A Memoir of Literary Roots and Family Legacy
For those of you who have read A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, The Naipauls of Nepaul Street feels like a rich ploughing into the soil that birthed the famed novel. Written by Vidia’s sister, Savi Naipaul Akal, the latteris an intricately-woven memoir that bares the evolution of one of Trinidad’s most eminent literary families.
Writers who emerged from this family include the internationally-renowned, Nobel-winning V.S. Naipaul or Vidia, his younger brother Shiva Naipaul, and later their nephew, the Canada-based Neil Bissoondath. Savi’s book seems to indicate that writerly chops were evenly spread across genders, but clearly women’s voices – like in many other families of that era – were muffled by patriarchal forces and the sheer tedium of other work. For instance, by the rarely-lauded thrum of domestic chores.
Revealing Ma’s Hidden Strengths
One of the reparations that Savi deliberately makes is to visibilize the role played by Droapatie Naipaul, or “Ma” – mother to Vidia, Savi and five siblings. Hers, as the author notes, was a “life mainly of drudgery, single-handedly doing all the things that one needed to do for the family.” Relatively reticent, Ma rarely expressed any resentment she might have felt at this ongoing relegation to the background. She had, after all, been an intelligent school student, who hadn’t been encouraged to study further, because her mother feared that she would overtake her brother.
Later, while her husband (Seerparsad), would take to reading and writing books, smoking and napping, she continued to cook, wash, clean, sew, iron. She was quietly insistent that all her children attend schools, and garner higher degrees. Unfortunately, later when Vidia won the Nobel Prize, he did not invite her to the ceremony, because he had always been ashamed of her. But she really came into her own being at midlife, when despite her younger children still needing care of sorts, she accepted a job at her brother’s quarry.
At that masculine workplace, she relished ticking off truck drivers, appraising stocks and dispatches, and becoming versed in the jargon of a new occupation. Disappearing at dawn and reappearing only at dusk, she suddenly seemed to bask in the recognition of her other faculties. Of capabilities that had always been buried inside the imposed busyness of family life.
From Latrines to Literary Legends
Besides lifting the curtain on her mother, Savi also dwells on the other overwhelming force in their household: Seerparsad or Pa. Pa’s story is foreshadowed by the historic backdrop that shaped these people and their families. Indians in Trinidad were the descendants of indentured servants, who had worked in conditions that might be termed “slavery” in modern parlance. Passports were seized for periods of five years, and after ten years they were given a choice: to remain at their current estates, to return on treacherous ships, or to accept a small parcel of land, often uncultivable, on which they could build rickety futures. Savi, who was a child in the 1940s, recalls beggared and homeless Indians crossing the terrain in bands. “Some were forced into criminal acts.”
Seerparsad’s family had chosen repatriation. On the day they were supposed to clamber into a waiting ship, five-year-old Seerparsad decided otherwise. Cleverly, he hid himself inside a latrine built on a ledge overlooking the sea. His mother frantically searched for him, and decided to forgo the return journey. Along with her, two other aunts also skipped their intended passage. A five-year-old’s quirky prank had irrevocably changed the fate of the family. “Young as he was, he had rejected repatriation to India.” The child’s move was known in family lore as the “latrine intervention.”
Books, Rebellion and Unconventional Paths
That early rebellious streak was to mark him through life. He didn’t subscribe to typical masculine norms. He wasn’t, as Savi notes, the type to change bulbs or repair gadgets. For someone who hadn’t studied much, he was very bookish – often splurging on books rather than on food. Till he needed a bookcase to house his growing collection. His burgeoning family may have had few clothes or fancy goods, but they were raised with Tolstoy, Flaubert, Balzac, Maugham and Pearl Buck among many others: “Pa taught us to value books.”
He wasn’t just seeding readers. Pa was also keen on writing stories, and on building his own literary career. He worked for many years as a journalist at the Trinidad Guardian, and eventually published a collection of short stories – Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales – that sold out its first print run of 1000. He was also, rather heretically for his times, encouraging of Vidia’s literary ambitions. He championed his son’s pursuit of English at Oxford, despite the relatively low material rewards that would accompany such a choice. This despite Pa’s family, with seven children, never having emerged from the precarity of a single income, or from sudden job losses. With both father and son fetishizing books and writers, they exchanged letters about shared writerly difficulties and publishing struggles.
At one time, Pa also learned to paint signs. A job involving sign-painting led him to his wife – Droapatie Capildeo, who belonged to the powerful Capildeo family. Often feeling dependent on his wife’s more powerful family, Seerparsad was determined to eventually establish his own house. This was the theme that fueled Naipaul’s A House For Mr. Biswas. In Savi’s book, Pa shines through as an affectionate, irreverent, offbeat parent, whose laissez faire parenting permitted kids to pursue unorthodox paths.
Alienation, Aspirations, and Family Dynamics
Of Vidia, however, the author paints a less salubrious picture. Known even in public as a surly and curmudgeonly figure, he seemed equally abhorred in private circles. He was seen as self-centered and selfish, dismissive and denigrating of most siblings.
Despite writing so poignantly about home and homelands, Vidia Naipaul might have always felt alienated – from his family, from Trinidad, from India (that was merely an ancestral land, in which he had no extant roots), and perhaps from the world at large. Fortunately, some of the other Naipauls seemed to have found their home and place in an ever-evolving, colorful Trinidad.
When Savi was 8, they moved to a new home on Nepaul Street. World War II had ended, Hitler had killed himself, Gandhi was in jail or fasting. “A new dawn would begin on 1st January.” The year was 1947, and Indian Independence would give rise to aspirations in many other colonies. Through Savi’s memoir, we are reminded that amidst large upheavals, enduring hopes for a home can shape the hearts of families and nations.
References
Savi Naipaul Akal, The Naipauls of Nepaul Street, Speaking Tiger, 2024