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"Does this
half-filial endeavour — Vikram Seth "You don’t know what exactly to write about next. Why don’t you write about him?" This suggestion Vikram Seth got from his mother Leila as the family drove back to Oxford after watching an opera in the summer of 1994. His reaction was: "I don’t know if I want to write about someone so close to me...." And thus was sown the literary seed for Two Lives The Seth family saga, combining histories of Vikram’s maternal grand uncle Shanti and his wife Henny, is "part biography, part memoir and part meditations". This genre-defying work is typical of Seth’s virtuosity and literary pole-vaulting that he performs every time he produces a book. The magnificently obsessed, family archivist writes the plain tale of Two Lives set against the drumbeat of tumultuous times. He covers a large canvas, striding valiantly across countries, people, human prejudices and eras. The book is structured in five distinct parts and each part can hold its own. Seth’s magical storytelling knits these disparate parts into a single tapestry of a sweeping panorama.
Initially, the book appears as a long drawn ‘Seth family soap’, but slowly it sucks you in. The gentle, lucid, minimalist style makes the ordinary appear extraordinary. It reminds you about R. K. Narayan’s effortless rendering of the minutiae of everyday life into art or about V.S. Naipaul’s narratives of different lives in India A Million Mutinies Now. Part one, dealing with Seth’s own coming of age and admission into Shanti and Henny’s home and lives as a "fearfully shy" young boy who joined Tonbridge School, is a first-person account. It recalls Seth’s parallel journey that shaped him up as a writer. His journey from Tonbridge to Oxford to Stanford, and then the China odyssey — resulting in a travelogue — is interspersed with descriptions of his bonding with Uncle Shanti and Aunty Henny. He especially remembers with warmth how Henny taught him German , a pre-requisite for his admission to Oxford. "Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century and he died two years before its close," writes Seth. He went in the 1930s to Berlin — though he could not speak a word of German — to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti met his future wife. After being disallowed to practice in Germany, Shanti had to pass all the medical examinations all over again to set up professional base in England. But destiny had another setback in store. His right arm is blown off at Monte Cassino during World War II. Life comes back to zero, and he has to struggle all over again. Seth deftly reconstructs the life and times of Shanti, putting skin to the bare bones of history through scholarly research, 11 long interviews with his granduncle and old family photographs of the protagonists. But recreating the life of Henny proves to be a much more daunting task both for the writer and the reader, as the only source is Shanti and the ‘trove’ of letters accidentally unearthed in a trunk lying buried in the attic of 18 Queen’s Road house. Henny Gerda Caro like Shanti was also born in 1908. She grew up in Berlin to a Jewish family, which was cultured, patriotic and intensely German. As Henny herself never spoke of her past, it’s only through these letters that the pain, anguish and wounds of her persecution in Hitler’s Germany and the loss of her mother and sister Lola in the morbid gas chambers becomes known.
Seth’s obsession with re-fabricating this lost world overtakes his pen and the family archivist gets the better of the writer. At times, the plethora of letters, replies and the post-scripts tests the reader’s patience. Though the backdrop of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany is heart-rending, Seth’s sermons on evils of war, hatred and political convulsions of history don’t go down well with the emotional warmth, family bonding and poignant human interactions — the quintessential heart of the book. At the end, though, one
fully agrees with Seth: "It has been a voyage not only round their
histories but also a sort of pilgrimage of their geographies." He
need not harbour any self-doubts about the success of the grand ‘endeavour’. |
Shanti and Henny got
engaged in 1949 and married in 1951. It’s a quizzical friendship and
enigmatic love story created by chance and history. "It may not
have been a requited passionate romance, but it was a deep and abiding
concern.... Beset by life, isolated in the world, in each other they
found a strong and sheltering harbour," describes Seth. The rest is
about the scenario after Shanti’s death, the quirky twist in his will
and the family’s response to it.