Chapter One
When I was seventeen I went to live with my great-uncle and great-aunt in
England. He was Indian by origin, she German. They were both sixty. I
hardly knew them at the time.
It was August 1969 – the monsoon season in Calcutta. A few days before I
left, Mama had taken me to a temple to be blessed, which was most unlike
her. She and Papa came to see me off at Dumdum Airport. I arrived at
Heathrow in the afternoon. My great-uncle and great-aunt were still away
on their annual holiday in Switzerland and, as I recall, I was met at the
terminal by someone in the firm for which my father worked. My first
impression was of the width of the road that led (under grey skies) to
London. I was housed for a night in a drab hotel somewhere near Green
Park.
That evening Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny returned from Switzerland, and
the following day I and my luggage arrived at their door.
I looked at the house that was to be my home for the next few years. There
was a red pillar-box not far from the gate of 18 Queens Road, Hendon; this
was to be my beacon whenever I trudged up from the tube station. In front
of the house was a small, low-walled, immaculately maintained garden with
a few rosebushes in full bloom. A path led to the door. To the right of
the path, slanted on a stand, was a burnished brass plaque that read:
S. B. Seth
L.D.S., R.C.S. (Edin.), B.Sc., D.M.D. (Berlin)
Dental Surgeon
I set down my luggage on the front step. The thought of meeting people
whom I had not seen for years and did not really know, and whose home I
would be sharing, made me nervous. I was, in any case, fearfully shy.
After a minute I rang the bell.
Aunty Henny appeared. Lean, tall, sharp-featured and attractive, she
didn’t look sixty. She greeted me with enthusiasm rather than warmth, and
led me down the linoleum-floored hallway where three or four people were
seated, browsing through old magazines. ‘Shanti’s patients,’ she
explained. She poked her head into the surgery to exclaim in her high
voice, ‘Shanti, Vicky is here,’ before opening the door to the
drawing-room. ‘No, leave the luggage in the corridor, by the stairs,’ said
Aunty Henny. ‘Now sit down and I shall make some tea.’
Since I had been told by Mama not to give any trouble and to be helpful at
all times, I offered to help. Aunty Henny would have none of it. I sat
down and surveyed the room. Everything seemed inordinately tidy, down to
the nested set of varnished side-tables and a polished cabinet for the
television.
Aunty Henny brought tea with three cups, and soon afterwards Shanti Uncle
took a break from his work. He was still dressed in his white dental
jacket. As soon as he came in, he hugged me, then stood back and said,
‘Now let me look at my little Vicky. It has been so many years since I saw
you. Now you must tell me how your parents are, and what your journey was
like. Have you got all your kit for school? Have you eaten? Henny, the
boy’s starving, you can tell. We must feed him up. Let’s open a tin of
peanuts. Have you shown him his room?’ Aunty Henny looked on impatiently.
Suddenly Uncle glanced at his watch, gulped his tea down and rushed back
to the surgery.
In those days I was very sensitive about my height and cringed whenever
anyone called me little. Shanti Uncle, however, was even shorter than I
was, and Aunty Henny towered over him. Nor did I like being called Vicky,
even though in India it would not be taken for a feminine diminutive. But
my overwhelming sense was that of relief. Uncle’s talk filled in, indeed
flooded, all my awkward silences. And his hug had made me feel welcome,
though it was made with only one arm. His right arm, being artificial, was
withheld from the embrace.
I had been to England twice before. When I was two and a half years old, I
travelled by sea with an uncle and aunt who happened to be going there. I
was to join my parents, who had left a year or so earlier: the Bata Shoe
Company, for which my father worked, had transferred him to head office in
London. My widowed grandmother – my mother’s mother (whom I called Amma) – had
been left in charge of me at home, and I grew very attached to her.
When I began to speak, Amma insisted that it be in Hindi and only in
Hindi. She herself was perfectly bilingual, but had decided that I would
get more than enough English in England. As a result, when I was delivered
to my parents in London, they found that I couldn’t speak or understand a
word of the local language.
Shortly after my arrival, I was taken to see Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny.
During the time my mother had been in England, she had become very fond of
Shanti Uncle, and he of her. Both Aunty Henny and he were keen on
children, and were looking forward eagerly to my arrival.
I don’t know whether it was Shanti Uncle’s effusiveness or Aunty Henny’s
European colour and features, but I quickly became uncomfortable. ‘I don’t
like it here, I want to go home,’ I stated firmly in Hindi. Shanti Uncle
looked startled. When Aunty Henny asked him what I’d said, he told her
that I was enjoying myself and would come again, but that I was tired and
needed to go home and rest.
The foreign Aunty Henny, whatever she represented to me, did pose a puzzle
to the whole of Shanti Uncle’s extended family in India. Uncle had married
late, in his forties, and had not brought her to …
(Continues…)
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-059966-9
Excerpted from Two Lives
by Vikram Seth Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
