Fireflies Read online

  SHIVA NAIPAUL

  Fireflies

  With a foreword by Amit Chaudhuri

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

  FIREFLIES

  Shiva Naipaul was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1945, and is the younger brother of the novelist V. S. Naipaul. Having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford, he emigrated to England, where he met and later married Jenny Stuart. He wrote two novels – Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) – before turning to non-fiction. His book North of South (1978), an account of his travels in Africa, is published in Penguin Modern Classics. Later works included the novel A Hot Country (1983), as well as the collection of fiction and non-fiction Beyond the Dragon's Mouth (1984). Naipaul died from a heart attack in August 1985, aged forty.

  Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He has written five novels: A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song, A New World and The Immortals. Among the many awards he has won for his fiction are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize and the Encore Award. He is also an acclaimed critic and musician. He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

  Foreword

  Writing is not, generally speaking, a family profession. Law, engineering and even dentistry have been known to be taken up by siblings, but writing, and the artistic temperament, constitutes a distinct turn in a family’s fortunes, as Thomas Mann so vividly showed us in Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kröger; and this has been true of modernity everywhere, whatever adjective we append to it: European or colonial. Nevertheless, there exist, throughout the ages and across cultures, anomalous instances of siblings producing serious additions to the realm of letters. Those families must have been quite odd in their intensities, one feels; the Brontës, for example, come readily to mind. And, in Bengal, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to give yet another example, there was the Dutt family, who wrote in English, and whose most extraordinary member, the poet Toru Dutt, died when she was twenty-one. Also in that same age of great change lived the Tagore family of Calcutta, whose youngest son, Rabindranath, overshadowed the other brilliances among his brothers. In the new world, but frequently travelling out of it, there were William and Henry James. To these pairings and constellations we must add V. S. Naipaul and his short-lived, but immensely gifted, brother Shiva, born in a country remote enough for the Brontës to have only daydreamed of.

  The name ‘Naipaul’ today provokes a range of emotions, from adoration and supplication of a very pure, literary kind, to liberal and postcolonial distaste. It’s one man alone that these emotions are directed towards, and this man, despite writing repeatedly, and unforgettably, about his family (especially his father) in his fiction and non-fiction, is somehow viewed sui generis, as if he came to the twentieth century and the English language like the infant Moses, solitary and untrammelled. Naipaul (V. S., that is) is himself partly responsible for the way this biography has evolved. Given his difficult relationship with his country of origin, Trinidad, and his ambivalence towards his country of cultural ancestry, India, Naipaul has been pursued by, and has subtly pursued, erasure, even while giving us accounts of those places he seeks to erase that are life-like and often revelatory. Additionally, Naipaul’s contribution to the aura of the ‘writer’, both in terms of single-mindedness (‘He has followed no other profession’, his biographical note famously declared) and as a conceit governing his work, has been unparalleled, and further given him that air of ‘aloneness’. But, in reality, there was always another one, one who was closer to home.

  The younger Naipaul’s novels and essays were far from invisible and were received enthusiastically, with praise and awards, before his abrupt death (albeit it sometimes seemed that there were only so many Naipauls that the world could cope with at any one time). Yet, notwithstanding the admiration of readers like Martin Amis, one suspects that Shiva Naipaul was not only misunderstood and underestimated (‘misunderestimated’, to use a George W. Bush-style malapropism), but read lazily by critics. Paul Theroux spoke of Shiva unflatteringly, as a sort of paradigmatic black sheep; the journalist Stephen Schiff, already, in 1994, having to write in the past tense, said ‘the trouble was that Shiva’s view of the world was rather like his brother’s and so were his travels (Africa; South America); he never fully emerged from Vidia’s shadow.’1 Speaking for myself, I too grew up with at least a few misconceptions about the Naipauls: that V. S. Naipaul was famous principally for one book, An Area of Darkness, and that his chief preoccupation was finding fault with India; and that there was a younger brother somewhere, whose chief preoccupation was trying to ‘become’ the elder Naipaul, and failing at the task. For a family to be plagued not only by talent but by mythology must be hard.

  That is not to say that Shiva was not in awe, and, in some senses, even oppressed by his older brother. Schiff reports Diana Athill’s (V. S. Naipaul’s long-time editor) account of a lunch during which ‘[…] in Vidia’s eyes Shiva couldn’t do anything right. He had this picture in his mind that Shiva was going to utterly disgrace himself and the family […] Vidia loved him but he thought Shiva was going to come to some terrible end.’2 Naipaul told Schiff that, when Shiva died at the age of forty in 1985, his mourning translated into a kind of physical ailment: ‘“My body began to burn” he told me. “I was doing a television programme and my hands began to erupt. My body was covered with an eczema – the eczema of grief.”’

  The ‘intimidating burden of expectation’, as Shiva Naipaul calls it in his great essay, ‘Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth’,3 was created early. To succeed in Trinidad, you had to – besides being intelligent and competitive – get out of Trinidad. To succeed at being successful, you had to win one of four ‘Island Scholarships’, the probable outcome of a punishing regime of studies, the ‘distant goal of all this torment’. There was ‘no higher reward, no greater accolade than these’: England awaited at the other end; possibly Oxbridge. There were more immediate incentives too: ‘Island Scholarship winners were […] the elected, the anointed. Their photographs appeared on the front page of the local newspaper; they were feted; girls of dubious but ambitious intent offered assignations amid the sombre glades of the Botanical Gardens.’ Shiva Naipaul’s family’s reputation for intellectual achievement had, for him, a watchful, Big Brother-like quality: ‘At Queen’s Royal College – the secondary school I attended – the names of the winners were inscribed in black letters along the walls of the Assembly Hall […] The name of an uncle of mine was there; so, even more intimately, was the name of my elder brother.’ In the event, the younger Naipaul won the scholarship, though, characteristically, he managed to pull this feat off with the air of one who’s missed his target, his name remaining outside that Assembly Hall pantheon: ‘ […] for, though I did win an Island Scholarship, I did it at another school which, regrettably, did not celebrate its heroes in the same way.’ No wonder, given the striving for excellence to no clear end except independence, given the ghosts of former selves swiftly put to rest in such a childhood and youth, Shiva Naipaul had a nervous breakdown
at Oxford, just as his older brother once had had. On ‘a fine summer afternoon, soft and blue and unportentous’, in 1966, ‘when skirts were extravagantly short’, Shiva Naipaul ‘suddenly became aware that something peculiar was happening’ to him; ‘barely able to breathe, I huddled against the wall of Balliol.’ English undergraduate life brings to some people their first heartbreak or their first premonition of the future; in Naipaul’s case, the trigger was the death of a contemporary from Trinidad: Steve, a ‘tolerant, indulgent’ Presbyterian who’d come to Oxford on a different scholarship, to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, that celebrated Oxford cocktail of disciplines, and been found dead in his room. ‘Even now, nearly twenty years later, I still do not altogether accept it,’ he wrote, in this essay collected in a book that came out a year before his fatal heart attack. ‘The fact of his death remains unassimilable […] inadmissible. I know no other fact quite like it […] His death was like a sermon.’

  The end of this long piece signals, as such reflections do, a fresh start: ‘On a sunny summer afternoon I turned my back on Oxford […] My dreams of philosophical wisdom had ended a couple of years before.’ He married, and the couple ‘found an affordable bed-sitter in Ladbroke Grove’, in London; there, he ‘bought a ravaged leather-topped desk with brass-handled drawers […] That is the beginning of another kind of story.’ This ‘beginning’ and its aftermath didn’t last very long – barely two decades. In this span of time, Shiva Naipaul had to make a case for himself as a novelist, as someone who had, problematically, inherited what his older brother had triumphantly and movingly called his ‘early material’. This ‘material’, though it risked coming to him second-hand, was also Shiva’s own; and, when approaching it, as he did in his first novel, Fireflies, he had to, among other things, pretend his brother’s acclaimed 1961 novel, A House for Mr Biswas, didn’t exist, and produce, out of the same, richly visited terrain, his own masterpiece. V. S. Naipaul often speaks about the act of writing, and of discovering one’s own ‘material’, as not being ‘easy’; despite its immaculate formal progression and its beady-eyed assurance, writing Fireflies couldn’t at all have been easy for Shiva Naipaul. The story covers the same ground that Biswas did: in it, a young woman, Baby, from an all-powerful Hindu family, the Khojas, is married off to an outsider, Ram Lutchman, a bus driver of no particular social status. Ram Lutchman, a little man, is a sort of prototype of and antithesis to Biswas, to modernism’s ‘little man’. For a time, it seems that he’ll be the story’s protagonist, a character without distinction, generosity, or even real ambition, marked more by resentment and fitful preoccupations, without recourse to, then, the air of eccentric imaginative liberation that Biswas and modernism’s ‘little men’ have. Lutchman is simply a little man, without a great deal of either personal or literary history. He has some of Biswas’s enthusiasms, which, both characters share with the figure on whom they were partly modelled, the authors’ father, Seepersad Naipaul; gardening, for instance, and, especially, the cultivation of a particular tree on which a great deal of energy and hope is focussed. In Biswas, in the new house at the end of the story, they ‘bought rose trees and planted a garden […] At the side of the house, in the shade of the breadfruit tree, they had a bed of anthurium lilies’, a species of the flower that will grow again in Mr Lutchman’s garden. Besides these, in ‘the extra space Mr Biswas planted a laburnum tree […] Its flowers were sweet, and in the still hot evenings their smell filled the house.’

  Before he dies, Biswas writes a letter (‘It was a letter full of delights’) to his son Anand, reporting to him, among other things, the progress of the garden. Mr Lutchman’s garden, however, is only one of – though the most enduring of – his several excursions and essays into ‘doing something’, excursions that always end in a fiasco. And so it is on a trip to a well-known public garden, with his two sons and onetime mistress, the would-be anthropologist Doreen James, that Mr Lutchman is caught stealing an avocado by the old but sly caretaker, and his transgression overlooked for a price. Both indiscretions – the half-hearted affair with Doreen; the stealing of the exotic fruit – would be unusual in the world of the early V. S. Naipaul, but are symptomatic of Shiva’s characters – their semi-socialised, spasmodic restiveness. Although Rousseau’s Confessions and Stevenson’s Treasure Island circulate in Fireflies, and at least two of the children, Sita and Julian, in Shiva’s second novel, The Chip-Chip Gatherers, appear to subsist on books, Shiva Naipaul’s characters have relatively little access to the out-of-the-way, concealed, but tumultuous world of cosmopolitan excitement that surreptitiously but palpably nudges Mr Biswas, a world in which both great and obscure literary figures and serious and absurd literary projects grip and inform, comically but transmogrifyingly people’s daydreams – a world of (as Naipaul described R. K . Narayan’s busybodies) ‘small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means’. In Shiva Naipaul’s universe, not only dreams, but daydreams – especially daydreams – are kept firmly in check. This partly happens because of the predictable, almost necessary, cycle of burgeoning and disappointment, hubris and humiliation, that all humans are subject to in Shiva Naipaul’s scheme of things. Mr Lutchman returns home and plants the avocado; but the tree refuses to grow in a healthy, encouraging way. Then, almost whimsically, it decides to live. There’s an anarchy of will in Shiva Naipaul’s world, which thwarts its characters’ imaginations. His protagonists aren’t ‘small men’ who indulge in ‘big talk’ about ‘small schemes’; they’re fish who live in brackish water, with little expectation of escape, but are vulnerable to a multitude of agitations. A bit more than midway through Fireflies, just as the garden appears to be going fairly well, despite a rampant weed accidentally planted in it, Mr Lutchman dies. His life has been a series of abortive episodes that are not quite adventures – his marriage into the Khoja family; his brief, uncomprehending passion for photography; his liaisons with Doreen; the drive into the country during one such liaison, into obscure villages named after places in India (Bengal, Calcutta); the throwing of a disastrous Christmas party; the garden and the avocado tree. All these are undertaken without Biswas’s quixotic gusto, but with a smouldering nursing of disaffection (besides stealing the avocado, Mr Lutchman also filches grass and flowers from a park, and a book on photography from the public library), as possible avenues and dance-like movements open to a man with little hope of social mobility. And, when he dies, we realise the true protagonist of the novel isn’t Mr Lutchman at all, but his wife.

  This decision on Shiva Naipaul’s part (to, despite initial appearances, fix on Baby as the protagonist), means many things for Fireflies. Baby Lutchman is ingenuous, trusting, even gullible; she’s also remarkable at appearing to doggedly move on from her many setbacks, rather than rehearsing, in a discomfited way, consecutive fantasies, as her husband did. By focussing on her, Naipaul delineates a relationship to power different from the one his older brother conceived in Biswas, where the eponymous protagonist, despite being equally beholden and resistant to his wife’s family, embodies an idiosyncratic, comic sense of liberation. The portrait of Baby Lutchman (who has lived under the shadow of the Khojas and of her husband, been fettered to and then let down by her sons, and even been in thrall to a Scottish fortune teller) instructs us that there is no real freedom – even from our own delusions. The only person who seems unencumbered by illusions in Shiva Naipaul’s first two novels is the narrator; who, absorbed, almost helpless in this dubious lack of encumbrance, attends to the characters in the landscape as if from an infinite but clarifying distance, recording their arc from ritual contentments and unhappinesses to dissolution. V. S. Naipaul has often spoken of how he’s been directed by a need for clear-eyed truthfulness, a need that occasionally make his statements unpalatable; however, we’re never quite certain if that compulsion to truth governs his life or his art. With Shiva Naipaul, there is no life; he is not, unlike his brother, a profoundly autobiographical writer, though he borrows constantly from personal memory. What we
encounter, in the novels, is not so much memory, or personality, but a free-standing universe. It shares commonalities with both his past and his older brother’s fiction; but it is, in the end, undeludedly and unconsolingly itself. Unlike V. S. Naipaul, who is at once haunted and tormented by a sense of completeness deriving from his lost Hindu, historical past, Shiva Naipaul has no real conviction in authenticity or wholeness; it’s almost out of this state of negation that he creates his variously populated novelistic world. The world is what it is, states one of V. S. Naipaul’s narrators; this is far more true of Shiva Naipaul’s fiction than it is of his brother’s. V. S. Naipaul will succumb to enchantment; but not so Shiva. This reining in, this holding in check, might be the outcome of temperament; but it is also a response to a sense of belatedness. Shiva’s determination to be unillusioned and truthful is inextricable from his determination not to be V. S. Naipaul.

  This doesn’t mean these two early novels, Fireflies and The Chip- Chip Gatherers, aren’t enthralling; they are. Shiva Naipaul’s work is animated by a mad, destructive comedy, which is near-perfectly orchestrated by formal mastery. Here, for example, is the opening of an episode in Fireflies, where the sisters and relations of the clan have gathered at the Khojas’ house for a cattha, an annual religious celebration:

  No Khoja function was ever considered complete without a beating. Any infringement of the rules (they could be invented on the spur of the moment) could be made the occasion for one of these entertainments, and children who were rarely beaten at home would suddenly find themselves liable. The choice of the victim was, in the normal run of things, capricious. At such times the sisters became unpredictable forces and, a beating once administered, its influence percolated through the clan. Several more victims were hastily assembled, although none could surpass the grandeur of that first beating...