“The cadence at the end
Of the bird’s song sounds like a question.
Is it a request, a behest
Or merely a suggestion?
In this twilight there comes
No answer to her cry
Is she forlorn? Did he leave her?
And is she asking why?”
From Ghanta Bhari Tales, by Bachchoo
Two workmen came to Vidia and Nadira Naipaul’s London flat to carry out repairs. At the turn of the stairs leading from the hall to the sitting room, the Naipaul household had a very precious David Hockney painting, a naked portrait of one of his lovers, posing on a chair. The workmen took one look at it and said they couldn’t work there in the presence of this obscenity. Would they have raised an objection if the portrait was of a nude woman?
The painting was temporarily taken down while the diffident craftsmen went about their work.
David Hockney died last week at the age of 88. He was acclaimed as one of the finest painters of his generation and, like millions of others, I saw his exhibitions and was awestruck by his interpretations of life and nature. The last exhibition I saw was a light-and-sound show with Hockney himself and his paintings projected on three walls of a theatre to the accompaniment of his lucid commentary. The exhibition called itself an “immersive experience”.
I was fully immersed.
I can’t immodestly claim that I had “met” David Hockney, but it’s true that I had perhaps a minute’s encounter with him across a very wide table.
Here’s how.
In his latter days Vidia, my good friend, had trouble walking and often used a wheelchair. I occasionally had the privilege of handling the wheelchair and helping him get about.
On this occasion, in 2008, Vidia was invited to an “editorial” meeting of a magazine which was to be called Standpoint. It was founded by journalist and writer Daniel Johnson.
Daniel is the son of the late controversial journalist and writer Paul Johnson. In the late 1960s, Paul was the editor of the left-wing weekly The New Statesman.
By the late 1970s he had changed his allegiance and began writing for the far-right newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
Daniel was around twenty years old at the time and may conceivably have been influenced by his father’s change of heart and avid support for Conservative politicians and policies and deeply critical of the unions, of Labour and anything to the left of Attila the Hun.
I knew all this when I agreed to accompany Vidia to the Standpoint meeting which was called by Daniel to solicit right-wing opinion on the scope and policies of the magazine he was founding.
I went, of course, purely as an attendant on V.S. and not as an invitee or a participant.
These, ten or twelve, sat around a large conference table, and I sat on a chair inconspicuously behind Vidia. There were illustrious people I recognised around the table, among them former Tory chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson.
And then there was, unmistakeably, David Hockney, at the other end of the table from where Vidia was.
Johnson convened the meeting and introduced his agenda, asking the invitees for their judgment or opinion of what right-wing journalism in the UK — and in commentary about the world — lacked. He was asking them to identify gaps in the right-wing commentary market.
As I recall, several opinions were offered. I had of course resolved to remain unperturbed by the verbiage I knew I would diametrically disagree with. In very many situations, this resolve results from an application of one of the adopted family mottos, which is: “The Intelligent must make concessions!”
But it obviously didn’t apply in this instance because the people around the table were renowned intellects whom I dare not, even internally, patronise.
What inspired me in this instance to turn a deaf ear was the conviction that extreme right-wing efforts in Britain would eventually come to a sticky end: Oswald Mosely’s fascist initiative? Enoch Powell’s bid for the Tory leadership with racist rhetoric? — after which he was compelled to leave his powerful Wolverhampton constituency and take refuge in some Protestant faction of Northern Ireland?
Yes, I listened and reserved my disagreement and contempt.
David Hockney hadn’t said anything at all, but suddenly interrupted the discourse by pointing at me and loudly asking if I was Indian. I said I was. “So, tell me why have you changed the name of Bombay to Mumbai?” he asked.
The room fell silent. Chairman Johnson didn’t dare to say that this question wasn’t contributing to the matter in hand. I said it was the determination of a nationalist Maharashtrian political disposition to name the city after the local deity Mumba Devi.
Hockney wasn’t in the least interested in that fact. He said he didn’t approve of such changes of name and went on to express his disgust and opposition to changing the name of his native Yorkshire to four fragments of the former county to “North Riding, West Riding, South Riding and East Riding” – (I may have not quite got his exact words).
Inevitably, after a bit of awkward humming and hawing, the meeting then resumed its business with Lawson pontificating.
There weren’t any condemnatory articles about changing names of places in Standpoint — which packed up in a few years.
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