Nobel prize-winning author V S Naipaul.
Credit: PTI File Photo
New Delhi: For 20 years, the Naipaul family in Trinidad used to live on "quiet alert" every October, when the Nobel Prize is usually announced, hoping to hear that the committee has chosen Vidia for the literature award, his sister Savi recalls in her memoir.
"By 1972, sixteen years after his first book, The Mystic Masseur, Vidia had compiled a body of work that merited at least a nomination for the Nobel Prize," she writes about her illustrious brother Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul.
Savi's The Naipauls of Nepaul Street, published by Speaking Tiger Books, is a revealing memoir about Naipaul's Indian-origin family in Trinidad.
From 1972, when Patrick White of Australia won the literature Nobel, until 1992, when the prize went to Derek Walcott of St. Lucia (and Trinidad), the Naipaul family had "lived on quiet alert every October, when the prize is usually announced", the author says.
"Every day we hoped to hear that the committee had chosen Vidia. Walcott's triumph, however, suggested to most of us that our hopes were permanently dashed. What chance was there that the Swedish committee would select two West Indian-born writers within a few years of one another?" she writes.
"Besides, the committee was said to have a liberal bias, and Vidia had long ago forfeited the right to that description. Meanwhile, he continued to earn other top awards and honours of which we had never heard previously," she adds.
Naipaul was awarded the Nobel in 2001. In awarding him the prize, the Swedish Academy praised him for "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".
Recalling that day, Savi writes that at about 6.30 in the morning in October 2001, she was on the treadmill at a gym when she got the news that "Vidia had won the Nobel Prize for Literature".
"...I was genuinely happy for my brother. But my deepest reaction came when I thought about our parents (they had passed away then). The tears then flowed in earnest," she says.
In the book, several family photographs also say much about the Naipaul family and the times they lived through.
Savi's father Seepersad Naipaul, virtual orphan in a dirt-poor rural Indian family, one generation away from indentured migration, through self-education became a remarkable journalist and writer.
And her mother Dropatie displayed remarkable diplomatic skills in sustaining a relationship with the large, prosperous and inward-looking Capildeo clan, of which she was the seventh daughter, while loyally supporting her husband's insistence on independence and engagement with Trinidadian life.
Trinidad-based Savi's account is about family loyalty, sacrifice, and sometimes tensions; pride in the writing achievements of her brothers Vidia and Shiva, and sorrow over estrangements and Shiva's premature death.
The memoir also gives a sharply observed picture of cultural change in Trinidad from colony to independent nation, of being Indian in a Creole society, and of the role of education in migrant families.
Naipaul wrote more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction. His most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas, was published in 1961. He died on August 11, 2018.