Had his heart not stopped in London at 40, the younger Naipaul might have stood beside VS Naipaul as one of the great West Indian writers of the twentieth century.
I read Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies several years after reading his famous brother VS Naipaul’s Guerrillas, which I consider one of the finest novels of all time.
Vidiadhar was the famous one. He had gone first, published first, and become the Naipaul the world knew first. I opened Fireflies expecting some echo of the older brother and found Shiva Naipaul. He had that cutting, biting observation, but then there were fireflies, tiny flares in the dark. He got you into the room with him, on the road with him. You could be the sensual woman swaying down the street, the girl by the standpipe, the boy with the swagger. Shiva grew up in the same house as his famous brother, with the same parents, books, the same scholarship pressure, the same Trinidad, and yet he wrote about his country, his people and the world in an entirely different register, as if he too was seeing it, was seeing fireflies for the first time. His writing is extraordinary. He made Trinidad extraordinary.
Shiva Naipaul was born in Port-of-Spain on February 25, 1945, twenty-eight years after Indian indenture ended in Trinidad. More than 140,000 Indians had been brought to the island between 1845 and 1917, mainly for sugar estate labour, and their descendants remained, bought land, opened shops, entered the professions and pushed children through Presbyterian schools, scholarships and English education. By the time Fireflies was published in 1970, eight years after Independence, the Naipaul brothers had come out of that world: Hindu at home, English at school, stifled by family, judged by examinations.
Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva and Vidiadhar’s father, was born in rural Trinidad in 1906, into an Indian family descended from indentured labourers. He had limited formal schooling and taught himself doggedly, reading and writing his way into journalism. Seepersad worked at the Trinidad Guardian, wrote fiction at night, and his chief concerns were publication and cash.
Seepersad married Droapatie Capildeo, entering the family of the Lion House on the Chaguanas Main Road, Anand Bhavan, built by Pundit Capildeo between 1924 and 1926. Father Anthony de Verteuil described the house as reflecting Pundit Capildeo’s Hindu ideology and as being based on a city dwelling in Gorakhpur, with plain walls, flat roofs and stark pillars forming an arcade in front. From that family came Rudranath Capildeo, mathematician, barrister and Opposition leader; Simbhoonath Capildeo, lawyer and parliamentarian; VS Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, novelists; Neil Bissoondath, novelist and short-story writer; and Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Forward Prize-winning poet, prose writer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
I wrote about the Lion House in 2023. It was after witnessing it crumbling in on itself, with trees and bushes pushing through the foundation, that the National Trust and Friends of Mr Biswas raised the question of access, ownership and preservation. VS Naipaul drew on that world and on his father’s life for A House for Mr Biswas, the fictional account of a man trying to secure a house, a name, a profession and dignity.
Seepersad died in 1953 after a heart attack, aged 46, when Shiva was eight. Vidiadhar was already at Oxford and could not return for the funeral; the final rites were performed by Shiva, still a child.
When Vidiadhar finally returned to Trinidad in 1956, Shiva was eleven and, according to their sister Savi Naipaul Akal, was proud of the elder brother and would recite chunks of The Mystic Masseur in his honour.
Shiva attended Queen’s Royal College and St Mary’s College before winning an island scholarship to University College, Oxford, where he studied Chinese. At eighteen, he boarded a banana boat for Avonmouth and left Trinidad for Britain.
The Naipaul brothers shared a remarkable command of language with an almost uncanny distance from Trinidad, as if they had been born elsewhere - yet Trinidad haunted both their work. VS Naipaul looked at the half-made society, the mimic men, the borrowed manners, the insecurity and self-invention of post-colonial life with a contempt that could be merciless. Shiva looked at the same material with a warmer fascination, irony, and humour. The thing they shared is that both wrote as if from elsewhere.
At times, they seem to write from nowhere in the world but a state of relief, as if escape had made the islands sharply visible and made Trinidad impossible to leave behind.
In A Hot Country, Shiva Naipaul wrote: “People can only do what they can; be what they are.” That sentence holds the kind of fatalism of people who had lived harsh lives, where tenderness could be fatal.
While reading his books, I longed to speak to Shiva Naipaul as intensely as I longed to speak with Sam Selvon. If Selvon gave us Moses at Waterloo Station, Henry Oliver called Sir Galahad coming into the London cold, the boys in Bayswater rooms, cafés, labour exchanges, rent money, women, cigarettes and winter streets. In Fireflies, Shiva gave us the terrible fatalism that could be the result of his ancestors’ brutal arrival on these islands.
Shiva Naipaul writes: “For Baby, the marriage was a bad one, but it never entered her head that she might complain or refuse to marry Ram. Fortunately, in her eyes, what others might have considered an injustice, she considered a law of life.”
Fireflies, first published by André Deutsch in 1970, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Jock Campbell New Statesman Award, and was later longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize. Shiva wrote steadily, copiously.
The Chip-Chip Gatherers followed in 1973 and won the Whitbread Award. North of South: An African Journey appeared in 1978 after his travels through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Black and White, published in Britain in 1980 and later published in the US as Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, came out of Guyana and the Jonestown massacre. A Hot Country was published in 1983. Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth came in 1984. An Unfinished Journey was published after his death.
Shiva Naipaul died of a heart attack in London on August 13, 1985. He was 40. He left his wife, Jenny Stuart, their son Tarun, the books, the essays, the travel writing, the Trinidad novels, and the papers now preserved in the British Library: 30 boxes of drafts, notebooks, correspondence, travel diaries, reviews and manuscripts from Trinidad, Guyana, Africa, America, Australia, India and Britain.
David Remnick, then a young American journalist and later editor of The New Yorker, wrote after Shiva Naipaul’s death in 1985 that Martin Amis had expected his next novels to establish him as one of the most accomplished and accessible writers of his generation.
When VS Naipaul was knighted in 1989 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, I remember thinking with a real ache for this writer whom I never met that Shiva, had he lived, could have been in his brother’s place. Shiva, more nuanced, refused the easy way of the hard contempt that characterised VS Naipaul’s writing. To many post-colonial critics, some of VS Naipaul’s later books appeared to confirm rather than challenge inherited colonial assumptions.
Even now, I want to know what Shiva Naipaul would have written had he not been alone in his flat in Belsize Park when the coronary thrombosis struck, had his heart not stopped over his writing desk in London at 40.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
