The Girl Who Ate Books by Nilanjana Roy

Author:Nilanjana Roy [Roy, Nilanjana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-93-5029-712-4
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2016-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

6

Vikram Seth

At the Seth family house in Noida, Vikram Seth oscillates between charm and gloom. He hates interviews, but accepts with resigned tolerance that he must ‘do publicity’ every six years or so. He’s resigned when an interview stretches for ten minutes too long, resigned when the photographer makes him change his shirt. ‘She’s the second photographer who’s made me do this.’

Then we discover I’ve selected the same restaurant where the family’s taking him for dinner. Vikram’s mother, Leila Seth, protests. You don’t argue with a photographer, or with a former Justice of the Supreme Court, so we change plans, heading to Dakshin at the Marriott.

Two Lives, the non-fiction work that’s forced Vikram back into the glare of publicity, is the most personal of his books, but also the only one where his own voice is so deliberately reined in.

As a teenager, he lived in England with his Shantih Uncle and Aunt Henny, who became ‘surrogate parents’. He knew that Aunt Henny, a German Jew, had lost family to Hitler’s concentration camps, and that Shantih Uncle had lost his arm during World War II, but that was all. He was floundering—panicking, he says—after A Suitable Boy, a writer in search of a subject, when Leila Seth suggested he interview Shantih Uncle.

Two Lives took almost a decade to write. It’s part family memoir, part Holocaust remembrance, part personal history, told with a sensitivity that fluctuates between reticence and, for the very private Seth, a surprising openness. ‘I thought of it as a three-stranded book, not two-stranded. But then I didn’t want Two Lives to become Three Lives.’

Home in that period was London, where he used to bathe in the Serpentine (‘I’ve become a bit of a wimp about winter swimming now’) and where, walking across Hyde Park, the image of a man, a musician, came to him and grew into An Equal Music.

It’s also been Delhi; Dariba Kalan, where his father still has family; Rajaji Marg, where the Seth family occupied a sprawling bungalow in a cheerful tangle of separate but intersecting lives, and now the suburb of Noida.

Aunt Henny taught him that language could be a home, too, as she took him through the intricacies of German, a language he found inimical but eventually settled into with great pleasure.

By the time we get to Dakshin, he’s done with talking and is looking forward to his vodka (Absolut Pepper, chased with plain coconut water). We order fried prawns as a starter, meen moiley, gongura mutton and kai stew. ‘Kai isshtew, kai shtew,’ he says meditatively, trying out the poetical possibilities of vegetable curry on his tongue.

I try to get us back on track.

‘About the Holocaust . . .’

‘Actually,’ says Vikram, looking around, ‘I like this place a lot.’ Dakshin is quietly understated, with an appam station, thalis lined with banana leaves. ‘I’m just going to hide the red light,’ he says, switching his attention to the tape recorder. ‘Put a little katori in front of it . . . that does the trick.

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