A Plot-less Life

 BY KARUNA CHETTRI

Like a spider, Naipaul weaves a slow, deliberate web, ensnaring and drawing both fans and critics alike, into the internal struggles of his characters.

If one were to sum up Willie Chandran's life in a single word, 'inertia' would do it efficiently.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has done it again. His new book, 'Magic Seeds,' leaves his readers wondering, interrupted and inconclusive about life - to be precise, about Willie Chandran's life. Willie Chandran - the novel's protagonist who, in 'Half a Life' (the prequel to 'Magic Seeds'), leads a rootless, meandering existence starting from India to England and finally to Africa. His perfunctory summation of his own life as one 'not his own' leads him to abandon Ana (his wife) during an African revolution. Armed with this sudden insight, Chandran moves to his radical sister Sarojini's home in Berlin. There, he hopes to find himself and start afresh.

Naipaul, however, is immune to his character's aspirations as Chandran continues to drift aimlessly - a flotsam dragged along by tides. One such tide is Sarojini, who hectors him about his self-indulgent, rootless existence until he succumbs to her righteous lectures. In an overwhelming wave of guilt to set things right, Chandran joins a rabble of freedom fighters, deep in the jungles of India.

Despite his good intentions, Chandran finds himself a passive observer of the so-called people's revolution. He reflects, 'How unfair it is. Most of my time in the movement, in fact, nearly all my time, was spent in idleness. I was horribly bored most of the time.' The guerillas, he notes, are a conglomerate of failed personalities; a motley crew of 'trouser people' who, out of sheer boredom, have banded together to 'liberate' the common people from themselves. The notion, as Willie observes, stems out of sheer vanity and has little to do with the plight of the 'commoners'. Even then, Chandran is incapable of taking ownership of his days and nights as he listlessly trudges through jungles, sporting a cheap, hand-sewn uniform with a red star that supposedly represents communist ideologies of 'the people'.

Through Chandran's idle observation, Naipaul projects his own antipathy toward left-wing ideologies and 'disillusioned city people' dressing up in uniforms to play at 'guerrilla warfare', while looting, terrorizing and living off the very people they were trying to 'free'. He leaves his readers wondering: how many of such freedom fighters are purely driven by ideologies, how many by sheer boredom? Naipaul spares none, not even Gandhi. He compares, through Sarojini's perspective, Chandran to Gandhi's early life as a confused young student in London, a depressed and disillusioned man in South Africa, and an India-returnee with nothing to show for his twenty years abroad - that is, until he became a revolutionary, and 'made waves'.

V. S. Naipaul, the Oxford-educated British writer, born in Trinidad to an immigrant family from North India, is a Noble laureate (2001) who has given a frank commentary on postcolonial disintegration through his collection of stories, memoirs and novels on India, England and Africa. Naipaul is a cosmopolitan writer evolved from his own disconnect with Trinidad, India and England. In 'A House for Mr. Biswas' (1961), he explores the disorientation of the elite-class from the postcolonial era and the emergence of a dispossessed lot, very much like Chandran. At times, Naipaul's cynicism borders on the vitriolic in his opinion of the English welfare people and their illegitimate babies, whom he refers to as 'profitable mistakes' they could comfortably live off.

Few authors can carry off the bleakness and dispassion with which he treats his characters in 'Magic Seeds'. Much of the book is composed of terse dialogues (not conversations) and the protagonist's idle musings as he stumbles upon brief moments of enlightenment. One such example: 'Time [always] lay heavy on his hands, there was little he found he wanted to do.' While many find Naipaul unappealing in his ability to reduce his readers to one of unresolved confusion, none can ignore him. Like a spider, he weaves a slow, deliberate web, ensnaring and drawing both fans and critics alike, into the internal struggles of his characters. Naipaul is unflinching in his narration of Chandran's aimlessness where Chandran organizes his experiences solely by the number of beds he has slept in - beds which he never owned, always borrowed - much like his life which was 'not his own'. Yet, Naipaul's Chandran is not a victim. He simply happens to live a plot-less life just as Naipaul intended for him to, just as many of us do - an existence of inertia randomly guided by external energies.