I have just been reading Two Lives, by Vikram Seth.
The lives in question are those of his great uncle & his wife, he Indian, she German Jewish, both born in 1908. They first met in 1930s Berlin, where Shanti-uncle was studying dentistry, & again in London whence both fled, Aunty Henny having been lucky enough to find a sponsor which allowed her a visa.
They married in 1951, by which time Henny’s mother & sister had perished in the camps & Shanti had lost his right arm at Monte Cassino, where he was serving with the British army dental corps. Although he was able to secure himself a job as scientific adviser to a dental products company, which provided him with a good salary, opportunities to travel & lecture on the latest research into scientific dentistry, he hankered after being able to go back to hands-on work with patients & being his own master. And so, with the help & encouragement of another practising dentist, he trained himself to manage – successfully - with only one arm.
After all this he & Henny settled for a comfortably middle-class life in a semi in the north London suburb of Hendon, where Henny died in 1989 & Uncle in 1998, just before his 90th birthday.
Vikram Seth lived with his uncle & aunt during his vacations, first as a sixth form boarder at Tonbridge & then at Oxford University, so the three became close.
This brief summary can scarce do justice, either to the story or to the masterful way in which Seth handles the material – the history of his own side of the family, interviews with his uncle in old age, a cache of documents belonging to Aunty Henny found in an attic (which had survived uncle’s attempts to destroy everything which brought him painful memories after her death), research in Germany – woven in with accounts of the sweep of German & Indian history.
Painful, inspiring & humbling – those are the words which spring to mind to describe what kind of ‘a read’ is this book.
Links
British Council: Vikram Seth
Vikram Set: Biography
Vikram Seth: Desert Island Discs
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Peace & awe
