Wanderer Of Endless Curiosity

Between Madras and the shore temple town of Mahabalipuram, the Tamil farmers spread their harvest across the road and wait for the traffic. Cars, buses and trucks burst through the sheaves; the rubber meets the rice, and the grains are pinched free from their husks. The vehicles move on, and women, children and Indian crows drop down through the exhaust fumes to gather in their share.

The scene delights the trim, crisply dressed man in the backseat of the Ambassador, India's doughty knockoff of the 1954 Morris Oxford. "Look at them doing their threshing," he says eagerly. "They're so happy threshing, threshing."

Friends say that Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul often talks in bis, a reference to the musical notation for "repeat phrase." But what could be mistaken for an affectation is actually a ritual of concentration that is performed on something as simple as the way a lintel rests on an ancient pillar or as complex as how the past weighs on the present.

The burdens of history are balanced in the pages of Naipaul's many books and published daily on his mobile face. The muscles for consternation, annoyance, mirth, sadness, disappointment and disdain are well developed. A lifetime overcoming obscurity, asthma and anxiety among strangers in strange lands has taught him to expect the worst. His autobiographical writings toll with such gloomy remarks as "To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament." To a visitor who has just blown through 10 1/2 time zones to arrive promptly for a meeting in Madras, he says, "When someone says I'll meet you between 3 and 4 p.m., it means our relationship is finished."

Evelyn Waugh said that punctuality is the virtue of the bored. In Naipaul's case, arrivals and departures constitute the story of his life, and tardiness disrupts the narrative. "If one is not on time, things won't go right," he warns, though one learns quickly not to take the author's fretful comments personally.

Vidia, as he is known to friends, operates at a high level of stress. It may be genetic, he suggests, sadly recalling that his brother Shiva, the novelist and journalist, wrote him shortly before he died of a heart attack three years ago at the age of 40 that "anxiety was his truest feeling." Apprehension also comes with the territory. Naipaul was born an outsider 56 years ago in the British colony of Trinidad. A member of neither the white ruling class nor the black majority, he was part of the island's large, self-contained Indian community. As a child, he lived a Hindu village life in the country. In Port- of-Spain during World War II, he experienced a polyglot street life that included the language of American G.I.s. Later, as a scholarship student at Oxford, the accents were more refined, but the sense of being a colonial was even stronger.