Edit

[I hate editing and am quite a poor editor; I manage to get very generous editorial help from three or four people to get my stuff out in the world. I love the labour of writing and do it a bit like Virender Sehwag - hitting fast and hard to get to a 69 ball-century, without the patience, finesse, or grandeur of the pundits. This Substack is thus a dump of my unedited writing and minimally censored thought, the things that I would otherwise pour out in reams of email.

This term, I am teaching a seminar called Writing Culture(s) this term; this post arises out of the keen editorial/critical eye that I am trying to cultivate in my students, one that I don’t have myself. This post is, hence, a tribute to editors at large, good ones, obviously.]

In the opening chapters of Among the Believers, Naipaul introduces a rather intriguing character, Behzad. Behzad is ambivalent to the Shiite Islamic turn in Iran in the post-1979 times. He is a Communist. He takes Vidiya Naipaul by the hand and makes him cross the road. Vidia Naipaul sets Behzad up, craftily, as a character. I notice how Behzad’s agnosticism, his cool-guy nonchalance, his swagger, mirror Naipaul’s strangeness in Iran and in Britain. They are stranger-friends, apparently. Behzad’s communism and associated modernity become a convenient dramatic backdrop for Naipaul to construct the heady picture of Shiite Iran - the ancient ruins, the Hanging Judge, the darting eyes, the mistrust, the contradictions. Naipaul does not introduce this much drama in Area of Darkness where he scoffs at street shit in Bombay. He has less patience for the laziness and shit of India; he has intrigue, suspicion, and awe for Persianate Islam. His irritations and frustrations in both books are overly dramatised, almost as if Naipaul is pulling a hazing ritual on his reader. The reader must be irritated as also seduced by Naipaul’s unspeakably incorrect emotions. Much like Akshay Kumar and Ayesha Jhulka’s college flirting songs in the 1992 blockbuster hit Khiladi.

We will never know, I say in class, whether Behzad is actually a friend/ally of Naipaul and what their irl bond was like. Naipaul is not innocent - he is not being totally candid with his audience, we gathered in the class discussion. But what he does do very well is set up a scene where the reader willingly walks in and experiences emotions that are confusing, pleasurable, and that they cannot help but feel. Naipaul pulls at the strings quietly in the background.

Readers, I say in class, don’t read Naipaul to know the history of Iran (there is wikipedia and academics for that), but to occupy the environment of intrigue, adventure, uncertainty, strangeness . I had asked a conflict journalist at a book event, a couple of years ago, what drove them to warzones. They named this or that injustice. I smiled. Obviously dissatisfied with the correctness of the answer.

As readers, Naipaul knows us better than we know ourselves. He works our desires and anxieties like an able orchestra conductor. The violinist or cellist experiences the relevant note, but its origin is in the conductor’s head.