She will interrupt, say what's on her mind without editing or censoring a thought, and hold onto an opinion, however unfashionable, with the same tenacity - and 'controversialness' - as her husband is known for.
Lady Nadira Naipaul in conversation with Sangitaa Advani

Forget the old cliché "Behind every successful man, there's a woman." When you meet Lady Nadira Naipaul, wife of Nobel Laureate author, Sir Vidia Naipaul, she's always right up there, in front. In Mumbai, at the recent world launch of Naipaul's latest novel, Magic Seeds, she's seated by his side on the podium, virtually the mistress of ceremonies. She's there to tidy the rough edges around the Great Man, smoothing over his famous ire at "stupid" questions, fending off the paparazzi. She adds the warmth, the human setting to the clipped, diamond brilliance of Naipaul's cutting intellect - and tongue.

But don't let that give you the impression that Lady N is a public relations' type person, always saying the "correct" thing. Far from it. As a fellow-Pakistani writer once put it, Nadira Naipaul is more Naipaul than Naipaul. Which means she will interrupt, say what's on her mind without editing or censoring a thought, and hold onto an opinion, however unfashionable, with the same tenacity - and controversialness - as her husband is known for. In the past, she's lashed out at L.K. Advani against the BJP's Gujarat policy, despite Naipaul's known prediliction towards some aspects of Hindutva ideology. And for a man who is so disdainful of journalists, Naipaul is an unabashed champion of the right to a free press: witness his public support of the publication, Tehelka, on whose board he sits. Some more ironies: Naipaul, who like the BJP, firmly believes that many of the problems of today's Islam stem from over-zealous converts, squarely defends Tehelka against the BJP-led attack on the publication. And Lady Naipul's own Pakistani and Muslim background in no way waters down his criticism of Islamic fundamentalism.

It's intriguing ambivalences like these that make the Naipauls such an interesting couple. One thing that's steadfastly unambivalent is their devotion to each other. Younger than him by twenty odd years, they have been married since 1996, and most of it has been pretty dramatic. How did the two meet? Lady Naipaul was a well-regarded columnist and special correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, for ten years. With great flair, she tells you how she met Naipaul when he had come to Pakistan to research his book, Among the Believers.

She reminisces, "It's a very famous story which has been distorted so many times that I'm actually fed up of it. Because I think people are incredibly stupid to pass on their own fantasies to other people. I am a very bold woman and I am a very tough woman at the same time. And I am famous for my plain speaking. Well, I had gone to the American Consulate. There was a Pakistani journalist, called Ahmed Rashid and I am taking his name, because I wish to clear this. He walked up to me and said, 'Do you know V S Naipaul?'

"And he pointed and I saw this man, very ravaged, tired, bent over a plate of salad. (He doesn't eat meat. You know Pakistanis eat a lot of meat.) And he was picking his salad. I saw him and do you know, that the book that I had adored was his An Area of Darkness. In fact, when I came to India for the first time in 1993, I never thought I was going to meet Vidia. I had a big fight in the Indian Press Club in Delhi over V. S Naipaul. Somebody was abusing him and I said, 'You are so ungrateful, you have a writer who is giving you the tool of self-assessment, which we don't have. And you are running this man down.' I used to carry that copy in my bag for a long time. If I wasn't doing anything, I would sit and read it. There was a line on Kashmir and I used to think, 'Dear God, if only I could write three lines like this, aah, I'll be happy!'

"And when I walked up to him and I looked at him, he was tired, I was tired. I had been fighting battles too, of my own, and I saw him and I was just filled with a kind of reverence. We were tired, the two of us. Tired people. And you know, I looked at him, and I was just full of love, and pity, and love, and for myself probably, because I was suffering too. And I said to him, 'Can I kiss you?' I didn't even wait. I kissed him on his cheek. He looked at me and he said, 'I think you should sit down….!'"

Almost a decade of married life does not seems to have taken the sheen away from this fairy tale beginning of what has been a second marriage for both of them. For a man who has never wanted children, Naipaul has gone on to adopt Lady N's daughter from her first marriage. Do they get into any arguments or differences? "I'm not a carpet for anybody," she asserts. "I do argue and then I do listen to him because I understand that he is much wiser. He's given me the philosophical way of dealing with everything in one's life so I have changed a great deal. I do argue for a little while but then he'll say something so funny, at which I start laughing, and then we'll both laugh!"

Then, an endearing confession: Lady N has a tendency to use malapropisms when she is nervous. "In the beginning it would irritate him. Now it amuses him. I look at him, and I say, 'You've been punished by God, you know. You don't believe in Him, you master of narrative, master of prose! Now, you've been given a wife who malaprops!'"

But of course Lady N has given her husband more than malapropisms as her contribution to their partnership. "I have to cotton wool him," she muses. "He's had a very hard life. You see the success and you don't see the pain behind it. He's a private man, there's a lot of pain. He's climbed every literary mountain and he's reached the top - it's been one hell of a journey." What about her own writing? Busy as she is managing the writer's life, so that he is totally free to get on with his vocation, she explains: "I can't write now. I wrote for ten years and was very tired. I said enough, I"ll wait. I'll sit with the material and maybe, one day I'll write a book."

Those who know the fiercely independent Lady Naipaul, will tell you that the last thing she does is sit around. There is, one senses, a different Naipaul work in the making.