Family fallout | 2 August 2018

Savi Naipaul Akal’s publishing house is named after the peepal tree, in whose shade Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment. The author’s industriously detailed memoir reveals nothing quite so brilliantly life-enhancing but presents persuasive statements in favour of family loyalty, domestic order and higher education, while allowing herself opportunities to express resentment of a disturbing sibling rival. She was proud when her brother Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, but dismayed when his acknowledgement of it failed to mention Trinidad, the land of his birth. He called his prize ‘a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors’. Vidia’s antecedents were among the Indian indentured servants who began arriving in Trinidad in 1845, 12 years after Britain had abolished the sale of slaves. Colonial sponsors who paid for the migrants’ passage from India were repaid with five years’ servitude, sometimes extended, often involving labour on sugar plantations. Thanks to the Act of Abolition, the Indian newcomers were not slaves; they were merely slavish. Even so, Vidia did not wish to be reminded. According to Savi, who evidently has always been sharply observant as well as affectionate, whenever such warmth was deserved, their father’s reactions to Vidia’s Nobel would have been as vehement and mixed as her own:

Pa would have been ecstatic,and would have wept with joy. For days and weeks Pa would have smiled with pride and pleasure to remember that the little boy to whom he had read from books as a child had gone on to publish many books himself and earn the plaudits of the world. All the same, Pa would not have liked everything about the man Vidia. Pa would have been appalled and angry over his treatment of [his young brother] Shiva. Pa would have been distressed that Vidia had developed an hauteur and callousness that upset and wounded so many good people.