Sardonic genius

On the morning of 13 August 1985 I was at my desk at the London Evening Standard when Mary Kenny rang; she had left a message the previous evening on my answering machine at home which I had failed to pick up. Shiva Naipaul had held his 40th birthday party in the spring. Less than a week earlier, he had rung and suggested lunch, which I couldn’t make. Now Mary told me that he had died the day before. Shiva had always been afraid of death. In that respect alone it had come to him mercifully, when he was struck by a coronary thrombosis while sitting alone in his flat in Belsize Park. But what was merciful for him was awful for his wife Jenny, his son Tarun, and a group of friends who were more devoted to him than he may ever have quite known. For many readers, not least of The Spectator (whose Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize is awarded each year for outstanding travel writing), his death was a grave loss; for some of us who knew and loved him it was a pain which hasn’t healed 20 years later.

Shiva came from Trinidad, and from what he called that sad litany of the Indian diaspora, which in the 19th century had taken men and women from Gangeatic India and distributed them around the British empire as indentured labourers, from Mauritius to Fiji, Natal to Malaya, Uganda to the West Indies. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a gifted man, a journalist with unfulfilled literary aspirations whose moving correspondence with his elder son was published not long ago. That son was of course V.S. — Sir Vidia — Naipaul. It may not be unprecedented for two siblings to be writers of genius, but it doesn’t happen very often.

Like his brother, Shiva won an ‘island scholarship’ to University College, Oxford; we were contemporaries but we barely knew each other.