My days with Naipaul in Iran

London: For journalists, going to interview V.S. Naipaul could be a daunting experience. On one occasion he had a taxi summoned to take a young woman back to the railway station because he felt she was not familiar with his work.

The author Hari Kunzru confirmed: "I interviewed V.S. Naipaul for BBC TV. When we sat down, the first thing he said was, 'Tell me what you've read and don't lie.' Only then would he consent to be questioned."

Fortunately, I wasn't made to pass this test but we met in very different circumstances in Tehran in 1980 just after the Iranian revolution when he had come out to gather material for his book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey.

He checked into the Intercontinental Hotel where I had set up base, like the rest of the media, as correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, London, on my first foreign assignment.

As the only two Indians in the hotel, we would meet most days for lunch. Though he struck me as being a loner, he was good company and we became friends.

I gave him all my contacts. Iran was then in a state of violent upheaval with almost daily executions of old regime members connected with the Shah, but over several months I had got to know members of the secretive ruling revolutionary council.

I remember Naipaul came away delighted with one encounter in particular. This was with an extremist cleric by the name of Sadegh Khalkhali, who toured Iran converting life terms in prison to death sentences. He said he could see Khalkhali's quivering epiglottis when he laughed.

What we did talk about were his view of India, summed up in his books, An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977). I found he was now mellowing towards India and altogether less critical of the country. "India is changing," he said, and did not seem to mind when I suggested, "Perhaps you are the one who is changing."

Over the years Naipaul was invariably courteous to me. This was not something I remembered but he would always thank me for taking him to the Tehran Bazaar, apparently to bargain for a Persian carpet.

There were other meetings but fast forward to the Bombay Brasserie restaurant in London in 1996 where he was holding a lunch to celebrate his marriage to the Pakistani journalist, Nadira Alvi. They had met at a dinner in Pakistan and married almost immediately after the death of his first wife, Patricia.

What was extraordinary was that Naipaul, who could be withering in his assessment of others, now employed the language of Mills & Boon to describe his feelings for Nadira.

He was clearly smitten. He was 63. She was 20 years his junior. They were sitting next to each other like a couple of teenage lovers in the bar of his favourite Indian restaurant (he would then eat only fish, dal, and vegetables and no meat). The lunch menu was decorated with little hearts.

He told me Nadira had appreciated An Area of Darkness, told him about the difficult life she had led as a divorced woman in Pakistan, and ended the conversation with: "Can I kiss you?"

She did so. Naipaul sank back into his chair, he told me. His words to her were: "I think we should sit down."

"I think we fell terribly in love," Nadira said of her meeting with Naipaul. "He was my soul mate. I am madly in love with him. I think I shall always be madly in love with him."

His eyes softened. He wanted me to write about Nadira as well. "Do you know about Nadira, her reputation and her work?" he wondered.

There would be changes in his life, he conceded. "I was thinking of getting rid of my library, letting it go to Tulsa (in America), but it cannot be done now," he sighed. "Nadira, who is much younger than me, will want the library."

Nadira certainly reorganised his life, throwing out old socks, old books and old friends, including, it would seem, Paul Theroux.

A couple of years later, Theroux got his own back by writing his side of the friendship that was broken off by Naipaul in Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents.

When I went to the book launch in 1998, Theroux told me it was my account of the Naipaul-Nadira kiss that had partly provoked him to write his own book, which includes the anecdote.

The task of defending and nurturing Naipaul's literary legacy will fall to Nadira but this is a task she has been performing anyway for the past 22 years.

In 2001, after Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize, he was accused of being "anti-Islamic". In order to rebut the charges, he came on the line and said: "Here, you speak to Nadira."

She was the tiger wife who defended her husband in forthright terms. She said her husband was not against Islam but the way the religion was being practised in a number of countries, including notably Pakistan.

She challenged her husband's enemies, asking them what they knew of modern Islam and how it was used in "tyrannies like Pakistan".

It was Naipaul and Nadira who told me with great delight that they had found a "unique biographer" to write the authorised account of the author's life --- Patrick French. The relationship was severed with the publication of French's coruscating biography, The World Is What It Is, in 2008.

Despite his poor health and confinement to a wheelchair, Naipaul did not lose his love of life. For example, when Ayub Khan Din's friends went to see a revival of his play, East is East, at the Trafalgar Studios in London in 2014, Naipaul and Nadira were among the VIP guests. Nadira said she had enjoyed the play but Naipaul kept his counsel.

Amit Roy, based in London, has been covering Europe for The Telegraph for the past 24 years