground fog obscured the road as we entered Kigali, but even so, we could see that the town, though crowded, was very small. That was the Rwanda problem: so many people, so little space. There were three or four hotels, none of them good. We stopped at each one. Vidia expressed first amazement that we were stopping at all—“Such low places”—and then, inevitably, discouragement. There was no room for us.

“They’re filthy,” he said.

“Maybe they just look dirty.”

He did not laugh. “What are we going to do?”

“Let’s try the U.S. embassy.”

It was now past seven in the evening, and after more than thirteen hours on the road it now seemed that we had no place to stay. The embassy was closed, but we found an American woman on the premises — the duty officer, she said, dealing with a consular problem.

“We are totally stuck,” I said, and explained that I was an American, a lecturer at Makerere University. “We have no place to stay in Kigali. Is there anything you can suggest?”

“We have a guesthouse,” she said. “You can use that.”

I then introduced my distinguished friend, the visiting lecturer and writer V. S. Naipaul. The duty officer had not heard of him, but never mind, there would be no problem. She drew me a map to the place, which was near the center of town. So we were saved, and we each had a room. She even suggested a restaurant where we might eat. Vidia relaxed — I could sense it from a few feet away, what he would have called a vibration. Cleanliness and order were everything to Vidia. He was relieved and consoled by this sudden intervention.

“This is perfect,” he said at the embassy guesthouse, yet he sounded sad, and I guessed that he was tired.

On a back street in Kigali we found the restaurant, which had a pompous French name, something like La Coupole. Vidia still looked melancholy, perhaps because we had been so lucky here. He had once told me how he had a cynical Hindu nature and that he was suspicious of good luck, believing that it attracted bad luck.

The restaurant was small, and warm with aromas of good food, herbs, and fresh bread. It was full of people, Africans and whites, all of them talking. The manager was a thin Belgian woman in late middle age. She was clearly harassed yet gentle and helpful, entirely at our service, apologizing for being so busy. She brought us a bottle of wine. Vidia tasted it and said it was first rate and grew even sadder as he spoke of how amazing it was to find a great wine in such a crummy town. The woman, flattered by Vidia’s praise, became even more solicitous. She chatted with him, complimenting him on his fluent French. I had a glimpse of Vidia’s sympathy and compassion. He was moved by the good nature of the woman, who was struggling to run a decent restaurant in this remote place. He admired her the way he admired the Major at the Kaptagat, seeing someone fighting to overcome the odds, bringing order to chaos, a sort of colonizer. The woman moved among the tables, setting out dishes, filling glasses, advising waiters, folding napkins, rearranging forks. Where was this fish from? Vidia wanted to know. Lake Kivu, she said.

He praised the woman with feeling. He watched her work. Then he looked around and said, “In a few years, this will be jungle too.”

He had not ceased to be melancholy. He ate his fish. I tried to draw him out on the subject of vegetarianism, but he was monosyllabic and unwilling. He drank most of the wine. It was a good bottle, he repeated. Why was he unhappy?

“You Americans are so lucky,” he said at last. “You come from a big, strong country. You are looked after. If there was trouble here or in Uganda, serious trouble, your government would send a plane for you. You would be airlifted out.”

“They were promising that during the Emergency and the curfew,” I said. “But I was having a good time.”

“You’re a writer. That’s why you don’t go insane. You can define and order your vision. That is so important. If you didn’t, your life in Kampy would be insupportable.”

It vitalized me to hear him say this. What had I written? Poetry, some essays, part of a novel. What had I published? Hardly anything. Yet to V.S. Naipaul, a writer I admired, I was a writer. He had seen it as much by reading my essay as by reading my palm.

“What’s all this about being airlifted out?”

“The embassy here, man. Your embassy. We had no place to stay. They provided it. Don’t take it for granted.”

“What would have happened if we’d gone to the British embassy?”

“Nothing, man. Nothing.”

“I’m sure your country would help you if you were stuck.”

“I don’t have a country,” Vidia said.

Now I knew why he was sad.

Kigali, not anything like a capital, was pitiful even by African standards. There were few streets and no buildings of any size. It had no breadth, it had no wealth, and it was dirty. The paved road ended at the edge of town. Yet Kigali swelled with people, who had flocked to find work and food, to feel safe in a crowd. The Hutus thronging the place had the watchful covetous gaze of hungry people, and when they set their eyes on me they seemed to be looking for something they could eat, or else swap for food. They lingered near the market, along the main street, and at the church that was called a cathedral. Easily seen from the main street were slums and shantytowns on the nearby slopes.

“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

He said he did not want to see the cathedral. Churches filled him with gloom. He wanted to avoid the market. Mobs, he said. The crush of people. The danger, the stink. The colonial architecture, the shop fronts, the high walls of yellow stucco with glass shards planted on the top, the tile-roofed houses, all these Belgian artifacts, he said, were already looking neglected and would soon be ruins.

He saw the roots of a banyan forcing their way into the paved sidewalk and pushing at a wall, the knees and knuckles of the roots visible in broken masonry and paving stones.

“The jungle is moving in.”

We left Kigali in the heat and traveled back the way we had come, on the winding rutted road, to the crossroads at Ruhengeri. Again the road was almost impassable because of all the pedestrians.

“This road is black with people,” Vidia said.

At the same café, Vidia sat under a beer sign and ordered another cheese sandwich. I thought, Vegetarians eat an awful lot of cheese. I ate an enamel plate of stringy chicken and rice. We were watched by kneeling Hutus as we ate. When we left, we took the road that led west, to the border town of Kisenyi, on Lake Kivu. The place was famous for its smugglers’ dens. Like most of the Congo’s border towns, it was said to have an air of intrigue because it was also the haunt of white mercenaries, who had names like Blackjack and Mad Mike and Captain Bob. There was often trouble in the Congo’s large eastern province of Kivu and in the southeastern province of Shaba. When fighting broke out, refugees fled across the border. From time to time, angry expatriates or white mercenaries would take over a Congolese town, causing a panic flight of people into Rwanda.

The people on this road could well have been refugees, for there had been fighting near Goma in the past month. But after a while there were no people at all. The empty road cut through yellow woods that gave way to greener, denser forest, and the car labored on stony inclines that were the foothills of more assertive volcanoes. On one of the bends of this road stood a man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding a basket. He waved as we approached him.

“Don’t pick him up,” Vidia said.

But I had already begun to slow the car.

“Why are you stopping?”

“Maybe he has a problem.”

The man leaned at the window. “Pouvez-vous m’emmenez à Kavuma? J’ai raté le bus,” he asked. Can you take me to Kavuma? I missed the bus.

“Get in,” I said, in English and then in Swahili.

Sliding into the back seat, the man apologized for not speaking English.

Vidia said, “Mon français n’est pas particulièrement bon, mais bien sur c’est comme ça. J’ai peur que vous ne soyez contraint à supporter cet accent brisé.” My French is not particularly good, but of course that is the way it is. I am afraid you will have to endure this corrosive accent.

“Vous parlez beaucoup mieux que moi,” the African said. You speak much better than I do.

Vidia protested this, even a bit crossly, and then he fell silent, and so did the African. Vidia was angry. He had not wanted me to pick up the hitchhiker. He believed that Africans often took advantage of expatriates.

Ten miles down the road, the African said, “Mon village est près d’ici.” My village is near here. Getting out, he once again complimented Vidia on his French, and he vanished into the trees.

Before Vidia could say anything, I said, “I spent two years in Africa without a car. I hitchhiked everywhere. People picked me up. That’s why I picked him up.”

Vidia said, “Let the idlers walk.”

He sniffed and made a sour face, twisting his lips. The man’s pungent earthen odor lingered in the car. I said nothing for a few miles.

“This is the bush. People depend on each other.” I could see that he was not impressed. “Anyway, it’s my car.”

What was his problem? Years later Vidia said to an interviewer, “I do not have the tenderness more secure people can have towards bush people,” and he admitted that he felt threatened by them. But who were “bush people"? Anyone — African, Indian, muzungu— seeing the dusky distinguished author V.S. Naipaul standing beside any road in East Africa would have grunted, “Dukawallah.” Shopkeeper.

We got to Kisenyi in the late afternoon, having had to go very slowly on the hilly road. Kisenyi was a lakeside town of villas and boarding houses and several hotels. We chose one at random, the Miramar, which was run by an elderly Belgian woman. She had untidy hair and wore a stained apron, but she seemed a kindly soul. You knew what such people were like from the way they talked to their African servants. She spoke to her staff in a polite and patient way that was clearly masking her exasperation.

Belgians — just one family, but a large one — filled the dining room, and, being related, they were uninhibited: they shouted, they worked their elbows, they reached across the table for more food. We ate at the same table, family style. Vidia winced and seemed to lose his appetite as he watched the display of boisterous manners, the chewing, the squawking women, the shouting, growling men.

The Miramar was more a boarding house than a hotel, with an intimacy, a disorderly domesticity, the shared facilities meaning intrusions on privacy — the bathmat was wet most of the time, bedroom doors were usually left ajar. Vidia, intensely private, hating proximity and confidences, disliked the place from the first and found the dining table, this common board, unbearable for its quarreling, gnawing Belgians. He hated their appetites. He said the Miramar smelled. He loathed the Belgians for their being big, pale, overweight, loud, ravenous, unapologetic. “Potato eaters,” he called them.

By contrast, the Africans here were tall, dark, skinny, whispering, and whipped-looking. I mentioned to Vidia that I thought they were Watutsi.

“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he said. “But you wonder how they stand these Belgians.”

He had hardly touched his food. He had eaten the fish. He disliked salad. “What kind of a vegetarian hates salad?” the Major had muttered to me. The Belgian food was heavy and meaty.

“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

We left the dining room early, before dessert was served.

“I don’t think I could stand watching these Belgians having their pudding.”

It was his first experience of the true bush settler in Africa. I had seen such people in Malawi and Zambia and Kenya, but these Belgians were the apotheosis of the type. You knew their days were numbered. They were farmers and mechanics and operators of heavy equipment — tractors and road graders. They were clever at fixing cars. They mended machines with the simplest tools. They drove the largest trucks. They had maintained the colony but, newly independent, the black republic would find them too expensive and ornery and would send them away. Without these simple capable folk keeping it maintained, the country would begin to fall apart. Although I always doubted it, I often heard that there was idealism in colonizing; but really, whenever the word “colony” was mentioned, especially in Africa, I thought of these simple-minded mechanics. And I suspected that when Africans talked about whites, it was the mechanics and their attitudes they were usually denouncing.

“Let’s get out of here.”

We went for a walk in the darkness, keeping to a path near the lakeshore. At the far end of the road, the Congolese town of Goma was visible. Goma was better lighted than Kisenyi.

“This deteriorating road. These crummy houses,” Vidia said.

I told him my thoughts about colonials as mechanics.

“My narrator mentions how a society needs to be maintained,” he said.

“Your novel,” I said, “is it based on a sort of political memoir?”

“Not exactly. I had to find a form for it. It was terribly difficult.”

We had walked through the center of town, past a bandstand, an abandoned fun fair, and some banners and lights strung across the main street. We came to a part of the road that was severely potholed and with villas that were shuttered and rundown.

“I suffered over it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how to tell the story. One day it came to me, the structure. I was so pleased. I called Patsy at her school. I said, ‘I’ve got it.’”

It was easy to imagine Vidia doing this, but I could not see myself on the phone, calling my wife and telling her about my unwritten book. Anyway, I had a book, but where was my wife? The whole business seemed enviable, someone caring that much about my writing. I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia.

“When I started out, I found it so hard to write I got sick,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t perform the physical labor of it. It exhausted me.”

I knew better than to tell him that I did not find the process of writing difficult. I sat, I wrote, the words came. I did not suffer. But he distrusted writing that was so fluent. “When it comes easily, throw it away. It can’t be any good,” he said. There had to be an element of struggle in all writing, which reflected a struggle in life. It was also why he hated hitchhikers.

Writing was a relief to me. Everything else was a struggle. I knew that I was nowhere — just a teacher living alone in the middle of Africa. It had been my luck to meet Vidia, but now he spoke all the time about leaving. He made it sound as though he were going to the center of things, back to his house, his friends, parties, his publisher, his wife, his life. I did not envy him his fame, or the glamour, but I admired the life he had made for himself.

“This is already starting to go back to bush,” he said. “Look, the jungle.”

As in Kigali, the sidewalks were erupting. The glass-spiked walls around the lakeside villas were cracking. Some walls had been vandalized, others had been painted with slogans or had political posters stuck to them. It was tropical Belgium, suburban Brussels gone jungly, penetrated by rubber trees and fungoid growths. Colonial decrepitude depressed Vidia, but it fascinated me — the crumbling houses, the chipped cornices, the remnants of the dead past, the Africans squatting against the nigh walls that were scorched and blackened by their cooking fires.

I told him this.

“Horror interest,” he said.

We walked on.

“I am going to see André when I go back,” he said.

André Deutsch was his publisher. He was still thinking about his novel, thoughts I had provoked with my questions about writing.

“I am going to say, André, I want a thousand pounds for this book.’”

It seemed a great deal of money to me, yet it was less than I earned in a year on my Uganda government contract.

“I think he’ll understand,” Vidia said. “I think he’ll give it to me.”

We were still walking in the empty rubbly road, the fallen leaves and blown papers unswept, in the middle of Kisenyi, among the darkened villas, hearing the lap of lake water where the night was blackest.

The dogs did not warn us — perhaps they were watching, waiting for us to walk closer. At first there was no barking at all. But it was soon clear that we had gone too far into the residential part of the town, for we were at once beset by a pack of dogs, panting in fear and effort, and only when we were surrounded did they begin to bark. They barked horribly, all their teeth bared, their neck fur bristling. They made odd choking noises. They slavered near my ankles and sounded crazy, as though they were going to kill us and eat us — that hunger and cruelty and strength were in their barking.

“They’ve been trained to attack Africans,” Vidia said.

He was calmer than I expected. I retained a childhood fear of aggressive dogs. “They know you’re afraid,” people had said. “That’s why they’re barking.” That was crap. Most dogs were wolfish and reactive and pack-minded, which is why they barked. Their owners were the alpha males, encouraging this behavior in the dog, their weapon, their slave.

“Kwenda! Kwenda!” I yelled — Go away! — believing they might know Swahili. This only maddened them more.

Vidia was careful not to turn his back to the dogs, which were perhaps both guard dogs and strays. He lunged at them and made as if to punt them.

“What they need is a kick.”

The dogs scattered, moving back but still barking fiercely.

“If they felt this veldshoen on their hide, they’d know it.”

He was wearing his heavy shoes and swinging his walking stick. His bush hat was crammed on his head. Seeing the dogs react, he went after them again, driving them further back. I was impressed by this small man in the dark street of a remote African town, taking on the dogs.

They did not stop barking. In fact they barked louder, protesting, after Vidia intimidated them. But now we were able to move along. I was grateful to him. He had not been fazed in this showdown. He was frowning.

“Another one-whore town,” he said.

The Belgian family were still quarreling when we got back to the Miramar. They were in the lounge, drinking coffee and shouting amid the glaring table lamps. There were armchairs and doilies and footstools and little porcelain shepherdesses on shelves and framed lithographs of Liège and Ghent and Antwerp. An African servant stood in the hallway, doing sentry duty, holding a tin tray, waiting to be summoned.

“It’s all so crummy.”

Yes, I saw that, but I also felt it was a glimpse of the colonial past, a curious antique that was now worn out and broken. I did not really think that the jungle was moving in, as Vidia had said. I felt that this Belgian culture would be displaced by Rwandan culture and that we had no way of anticipating what it might be.

“Is your business always this bad?” Vidia asked the Belgian proprietress of the Miramar, in his challenging way.

The big woman shrugged and matched his directness, saying, “Business is good whenever there is a revolution in the Congo.”

The next day we drove across to Goma and had lunch at a café on Lake Kivu. Cheese sandwiches again: Africa was an unrewarding place for a vegetarian.

“I will meet you at ‘the coffee,’ they say in France and Italy and Spain. Even quite educated people make that simple mistake.” He saw that I was only half listening. He said, “You are thinking about your writing.”

“No,” I said. But I had been — the simple problem. How did I get from where I was to where he was?

“Are you sure you want to be a writer?” he asked. “It’s a terrible profession. Yes, you have your freedom. But it can kill you if you’re not up to it.”

I said I was up to it.

“Come to London. I will introduce you to some people.”

I said I would try to visit, perhaps at Christmas.

“These people are infies. They know nothing. Their leaders — Ian Smith, for example—”

Ian Smith had recently issued a unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia, and a minority of whites were governing the country.

“—Ian Smith is an infy. He is qualified to mend bicycles in Surrey. Nothing more than that.”

Vidia had been looking into the distance as he had been talking. After we finished lunch, he suggested we walk down the adjacent road. When we were on it I realized he had been looking at a sign that said R.J. Patel, and that evangelism was on his mind.

“Hello,” the Indian shopkeeper said, smiling at the Indian in the bush hat who had just entered his shop. “You are not Congo people. I am knowing.”

“We’re from Uganda,” I said.

Vidia got to the point. “How is business?”

“So-so. Not bad. People are needing. I am exclusive stockist for a large variety of goods.”

“Do you have a family?”

“That is my daughter,” Mr. Patel said, gesturing at a young woman near the shelves whose back was turned. Mr. Patel was standing before a large basin heaped with salt. “She is running shop. I am attending to so many other businesses.”

“What sort of businesses?”

“Too many to tell you,” Mr. Patel said. He opened his mouth wide and the approximation of a laugh came out of it. “This is just a simple shop. My other businesses occupy my time. Properties also.”

“But the money here is worthless,” Vidia said. “How do you manage?”

“I am managing. I have many ways.”

“So you’re not worried?”

“Ha! I am doing very well.” Wery vell was what he said.

He began filling a paper bag with scoopfuls of salt, murmuring with each scoop.

“What will you do when the crunch comes? The crunch is coming, you know.”

“I have my ways,” Mr. Patel said. He had grown solemn under Vidia’s questioning. He was still scooping, murmuring, crinkling the brown paper bag. “I will be okay.”

“And your daughter?”

“She will be all right.” He then went silent. He said, “Excuse me,” and turned his back on Vidia.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

We were out of the shop, swinging along the empty Goma road, Vidia marching like a soldier.

“He’s lying.”

He had not believed a single word the man had said.

“He can’t move his pence. The Africans will take his shop and all his goods. He’s lying about those other businesses. And look what he’s doing to his daughter, forcing her to work there.”

Lake Kivu was dull silver under a gray equatorial sky that sagged with humidity. The grayness gave the trees along the lakeshore a dark, impenetrable look. People on the street stared at us, though the soldiers in their faded uniforms did not glance our way but walked heavily past, stirring up the dust in big clomping boots. Their boots and their rifles were old-fashioned and indestructible-looking. Music played, the Congolese songs that sounded Brazilian, with marimbas and blaring trumpets. Soldiers, waifs, dogs, chickens, and broken signs in this distant corner of the Congo.

“He’s a dead man,” Vidia said of R. J. Patel. “They’re all dead men.”

I had heard him say that before, in Kampala and Nairobi. But I had believed Patel when he said he would be all right. And I had been excited at being in the heart of Africa. It seemed to me that if you put your finger on the middle of a map of the continent it would be on this place, Goma, this muddy lakeshore. I tried to see it with Vidia’s eyes, but I could not. I had neither lived his life nor written his books. He made up his mind quickly: observation for him was about drawing conclusions. I knew that whatever I wrote would be different from his view. It was probably a good thing that he did not ask me what I thought.

“I’m glad I saw this,” he said. “Now I think it’s time to go.”

Another night at the Miramar, among the squabbling Belgians and the food-strewn dining table and the overbright lamps, and then we were off to Ruhengeri again and the Uganda border. We stopped only to snap pictures at a dramatic curve, dangerous for its being unprotected, over an abyss called the Karnaba Gap. I was wearing my tweed jacket and my horn-rimmed glasses that gave me a scowling expression.

“I think you will do well,” Vidia said. He was upbeat, cheerier now that we were heading home.

I had turned twenty-five in April. I had not published anything outside Africa. I ached to have a publisher for my novel. In a halting way, I told him so.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The most important thing is to avoid making an enormous amount of money before you’re forty. Promise me you won’t do that.”

I made this promise, that I would not make my fortune in the next fifteen years.

“Concentrate on your writing. After you’re forty, fine — make all the money you like.”

Vidia was well under forty, yet he seemed older than my father.

We drove on, up and down the Kigezi hills, squeezing the car around corners, into the savannah again, past the big game and the long-legged herons and the marsh of papyrus, under the vast African sky. It was all familiar now.

Back in Kampala, at my house, where he was still a guest, I was full of his talk and of ideas I wanted to write down. Even before I had a bath or washed off the dust of the safari, I hurried to my study and sat and began to write.

Passing the room, Vidia looked in and exclaimed, “Yes!” He was delighted. “I used to do that. Sometimes at night, after we got home from a party I would go to my room and write, just like that, without even taking my coat off.”

He stepped into the room and glanced at the pages. He was looking at them upside down. I was about to turn them so that he could see, but he said, “No, I’m not reading. I’m looking at your handwriting.”

He looked closely.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” He nodded. “It’s not American. It’s distinct. Hasty. Intelligent. It’s you.” This was more of his approval.

For weeks he had been speaking eagerly of leaving Uganda, of going back to London. Before he left, he gave me a necktie he had brought from England. “I knew I would meet someone to give this to. I want you to have it.” It was new and very narrow — that was the style — and orange. It was still in its shallow box. I never wore ties, but I was grateful for the gift. He gave me another gift the day he left. He told me in detail a dream he had had, which concerned his brother and a murder he had committed. I listened closely, and when he was gone I wrote the dream down in my notebook.

I was sorry to see him go. I was losing my teacher, and he had also become my friend. It mattered to me that he took me seriously, that he treated me like a fellow writer. No one else did, but that did not matter, because I had him.

Then an unexpected thing happened. I had never been homesick in Africa, nor had I despaired at what I saw. I was there to work and was grateful for the job. I liked my life. I was self-sufficient. Some days I was Albert Camus, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria. Some days I was George Orwell, preparing to shoot an elephant. There were days when I was myself, writing something that I believed had never been written before, that would surprise the world. But when Vidia left on the plane from Entebbe, I drove back to town feeling lonely, and my loneliness stayed with me. From then on, I liked the place less. I had begun to see it with his eyes and to speak about it using his words.

He had believed in me. He had talked about how in writing you served an apprenticeship. He said we were freer than any writers had been in the past. “We are free from dogma, religious and political dogma. Use that freedom.” I remembered the many times that he had peered into my face (“a man’s life is in his face”) or traced my palm and said, “You’re going to be all right, Paul.” What did he see?

A note of comedy crept into my writing. It was an effect of my loneliness, and it startled me, but it gave me vitality. And it seemed more authentic than the solemnity it had displaced. I began to understand that the truest expression of life was humor, especially at its most disturbing. Much of what happened in Africa was not tragedy but farce. It was the influence of Vidia.

Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer. He spoke about it with his customary directness. That meant everything to me, because I had no idea what I was going to do next.

And I certainly had no idea that my meeting with Vidia would loom so large in my life, or his. But long after this, in an introduction to one of Vidia’s books, the English critic Karl Miller wrote, “The novelist Paul Theroux was with Naipaul in a disrupted Uganda, rather as one might once have been said to have been with Kitchener at Khartoum.”