Fireflies by Shiva Naipaul

First published: 1970

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Port of Spain, Trinidad

Principal Characters:

• Vimla Lutchman (Baby)/SCX>, the heroine, a cousin to the Khojas
• Ram Lutchman, first a bus driver, then an employee in the ministry of education
• Bhaskar, the Lutchmans’ firstborn, who is driven to cynicism by repeated failures
• Romesh, the second-born son, who becomes a criminal
• Govind Khoja, the head of one of Trinidad’s most important families, a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Sumintra Khoja, his paranoid wife, who is neurotically attached to dolls, which are her substitute children

The Novel

Set in Trinidad, Shiva Naipaul’s birthplace, Fireflies is a massive chronicle, in two parts, of the fortunes (good and bad) of Vimla Lutchman (nicknamed Baby). At first she is the rather passive wife of an undistinguished bus driver, but being the great-niece of the elder Mrs. Khoja, she is circumscribed by the impressive social and material background of the Khojas, one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most important families in the region. Baby is powerless in that family, in which all veneration is paid to Govind Khoja and in which all domestic affairs are influenced by his six sisters. After her marriage to Ram Lutchman, Baby discovers another side to her life: a submission to Ram’s sordid bouts of violence, drunkenness, and unapproachable taciturnity. She grows fat, and her lust for commerce waxes. She remains devoted to her husband even when he has an affair with Doreen James, a purported anthropologist. Baby worries about her two sons, Romesh and Bhaskar, and occasionally seeks refuge with Gowra, a distant cousin.

Ram Lutchman develops fitful obsessions—with Doreen, gardening, swimming, photography—but these come and go. His life becomes a sequence of ridiculous failures. His wife stays with him, however, through all of his quirks of fortune, sometimes defending him with a ferocity as comically useless as it is poignantly loving. When Ram dies suddenly after a heart attack, her grief prompts her to collect some of his charred bones from the cremation site, but when she begins to suffer nightmares, she throws the bones into a river, and her nightmares stop.

The second part of the novel opens with the gradual disintegration of the Khoja clan, as a rebellious faction of sisters develops (headed by Urmila-Shantee, and Badwatee) against Govind. This conflict is part of the important subplot that fuels Baby’s struggle for independence. As a widow, she is drawn more strongly into the Khoja sisters’ circle, and deciding to follow Urmila’s commercial example, she takes in lodgers to finance her dream of success for her sons—particularly for Bhaskar, who wants, very unrealistically, to be a doctor. She comes to depend naively and foolishly on the fraudulent prophecies of her neighbor, Mrs. MacKintosh, a rather desolate, impoverished Scottish woman, deserted by her husband and left with a polio-stricken son and a daughter. Seeing her opportunity to trade her crackpot predictions for free food, Mrs. MacKintosh delivers whatever prophecies she knows will appeal to Baby’s hunger for good news.

To inspire the mediocre Bhaskar, Govind spins a parable of a boy who overcomes economic deprivation by his resourcefulness. Lacking the convenience of electric light, the boy captures fireflies in a bottle and studies by their light. It is an absurdly exaggerated tale, perfectly in keeping with Govind’s propensity for moralizing but comically irrelevant to Bhaskar’s essence as a youth. When Bhaskar goes abroad to an Indian university, his brother Romesh develops quickly into a dangerous failure. His passion for cinema so warps his personality that his life is overrun by violent fantasy. Festering with contempt for the memory of his dead father and filled with hate for the Khojas, he brutally attacks Govind and his wife, Sumintra.

The whole edifice of Khoja respectability cracks. Trouble brews in the home of Saraswatee, another of the Khoja sisters, when her daughter Renouka, influenced by her Catholic education, turns against Khoja values. Rudranath, Saraswatee’s husband, turns against this modernity and goes berserk. He never recovers from the blow to his puritanical mania. Renouka takes up with her cousin Romesh, while also pursuing an affair with a “commercial traveler.” Govind, who has been deprived of his authority as the head of the family, decides to play the guru to the people at large and forms the People’s Socialist Movement, which he leads disastrously in an election. Assassination threats are made against him, and the Khoja rebels campaign against him.

Baby survives all the shame brought on her by her criminal son, just as she survives Bhaskar’s sequence of career failures. Bhaskar’s newly developed cynicism—he eventually dismisses Govind’s tale of the fireflies as pure rubbish—counterpoints his mother’s optimism. Yet the heroine’s life is cast in a downward spiral. She loses the friendship of Mrs. MacKintosh and the sympathy of her lodgers. She therefore sells the house and moves with Bhaskar into cousin Gowra’s home. She assists Govind with his “naturalist” school, but the venture fails. Bhaskar embarks for England with a bride, and Baby is left alone and empty.

The Characters

Baby is Shiva Naipaul’s detailed portrait of a dreamer out of touch with reality. She is not a powerful or particularly colorful figure, but she is intensely and touchingly human in her natural foibles, suffering, and yearnings. At first, she is little more than a conventional Hindu wife, who is subject to her husband’s will and whim. She bears his cycles of violence and calm, drunkenness and abstinence, brutality and concern. She even abides his adulterous relationship with Doreen James. Her resignation, patience, and unquestioning loyalty to Ram mark her as an acquiescent victim of domestic exploitation, but because her world view is marked by an indifference to the formal arrangement of laws, duties, and social forces, her world does not fall apart easily.

She derives substantial emotional solace from the Khoja sisters, who, as a group, are a corporate entity. Although foils to her patience and soulless devotion, the sisters provide her with the emotional coherence and consistency she lacks from her husband. While each of the sisters has her own specialty—Urmila, her voice; Shantee, her shared confidences with Govind’s wife; Badwatee, her obsession with Catholicism; Indrani, her defiant solitariness; Darling and Saraswatee, their compliancy—together they constitute a formidable feminine force and represent the grasping and conspiratorial power of a family that is a pillar of the Trinidadian community.

Baby shares with her cousins a confusion of religion with magic. She so wishes her life to be blessed with good luck that she turns desperately to Mrs. MacKintosh for tea-leaf fortunes. Absurd but pitiable, she is not selfish: Her dreams are more for her family rather than for herself. It is only when, little by little, almost all of her emotional supports are taken away from her that she deteriorates into a figure of desolate emptiness. She becomes, in effect, a lost one.

Shiva Naipaul, like his famous elder brother, V. S. Naipaul, has a genius for telling satiric details—so much so that subsidiary or supporting characters have a palpable, colorful existence in the novel. Doreen James is sketched in all of her snobbish affectation and incapacity to love. Sumintra Khoja is poignantly limned as a woman of arrested emotional development, whose dolls are a substitute for children. Mrs. MacKintosh is delightfully weird and shrewdly exploitative of Baby’s gullibility. The priest Ramnarace, with his concessions to modernity, is an exotic anomaly.

Ultimately, however, the most lasting impression is created by the Khojas, Baby, and her family. Naipaul’s world is one of illusions and delusions. Mocked by failure, his characters often try to abstract themselves from the world that hurts them, but they are not simply victims. They all have their own foibles and failings—sometimes disturbingly violent (as in Ram and Romesh), sometimes absurdly self-victimizing (as in Govind and Baby). In a society in which no soul is pure and no vision uncorrupted, the more the inhabitants attempt to escape their enclosed world of hierarchical functions and powers, the more victimized they become. Their failures, though sharp and sometimes destructive, are glossed by their eccentricities or absurdities, so that they are almost tragicomic.

Critical Context

Fireflies is, perhaps, underrated. It lies in the shadow of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) that masterpiece by Shiva Naipaul’s older brother—and certainly lacks the driving force, unrelenting central focus, and architectural coherence of its predecessor. Yet it is a massive success in its own right. It won the Jock Campbell Award, the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.

Like his brother, Shiva Naipaul was Hindu by instinct, if not by doctrine. His story conveys a strong sense of detachment and resignation, for in it the heroine, unable to alter the grim course of life, gives up the struggle in the end.

In a sense, Naipaul could be accused of exercising the fashionable pessimism of existentialism, but there is a sweet flavor amid the bitterness and sourness of his story. His gritty satire saves the writing from wearying pessimism, and his perceptive renderings of human nature offer a cool irony. Yet it is not a cold, heartless book, for the satirist’s penetrating and scalding wit is balanced by sympathy for suffering. Like the fireflies of the title, the heroine’s struggle sheds light before being extinguished. Its light is an illumination of human nature. Naipaul’s comedy thus distances readers from facile pity without alienating them from the vulnerabilities that make us helplessly human.

Bibliography

Blackburn, Sara. Review in The Washington Post Book World. April 18, 1971, p.2.

Grant, Annette. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXIV (February 7, 1971), p. 6.

Hess, Linda. Review in Saturday Review. LIV (March 20, 1971), p. 37.

The Times Literary Supplement. December 11, 1970, p. 1437