TAKE THAT! With second wife Nadira after Naipaul won the Nobel Prize

God, reading Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul, I am shocked. What could possibly have possessed Naipaul to anoint French as his official biographer? To be sure, you expect a few unflattering tales tossed in to make sure the book doesn’t read like a hagiography but the portrait that emerges of one of the most acclaimed writers of our time — winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 and, before that, of the Booker Prize in 1971 — is of so unrelentingly unpleasant a man that you begin to wonder why Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul allowed The World Is What It Is (Picador) to be published.

Now 75, he could have stipulated that the biography appears only after his death. Instead, he gave French full access to his archives and talked to him, and, perhaps, most damaging of all, let loose his biographer on the unhappy diaries left by his first wife, Patricia (“Pat”). Naipaul and his second wife, the former Pakistani journalist, Nadira Alvi, are currently in Africa where he is supposed to be researching a book on religion but he has so far uttered not one word about the sensational extracts that have been serialised. French is not even sure he read the manuscript though one has to assume that Nadira would have gone through it to see what her husband’s biographer has had to say about her — actually, she comes out of it surprisingly well, considering she took up residence in Naipaul’s Dairy Cottage in Wiltshire almost as soon as Pat’s coffin was carried out.

One thing that can safely be predicted is that lots of Indians will be rushing to check their names in the index of the book which was released in India earlier this week.

The journalist Rahul Singh, who once eased Naipaul’s passage through India but later fell out with the author, as many others were to do subsequently, gets 5 mentions; his father, Khushwant Singh 3; and his late son-law, Ravi Dayal, 5.

Another journalist, Bharat Bhushan, who has an ill-tempered exchange with Naipaul, gets 2; Pankaj Mishra 2; Vir and Malavika Sanghvi 1; and Vinod Mehta 4.

Those who hoped French was going to put the knife into Nadira, for having wormed her way into Naipaul’s affections during his Pakistan journey while his wife, Pat, lay dying back in England, are going to be disappointed. After Pat’s death in 1996, when the time came to scatter her ashes in the woods she had loved, Naipaul wanted the urn to be relegated to the boot of the car but Nadira, to her credit, would not hear of it.

This is French’s account: “There was an altercation: Vidia wanted to put the ashes in the boot, but Nadira refused. ‘I said, “You can’t put her ashes in the boot.” Vidia hates anything unpleasant, he hates trauma.’ He wrote later, ‘N. was outraged when I suggested it. She said I should “zip up”.’

French goes on: “They drove north, out of Wiltshire, Nadira holding the ashes in the urn on her lap.”

There is a moving end to the scene as Nadira offers a Muslim prayer after the second wife scatters the first wife’s ashes. “Nadira walked back, out of the woods. V. S. Naipaul, the writer, Vidyadhar, the boy, Vidia, the man, was leaning against the car, tears streaming down his face, lost for words. Afterwards, they went back in the taxi to the empty house.”

That’s where the biography ends.

Naipaul and Pat had been married for 41 years after meeting at Oxford. Not even the most traditional Indian wife could have been more supportive or loyal. But he had humiliated her, told her of his Anglo-Argentine mistress, Margaret (who was also dumped, despite going through three abortions, when he married Nadira) and possibly hastened her death from cancer with his sustained cruelty. It is just possible that he wanted French to lacerate him as a kind of penance.

Naipaul was only 29 when he first came to India. French would like Indians to acknowledge that Naipaul was “right” when he was scathing about the country in An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977).

Even in small matters, he abused the hospitality lavished on him, as noted by Vinod Mehta, an editor who “found himself overwhelmed by the visitor’s sense of entitlement”: “Vidia gets four or five people to help him, and makes life hell for those five people. He’s a weird person.”

Naipaul believes it is his right to have Vinod’s car at his disposal. Vinod remarks: “It became very difficult for me, because he wanted my car all the time.”

Nor was Vinod the first to spot that Naipaul would not spend his own money to get taxis, for example: “He is very tight-fisted. There is no question about that.”

Although there is no one more easygoing and affable in all Bombay than Rahul Singh, Naipaul finally failed to retain even his friendship. Rahul took him to dinner and introduced him to his wide circle of friends. Last week Singh confided to The Telegraph: “I said some nasty things about Naipaul and he has said some nasty things about me.”

Naipaul would book himself economy air tickets but relied on friends like Rahul to use their influence to push him into First. Says Singh, “I upgraded his Air India ticket. I don’t want to sound mean. I still think he is a great writer. In our good days, I did a lot for him and when he used to come to Bombay, he would first contact me and I invariably took him to wherever I was going and also had parties for him. The falling out came when I wrote after he got the Nobel Prize that September 11 may have made him politically more acceptable. He did not like that.”

His father, Khushwant, who also showed Naipaul around, noticed this about his guest: “He was quite allergic to being touched. He almost recoiled when anyone greeted him with an embrace. The only feeling I got was that he had a chip on his shoulder. I attributed this to his being a coloured man in England.”

Rahul introduced him to Prem Shankar Jha who observed that Naipaul “was always looking for offence, looking for the hidden barb.” Naipaul retaliated by calling Jha “a windbag”.

As for fellow writers, he showed little compassion for Salman Rushdie, refusing to sign a petition in his support when Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced the author of The Satanic Verses to death. “It’s an extreme form of literary criticism,” quipped Naipaul.

For better or worse, it is mainly in India that Naipaul is lionised. French’s biography is unlikely to change that. Quite the reverse, possibly, on the principle that nothing succeeds like notoriety.