Nobel-winning author dies at 85

Shahzad Mustafa remembers thinking of his own childhood when a worker from the Children’s Aid Society visited his mosque to talk about the importance of Muslim families fostering children of the same faith.

His mother had taken in three Muslim foster children for a few months when he was young — an experience he said had a profound impact on his life.

As the CAS worker told the congregation in Markham, Ont., last year about the scarcity of Muslim foster families in the region, Mustafa says he was struck by a need to act - a feeling that eventually motivated him to launch an organization dedicated to encouraging Muslims in the Greater Toronto Area to become foster caregivers.

“We should be looking after our kids and we should be part of a bigger solution,” the 50-year-old told The Canadian Press.

“As immigrant communities become more prominent within Canadian society, there needs to be more outreach within those communities to bring more families into the foster-care movement.”

The organization, called FosterLink, launched in March with support from Mercy Mission Canada, a Muslim community development group that Mustafa is the director of.

FosterLink hosts events at mosques to raise awareness about fostering and connect with potential caregivers, Mustafa said.

So far, it has recruited about 50 people who are going through a months-long application process that could see them become foster parents.

“We’ve definitely seen a huge interest,” he said. “The intake process is very rigorous ... foster care isn’t meant for everyone and there are strict requirements.”

According to the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, between 2016 and 2017 there were almost 13,000 children and youth in care during any given month.

The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto didn’t provide exact figures on how many Muslim children are in foster care, but said there was a need for more caregivers of that faith.

“We understand that when we take kids from one culture and put them in homes that are of a different culture, that is not in their best interest,” said Mahesh Prajapat, Chief Operating Office of CAS Toronto.

“Identity is critical, but it’s not just identity. It’s the feeling that you are somewhere comfortable... from food...to customs.

Fostering children involves looking after a child who is under the temporary care of Children’s Aid until their original guardians are deemed fit enough to take them back or the child is adopted.

To become a foster parent through Children’s Aid, families must complete a home study evaluation to see if their homes meet safety standards, according to the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies. Caregivers also undergo training where families learn about abuse and neglect a child may have faced.

V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose precise and lyrical writing in such novels as “A Bend in the River” and “A House for Mr. Biswas” and brittle, misanthropic personality made him one of the world’s most admired and contentious writers, died at his London home, his family said. He was 85.

His wife, Nadira Naipaul, said he was “a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour.”

His friend and fellow author Paul Theroux said that Naipaul had been in poor health prior to his death on Saturday, but had taken pride in having his work recognized.

“He will go down as one of the greatest writers of our time,” Theroux told The Associated Press during a telephone interview, citing his mastery of writing about families and colonialism. “He also never wrote falsely. He was a scourge of anyone who used a cliche or an un-thought out sentence. He was very scrupulous about his writing, very severe, too.”

Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction reflected his personal journey from Trinidad to London and various stops in developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

In an extraordinary career spanning half a century, Naipaul travelled as a self-described “barefoot colonial” from his rural childhood to upper class England, and was hailed as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. From “A Bend in the River” to “The Enigma of Arrival” to “Finding the Centre,” Naipaul’s books explored colonialism and decolonization, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world.

He was critical of colonialism, but set himself apart from any social movements. He saw himself as a realist, cured of illusions, his outlook defined by the famous opening words of “A Bend in the River” that became the title of a biography by Patrick French: “The world is what it is.”

He was equally skeptical of religion and politics, of idealism of any kind, whether revolutionary uprisings or of quests for paradise such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s search for the non-existent El Dorado.

“If you come from the New World, as I in large measure do, you see all the absurd fantasies people have taken there and the troubles they have wrought as a result,” Naipaul told The Associated Press in 2000. “We were not given a proper history of the New World itself. This was not out of wickedness. It was out of ignorance, out of indifference, out of the feelings that the history of this very small island was not important. These aspects one had to learn and writing took me there. One didn’t begin with knowledge. One wrote oneself into knowledge.”

Naipaul prided himself on his candour, but he had a long history of offensive remarks. Among his widely quoted comments: He called India a “slave society,” quipped that Africa has no future, and explained that Indian women wear a colored dot on their foreheads to say “my head is empty.” He laughed off the 1989 fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”

The critic Terry Eagleton once said of Naipaul: “Great art, dreadful politics.” Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott complained that the author’s prose was tainted by his “repulsion towards Negroes.” C. L. R. James, a fellow Trinidadian writer, put it differently: Naipaul’s views, he wrote, simply reflected “what the whites want to say but dare not.”

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — Vidia to those who knew him — was born on Aug. 17, 1932 in Trinidad, a descendant of impoverished Indians shipped to the West Indies as bonded labourers.

His father was an aspiring, selftaught novelist whose ambitions were killed by lack of opportunity; the son was determined to leave his homeland as soon as he could. In later years, he would repeatedly reject his birthplace as little more than a plantation.

In 1950, Naipaul was awarded one of a few available government scholarships to study in England, and he left his family to begin his studies in English literature at University College, Oxford.

There he met his first wife, Patricia Hale, whom he married in 1955 without telling his family.

After graduation, Naipaul suffered a period of poverty and unemployment: he was asthmatic, starving and depending on his wife for income. Despite his Oxford education, he found himself surrounded by a hostile, xenophobic London.