In a sense, Vikram Seth actually gives us three lives in his book about his Uncle Shanti and his Aunt Henny, for we learn quite a bit about Vikram Seth’s own early life in the introduction (Part I). He is studying in London and goes to live with his Uncle and becomes like a son to them, as they are a childless couple.
Henny and Shanti became acquainted when Shanti was a student in Berlin. He took a room with the Caro Family after the father had died. In their large apartment he thrived and became like a member of the family, very close to both Henny and her sister Lola and their mother, Ella.
They socialise a great deal and go on hikes and boating outings and celebrate in the apartment. The group of friends is followed throughout the story later even when Henny Caro is in England and some of the friends are in East Berlin separated by the wall. Right through to the end of the volume, we have many letters giving details of the feelings and resentments of these close friends about the German Third Reich, their loss of relatives and how the friends were faithful to each other through thick and thin ... or some were not supportive - they didn’t have the courage, yet all faced terrible stress.
Uncle Shanti is a loveable, affectionate person though when necessary he could be very firm. His background in India presents a picture of the large clan of Seths, in Northern India. In 1899 Shanti’s uncle published a book on the History of the Seth Family of Biswan. He grew up in a house of women, his mother, Leila, his beloved grandmother, Amma, who spoke only Hindi to him, an aunt, Chanda and three elder sisters. The house was divided in two parts, one for the women and the other for the men. The grandfather, a landowner, had a treasured orchard and his great uncle, who wore red robes, was a sannyasi (a holy man). There were also two older brothers, one of whom, Raj, later took over Shanti’s education when the father died. He was extremely fond of this elder brother and grateful to him all his life.
Shanti went to a theosophical school in Bennares for five years and was head boy there while living with his brother Achal, who was already a doctor. His two uncles worked as a judge and an accountant in Lucknow and Sitapur, so he had many relatives to soften the loss of his father.
Henny came to London a month before the war, to find work because she was not allowed to work for the Life Insurance Company run by her fiancée, Hans’ father, as she was a Jew. For a time she only had very menial work. She suffered the bombing of Germany by the Allies. Shanti, after practising as an assistant dentist for a while, was drafted into the British Army Dental and Medical Corps.
He had passed the medical and dental examinations with distinction (having to re-apply in Britain, after receiving them in Germany, where even research and academia were denied him under Hitler).
He took the exams again in Edinburgh and found that dentistry was taught at a higher standard in Germany and that in Great Britain the emphasis was more on extraction rather than preservation of teeth.
Shanti was eventually sent to the battlefront in Africa-after having requested Syria. He was mixed up with another person who had requested Khartoum, Sudan. Then, as a captain, in 1942 he was sent to Egypt to the Canal Zone, to a base hospital. The Germans had got as far as El Alamein in the desert west of Cairo. The colonel asked him to manage the local medical officers’ mess with the result that the food immediately improved. His next posting was to Syria for most of 1943 with an ambulance unit.
Then came the long war in Italy. He accompanied the invading troops to Naples where the Monte Cassino battles waged for months, with huge losses. Shanti was near the combat zone and actually was shelled by the Germans and lost his right arm. This tragedy caused him much prolonged suffering and almost meant he couldn’t be a dentist. But with much help from his friend Henny and many others, he was encouraged to keep trying and eventually after WWII was over, he was a sought after, gentle and much loved practitioner in London.
After the war, it took many years for Shanti and Henny to get together. A relative had to actually push him to make the proposal, but their correspondence remained quite continuous.
The friendship was perhaps not terribly romantic, but they each were lonely and had spent the best years of their youth in happy times in Berlin. They knew each other and their circle of friends there. They were devoted to each other and were aware of what the other had suffered during the war.
Henny never wanted to talk about the loss of her mother and sister in Teresienstadt and Birkenau.
That they were separated at the end, which was terrible for her and there was a great deal of correspondence to various of her friends about who had been helping them in the last two years when it became clear that they would be taken someday soon.
One follows the many threads of thought between her circles of friends, close friends and not so close friends, Jewish friends and Christian friends that Vikram Seth has reconstructed from available documents and letters.
It seems almost too tedious, yet one begins to understand Henny and her inability to be a very warm person and realises what preoccupied her as she mulled over the terrible years of the Hitler era.
Shanti said she never cried - at least he had never seen her cry - which seems a tragedy in itself. Yet, Vikram Seth, who understands German perfectly, conveys the devotion between the two and how they always spoke it to each other; he learned it very speedily under circumstances relating to his PHD studies, which turned out to be unnecessary after all. Yet it served him well for knowing his adopted parents (at least they called him their Sohnlein, or “Little Son”).
The two lives are intertwined and for many very tentative, but became more and more intimate and caring and after Henny died, Shanti was so devastated that he tore up all her pictures in hopes of not being reminded of her. This was a pity, a loss for this book, but there are some lovely shots of her in her youth.
It is not quite as heavy as Vikram Seth’s other serious novel “Suitable Boy (1,349 pages, weighing in at 1.86 kilos). “An Equal Music” was also much lighter.
Seth has also published three volumes of poetry, translated a book of Chinese poets, produced a travelogue on Sinkiang and Tibet, a libretto for an opera, and a novel in verse, “The Golden Gate”. “Two Lives” is a very engaging and touching story.
sheridangriswold@yahoo.com
