About Vikram Seth's "Two Lives"

Vikram Seth's Two Lives

Compounded by the exigencies of colonial domination, exile, migration, and double migration, a diasporic writer is challenged and ruptured by the multiplicity of ambivalent affiliations of language, class, race, gender and sexuality. The writer often tends to deal with these affiliations as a mode of postcolonial grand narrative¹ exposing the theoretical clichés of marginalization and resistance. But a writer of a much greater sensibility transcends these issues and moves towards a global narrative of reconciliation and resolution. A master of every genre ─ whether it is poetry, novels, libretto, travelogue or children book ─ Vikram Seth’s Two Lives ² exhibits refreshing change in the postcolonial narrative technique. A masterful fusion of biography, memory, autobiography, documentary, history, fiction and essay like excursions, it resists theory biased theme of cultural resistance and gravitates towards a narrative of global resolution. Deeply entrenched in the history of Second World War it is a powerful reminder of the horrors and trauma of the War. Two Lives does not do quite what is expected of a postcolonial narrative or of an English novel in the tradition of Jane Austen (as Seth’s magnum opus A Suitable Boy ³ is considered).A cosmopolitan4 story, narrated by a truly cosmopolitan writer, It resists any branding of an Indian writing in English.

I

A story of Vikram Seth’s great grand uncle Shanti and aunty Henny Two Lives covers almost a span of seven decades of the twentieth century. Shanti Behari Seth migrates in 1930s to Berlin to study dentistry. Henny Gerdo Caro is the daughter of a jewish-German family with whom Shanti lodged while studying in Germany. Henny was the private secretary to a director of the Mannheim Life Insurance Company. When she gets the news that her family has a lodger, she forbids her mother to “take the black man" and this “was the beginning of a relationship that was to last five and a half decades.”⁵

Shanti falls in love with Henny but is immediately smitten because she is involved with Hans─ her boss's son. Thus he can worship her only from a distance.

As Hitler comes to power both of them are displaced and end up in London. Shanti leaves Germany for England in 1936 because he is prohibited from practicing dentistry on racial grounds. There he serves in a British army dental unit until a shell blows off his right arm in Monte Cassino. Henny manages to flee in late July 1939 ─ just one month before the war breaks out ─ leaving her mother and sister behind. The only person she knows in England is Shanti. Until he returns from the war they keep a warm correspondence. After his return, the one arm dentist struggles to reestablish his dental practice and gradually a friendship is evolved between these two fractured lives. This unusual pair of exiles seeks sanctuary in each other and eventually marries after 18 years of friendship just to live a childless life at 18 Queens Road, Hendon.

Vikram Seth aged 17 goes to live with them in 1969 to pursue his studies. He forms an intimacy with Henny during his stay as he learns German from her. Exhausted with his literary experiments so far he is suggested by his mother to pen down the lives of Shanti and Henny. Since Henny had died in 1990's he begins interviewing Shanti uncle about his life. He narrates his relation with Shanti and Henny with a family chronicle and the background of his own writing process for Two Lives and other works, notably A Suitable Boy. However when Seth gets a "trove", a trunk full of Henny's letter, her story eclipses the entire book. This discovery dramatically changes the shape of Two Lives because he has primarily aimed to pen the story of Shanti. Seth is dutiful and overtly respectful of letters from which he quotes too fully.

Seth’s foray into the content of these letters leads him to analyse history of the Second World War. Further there is a marked digression as the writer starts giving critical commentary on the consequences of the War and current global problems. Along with it he provides imaginative reconstructions of that part of story where he falls short of exact details. He recreates Henny's sister Lola's final journey from the collection camp for Auschwitz.⁶ Even in this fictionalization of history, as in reproduction of facts and in translation of several letters from German into English, the author is true to History.

II

Vikram Seth, does a deep analysis of history and its impact on the two lives and the world at large. Author’s sense of history is so strong that it does not only help him to avoid the trap of familial self-indulgence but also creates an intense urge to unveil the quiet spaces of the history of a century of unprecedented turmoil. As he excavates the aloof and the enigmatic life of Henny, the horror and trauma of history is unfolded. Henny's letters reveal a world of pain, as she has written to her friends in Germany trying to reconstruct events. Apparently indifferent to every thing she has an inevitable hatred towards Nazis as her letter to Mr. Mahnert, dated 18th July 1946, exposes─

I know that some of my friends changed with the time as tide changes with moon and you cannot blame me if I despise such people. I know ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’, but the ways the Nazis have erred is inhuman and can never be forgiven and, I hope, never be forgotten.⁷

The letters reveal the pathetic condition of Jews in the post War Germany. A letter by Mahnert to Henny, written in august 1947 is worth quoting:

Your little parcel was handed to me on the 29th ult. and was a relief: I would have had to use twine for my boots had you not been so kind to send me laces. Many thanks also for other things….Well, we have after all nice souvenirs, ─ we have lived during a time which the present youth will never see…. You can hardly form an idea as to how things are here, all people thin and haggard and in fear of the coming winter, without coal (or with a ridiculous small quantity thereof) and, for the greatest part, without window glass!─ But never trouble the trouble until the trouble troubles you.⁸

[...]

¹. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

². Beevor, Antony. "Two Lives by Vikram Seth". http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/to/arts_ and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article 561550.ecesep.312005

³. Brennan, Timothy. “Development to Globalization: Postcolonial studies and globalization Theory”, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus.2004 (Chennai: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

⁴. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia

http://www.answers.com/topic/auschwitz#

⁵. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1981).

⁶. Seth, Vikram. A Suitable Boy (London: Phoenix, 1993). ¾ Two Lives (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005).

⁷. Waugh, Patricia. Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism (London: Arnold, 1997).

⁸. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.The_holocaust