Tall Tales
SOMETIME IN THE 1980 S, at a party in Bombay, VS Naipaul was seated next to a drunk man. The man introduced himself—Behram Contractor, better known as Busybee to the readers of his daily newspaper column on the city, “Round and About”— and asked Naipaul who he was. “My name is Vidia Naipaul,” came the reply. Busybee was amazed. “You are not the VS Naipaul, the famous writer?” Naipaul nodded. “You are a very good writer,” Busybee said. “But Dom Moraes is a better writer than you are.”
This was not the first time Naipaul found himself paired with Moraes. As a younger writer in London, while writing A House For Mr Biswas, a common friend had insisted he should meet the poet. Moraes tells the story of being persuaded by Francis Wyndham, an editor at the British publishing firm, Andre Deutsch, to meet a “very promising young author from Trinidad.” Moraes wasn’t sure why:
“I don’t write novels,” I said.
“He doesn’t write poetry.”
“He was at Oxford a couple of years before you.”
Francis said.
“That,” I said, “is ridiculous. Why should I waste this poor man’s time because he was at Oxford a couple of years before me?”
“It’s strange,” Francis replied. “Vidia said exactly the same about you when I mentioned this to him. You see, you two do have a lot in common.”
Finally he arranged lunch at the French pub.
I liked Naipaul very much as a person. He was very shy — so was I — and as I had told Francis we had nothing whatsoever in common. Over lunch, we talked about books we had read. I have forgotten what they were. Later I mentioned the matter to a friend, who knew Francis and laughed.
“Don’t you know what Vidia Naipaul and you have in common,” he inquired. “Francis may have been too polite to say so, but you both have brown skins.”
Wyndham was perhaps being racist, and Busy-bee was certainly drunk, but Moraes and Naipaul did have more than Oxford in common. Both had journalist fathers; both enjoyed early success in Britain. Moraes was not yet twenty when he became the youngest writer to win the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1958. Six years later, Naipaul won the same award: he was
31. Novels and poems brought them fame, but it is the nonfiction they wrote, partly to make ends meet, and partly to make sense of themselves in a world after empires and endless wars, that made them notorious. Naipaul travelled through the Caribbean after finishing Mr Biswas, then to India—the “wounded” land of his Hindu forefathers. He was in Iran just after the 1979 revolution. He was in Argentina when Juan Peron returned to power and military rule briefly ended in 1973. Throughout his life he wrote memorably about his trips to Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and the United States.
Dom Moraes was different from his fellow Bombay poets—Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla—in that he also published more than twenty works of nonfiction, and reported extensively on violence across the world, from Gujarat to Indonesia.
Moraes began with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, which he covered for the in the middle of his honeymoon. He narrowly escaped bombing in Algeria, predicted the birth, his third and final book on India, was hopeful about the majoritarian resurgence that would culminate in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and riots against Muslims in Bombay, Moraes reported the shock of the horrendous violence—in Bombay, in Bihar, and most poignantly in Gujarat after the 2002 carnage. Between them, the two brown men chronicled every point of view. Over a span of fifty years, they covered the world.
