Storyteller in the Family: Inspiration and Obligation

The New York Times

February 6, 2006

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NOIDA, India — Vikram Seth has a house of his own. He just prefers to live in his parents' house, a few doors down. His father's study is his crash pad. His mother's study, connected by a door, can be invaded at any time. His parents' bedroom, with windows that overlook a small, tidy garden, is in effect the family room, too: before anyone goes on a journey, it is here, on the large square bed, that the family sits and chats. The upstairs quarters belong to Mr. Seth's brother and his wife. Nearly every day, a meal is eaten together, either upstairs or downstairs. What's the point, Mr. Seth asks, of being sequestered in your own house down the road?

"This way, we wander through each other's life, and it's much nicer," he said.

His books are likewise known for wandering through domestic life. His 800,000-word tome, "A Suitable Boy" (1993), chronicles the twined lives of four families in midcentury India. "Golden Gate" (1986) a novel in verse, meanders through a family of five friends in California. The latest, a memoir of sorts called "Two Lives," published by HarperCollins in November, tells the story of two misfits in marriage: Mr. Seth's great uncle, Shanti Seth, and Shanti's German-Jewish wife, Henny, and their lives before and after World War II.

"Two Lives" is also an autobiography, in a manner of speaking. In it, Mr. Seth comes as close as he ever has to being honest about himself. (It has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, in the autobiography category; the winners are to be announced next month.) More to the point, if "Two Lives" draws daylight on his own kin, it also reveals something about the danger of having a storyteller in the family. (Mr. Seth's family has several; "On Balance," by his mother, Leila Seth, is an unusually candid family memoir of loss and belonging.)

What Mr. Seth turns up about Shanti and Henny, through letters and interviews and finally a will, is both poignant and painfully revelatory. The letters, he concedes, were private — "eyes-only letters," as he puts it. But for a writer, they were also a find. And their discovery presented twin obligations to story and family. "There's a duty to the living not to hurt them," Mr. Seth explained. And "there's a duty to write things as they are."

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