Get the latest tech news

V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory

‘To be taught by Naipaul would be an honour, but it also seemed to contain the risk of annihilation.’ Aatish Taseer on being mentored by V.S. Naipaul.

When Nadira and I returned an hour or so later, soaked to the bone from an October shower, I glanced into Naipaul’s drawing room, with its two rose-coloured armchairs and facing shelves, full of Penguin classics in black and orange – and saw that my novel, which I had called The Temple-goers(a Naipaulian formulation for Hindu India), was gone. I was intrigued by his restlessness, by an unevenness that made him in one context an adherent Brahmin to his family, full of caste prejudices, and, in another, a man of hookah bars and nightclubs, conducting a secret affair with a rich girl. The enclosed world of Wiltshire, with its strange intensities heightened by solitude, was so distant from the complexities of Delhi, where Indian writing in English was itself a rarefied sphere, soon to be the locus of class wars, cultural revival and Hindu nationalism.

Get the Android app