Sir Vidia's Shadow Read Online Free

ordered Pradesh’s books,” Haji said. “They’re in the bookshop. I’m planning a drinks party for him next week at my flat. He’s staying with me for a bit. Come and meet him.”
    So Haji Hallsmith had appropriated U. V. Pradesh as his listener and witness. Haji also did some writing: confessional poems that embarrassed his friends. Yet they read them, always looking for clues to that brief, bewildering Muslim marriage.
    â€œWhat about my
malaika?
” Julian asked.
    It meant angel, and Hallsmith knew who he was talking about.
    â€œYour splendid
malaika is
always welcome, Jules.”
    That same afternoon, Julian went to the bookshop and bought all the U. V. Pradesh titles it had in stock—
The Part-Time Pundit, Calypso Road
, and several others. While he read
The Part-Time Pundit
, Yomo read
Calypso Road
.
    She said, “These Trinidad people talk like Nigerians.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    She read, “‘If you vex with she, give she a dose of licks, and by and by she come quick-quick when you bawl.’”
    â€œThat’s Nigerian?”
    â€œFor sure.”
    The character Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in
The Part-Time Pundit
, was unlike anyone Julian had ever met in fiction. The narrative, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, was simple and strong, unusual, funny, oblique, very sure of itself. It described a world Julian knew nothing about. Every name, every character, every setting was new, and yet it was familiar in its humanity. Among other things, it was about transformation.
    He read three more U. V. Pradesh books. They were also fantastical, assured narratives of transformation. He saw no literary influences, no antecedents. They were original and powerful, too plain to be brilliant, with a pitiless humor that gave them pathos.
    The voice of the narrator he recognized from
Mother India:
impartial, remorseless, almost cold. In his essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell had said you could see a human face behind all third-person narration, yet there was no face that Julian could discern here. About U. V. Pradesh personally Julian knew nothing beyond the fact that he had been born in the West Indies, was educated in England, resided in London, had won a number of prizes, was about forty—nearly elderly, so Julian thought. The biographical note in the back of Pradesh’s books was short and unrevealing.
    Pradesh took no sides in these works of fiction. One, about an election, was plotty and sprawled improbably. Another, set in London, could have been written by an old, wise Englishman, and its observations about age and frailty gave it a morbid power.
Calypso Road
was slight but charming, full of curious characters. They were all confident, fresh, spoke with the concision of poetry and with an originality that was like news to Julian.
    â€œSo what you tink?” Yomo said. Reading made her impatient, lust corroded her English. She was tugging at his sleeve, pulling his hand between her legs.
    â€œI like this book.”
    The extraordinary ending of
The Part-Time Pundit
, so unexpected and yet so logical a transformation, overwhelmed him. Why had he not seen it coming? It made him wish he had written it himself. The best of it was this: after all his changes of direction, the Trinidadian pundit Ganesh vanishes, only to reappear in London years later.
    The nameless narrator, now a grown man in London, looks “for a nigrescent face,” sees the pundit from his island approaching him.
    â€œGanesh?” he says in disbelief.
    The pundit seems utterly changed, wearing a tweed jacket and soft hat and corduroy trousers and sturdy shoes. He carries a walking stick and is marching through a railway terminal.
    â€œPundit Ganesh?” the narrator repeats, seeing Ganesh Ramsumair.
    â€œâ€˜G. Ramsay Muir,’ he said, coldly,’” and the brown man scuttles away.
    â€œWhy are you smiling?” Yomo asked.
    Julian was