WORDS FOLLOW ME: Incessant Shadow

Driving through Bombay at night, after the rain, I see a city transformed. There are new flyovers and expressways, and the journey to Malad West from the airport, normally (my hosts say) an infuriating hour and a half spent in stalled traffic, takes just over half an hour. From the car window, I see the roofs of the Andheri chawls, the twisted bodies of sleeping dogs by the side of the road, and - a recent development- groups of burqa-clad women hurrying down the side streets, as though this were Delhi. A sign for the BBC flashes by. I take a second look: "Borivali Biryani Chicken."

On my first visit to India, in 2004, I had read An Area of Darkness. This time around, the day after my arrival, I went to a bookshop and bought A Wounded Civilization, though I told myself I didn't want to read any more Naipaul. With a journey to Kerala in mind, I had brought something more appropriate with me, The God of Small Things, but the thought of anything other than his unadorned prose put me off. And so, with the resigned air of one turning to an accustomed vice, Naipaul it was, warts and all.

During that 2004 visit, my mood had been continuous with his. The discomfort, the petty displeasures, the shock at the callousness of the place: all this we shared. For him, these sensations were rooted in the anxiety of being swallowed up by the crowd at Bombay's Churchgate Station. For me, the truth was the opposite. I was only too visible, too obvious, at Churchgate. It was difficult being black in India: not so much swallowed up by the crowd as singled out, and pilloried, by it. My nerves became brittle, and the journey, that year, was darkened by that pillorying.

Books remain where they are, but the reader grows. A Wounded Civilization did not have, for me, the startling originality of its predecessor. I found it explicatory, declarative; in the intervening years, I'd gotten a better measure of the author's style. The prose, as in all Naipaul's works, was fine, but I wasn't ambushed this time around. The reading of certain books, or certain authors, can be akin to combat, and in this case, I had the upper hand.

I began to notice Naipaul's weaknesses, and they began to grate. I was irritated not only by the political infelicities - the worst he can say of a particularly impoverished rural settlement is that it reminds him of Africa - but the stylistic ones. He often relies on the passive construction; this is part of what gives him his sheen of authority. He has favourite words, and (not just in this book) overuses them: "rage," "obsession," "mood," and, bizarrely, "paunch." "Frenzy" he also overuses, and unidiomatically. The words are like scabs to which he returns over and over. His vocabulary, normally so scrupulous, scarifies around personal psychodramas: mood, frenzy, rage. There's a dismaying abundance of exclamation marks.

Near the end of my journey, flying east from Delhi, looking down on the old cities of the overpopulated Gangetic Plain, on Benares and Lucknow, looking until the dust of Uttar Pradesh gives way to green fields, and the fields give way to ever higher mountains, I feel the echo of his effort. The synthesis of life and literature, of anecdote and public politics: an echo of coming to terms, in an inevitably limited way, with a place. And the necessity of those limits in setting down any writing about a place, so that a small gathering of facts and observations, buttressed by opinion, come to stand in for the unrecordable totality of an experience.

A Wounded Civilization was written during the emergency of 1975. This was at the beginning of the right wing Shiv Sena's success in the state of Maharashtra. Naipaul sets that rise in the context of Indira Gandhi's rule, but he devotes much more time to the other Gandhi, Mohandas. The Mahatma is admirable, but his success - which was, according to Naipaul, Hindu nationalist and racial at its core - doomed India to an inevitable failure. Wearing the dhoti, rejecting technology, yearning for Ramraj (the mythical rule of Ram, conflated with Swaraj, "self-rule"): these Gandhian positions are incompatible with a pluralistic nation or with the governing of a modern economy.

Naipaul had come to the country near the end of the monsoon that year, as I'd done now. And as I read him, I thought to myself: he's beyond saving, his racism is thorough and disfiguring. Why then, I asked myself, this ritual pollution? Why flatter him with the attention? India is full of good writers, and India as a subject has been richly written down in numerous books.

But: when his prose achieves that new-washed just-after-the-monsoon feeling, irritation gives way to envy. He has an eye for the telling detail, and the ear to enact it. He is fair to the world of emotion in spite of himself, fairer than many an unpolluted writer. His adjectives are exact, the sentences breathe as ideally as bel canto, because they come close to what has been experienced and observed. One wants to call it a trick, but that would be like calling Coltrane's circular breathing (which allowed him to play runs at tremendous speeds) a gimmick. At such moments, the reader of Naipaul hews close to him and becomes, like him, all sensory attention:

"The noon sun hurt; the empty Sunday road shimmered. The bus seemed a long time coming; but at last, trailing a hot brown fog, it came, a red Bombay double-decker, the lower part of its metal sides oily and dust-blown, with horizontal scratches, and oddly battered, like foil that had been crumpled and smoothed out.

Back through the chawls then, our red bus mingling with more and more of its fuming fellows, the main roads black and the pavements alive, the cinema posters offering fantasies of plump women and snowy Himalayan peaks, the cluttered sunlit façades of commercial buildings hung with many brilliant signboards, past the mills and chimneys, along the fast city highways with the more metropolitan advertisements (‘butter at its buttermost') to the skyscrapers and the sea: the Bombay of the white towers, seen from the hillside, which already seemed far away."