A reluctant genius
By Rahul Jacob Financial Times | October 21 2005 http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a68f698c-4125-11da-a208-00000e2511c8.html When Vikram Seth first proposes Assaggi, a small Italian restaurant in Notting Hill, for our lunch together, I ask him to reconsider. Its wooden floors and sparsely decorated walls make the trattoria unusually noisy; I know that transcribing the interview tape afterwards will be like trying to listen to a conversation in a nightclub. Days later, the novelist and poet, who has by now assiduously researched the problem, calls to say that for more than a year now the restaurant has had Styrofoam under its tables and behind its paintings, so the noise problem is considerably reduced. I arrive at Assaggi a few minutes after Seth, during which time the small-built Indian has been, inexplicably, mistaken by one diner for an Italian staff member, and simultaneously struck up a conversation with a Singaporean woman who is waiting for a table. This slightly anarchic beginning of impromptu, overlapping conversations and mistaken identities sets the stage for what is to come. As we settle in, I say that, having just finished reading Two Lives, Seth's part memoir, part biography of his great-uncle and aunt, whose lives were intertwined with the second world war and the Holocaust, I can't help marvelling at the diverse genres of writing he has tackled during his career. His work includes everything from a travelogue (From Heaven Lake in 1983), to A Suitable Boy (1993) a 1,400-page literary soap set in newly independent India; from The Golden Gate (1986), told entirely in verse and described by Gore Vidal as "the great California novel" to a book of children's stories and translations of three Chinese writers from the Tang Dynasty. All of which begs the question, is he a dilettante or a genius? Seth winces. "Can't we cut out both dilettante and genius and just say I am led by inspiration? If I'm inspired by something, I don't just dabble in it, I get obsessed by it," he says. He recalls having failed at writing a play. What was it about? Just a drama about the shenanigans of a publishing house - written in iambic hexameters. While still a PhD student in economics at Stanford, Seth spent a couple of years in Nanjing researching the demographics of seven Chinese villages. He wrote From Heaven Lake after hitchhiking across Sinkiang and Tibet, mostly in army trucks, on his way back home to India, then returned to his studies. His poring over censuses made him fully realise how tens of millions had died during the famines brought on by Mao's agricultural experiments. He returned to China in 1989, a week before the student massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the two horrific periods have coloured his vision of China. While comparing the two populous giants, I say that China has since done a far better job in food distribution and education than India. He replies, "I don't think you can say, decades on, that [the famine of the Great Leap Forward] doesn't matter. There is no greater inequality than [the difference between] life and death." He used intermediaries in China to send on letters to his friends (to avoid the attention of the Chinese authorities), but after Tiananmen Seth stopped writing to them altogether. He has not visited the country since 1989 because he worries that his strongly worded preface to the Indian edition of From Heaven Lake means he will be persona non grata. This seems a little extreme. "I'm not sure my Chinese friends would benefit from my contact. I think this idea that politics and economics necessarily march in tandem is a fallacy," he says, pointing to a recent incident when Yahoo's Hong Kong subsidiary was accused of providing the Chinese authorities with information that resulted in a journalist being jailed for 10 years. Seth's parents urged him to finish his PhD, join the World Bank as an economist for a few years, and then live as a writer on the small pension he would receive thereafter. Seth's heart wasn't in it; he jokes that he took "11 years not to finish my PhD". Instead, he lived with his parents in Delhi for several years, writing A Suitable Boy and eventually selling the blockbuster for a reported $1m. Soon after, he began to split his time between London and Delhi, and found a calligraphy teacher in England who, by odd coincidence, was a native of Nanjing. Fans of Seth's novel An Equal Music (1999) will attest that the author knows his music, so I am not entirely surprised when he draws an analogy between Chinese calligraphy and music. "You can read it as music or as art. By that I mean you can know in exactly what order each stroke is made, so you can [think through] what the artist has done - when he moved fast and when slow," he says. By this point, Assaggi's owner, Pietro, and the head waitress, Paula, who both obviously know Seth well, have come by for voluble dispositions on everything from Paula's recent holiday in Puglia to Pietro's wife's belief that he needs a sharper haircut. Just when I think we will have no further interruptions, Seth inquires about a new waiter's name. The waiter in turn wants to know whether Hindi is written right to left. Seth grabs my notebook and writes the waiter's name, Enzo, in Urdu and Hindi. When Seth fails to finish his main course of calf's liver, Pietro is crestfallen. Much melodrama ensues - and this is before the Singaporean woman comes by to introduce her dining companion, and Seth and she have carried on like long-lost cousins in high-wattage Mandarin. Flailing desperately as I try to keep the interview on track, I steer Seth on to the subject of India. The integrity of India's current prime minister, a Sikh with a PhD in economics, and its president, a Muslim aeronautical engineer, makes him optimistic. India's federalism and its tradition of judicial review, he believes, have together helped its imperfect democracy absorb shocks along the way. We are meeting weeks after yet another commission's report into the mass murders of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 was presented to the Indian parliament. Meanwhile a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat by Hindu fundamentalists a couple of years ago - allegedly aided and abetted by the provincial government - has also gone unpunished. This hardly suggests that India's police and judiciary are working properly, I say. "It's disgusting," he agrees, pointing out that India is one of the few countries that has chosen not to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty. "How do you deal with intra-national injustice towards entire populations? That's something we'll have to muddle through at an international level in the next few decades, rather than leave it to cowboys," he says, more generally. "If the intentions are suspect, as in Iraq, that creates huge problems. In Bosnia, which is not dissimilar, you tend to accept it. In Rwanda, you wonder why it didn't happen." The Clinton administration, in fact, stubbornly avoided calling the massacre in Rwanda genocide despite being pressed by journalists. This seems a good point at which to discuss his latest book, as it largely deals with the Holocaust in Germany. Seth's Jewish aunt Henny escaped by moving to London, eventually marrying his dentist great-uncle Shanti there. His aunt kept all correspondence relating to the death of her sister and mother in the Holocaust in a trunk in the attic, and she never discussed their deaths with her husband. Did he worry about betraying her confidences? "In so far as her nobility only comes out in these letters, I felt I almost had a duty to use them. She is dead and past caring, and I want them remembered, and this is the only way to do it." Heroic though their lives were, after ploughing through 500-odd pages of the overly long Two Lives, I am more interested in his remarkable mother, Leila Seth, the first woman to become a chief justice of a province in India, and the author of a well-received autobiography of her own, On Balance. I learn that she decided to study law in England on a whim when her husband was posted to London for a couple of years, because the course-work was more flexible than that of the Montessori teaching course she initially planned to do. Three months after Seth's younger brother Shantum was born, she sat her bar exams. When the results were posted outside the The Times' office, she looked at the lower reaches of the results sheet. "My father took her finger and moved it upwards." All the way to the top, actually: his mother had finished first. After the tape recorder is switched off, we wax boringly sentimental about our parents. We are both Calcutta-born sons of idolised, unconventional, working mothers and indulgent, supportive fathers. "All of us are pretty much in her shade," he says of his mother, crediting her with encouraging him to write Two Lives. When he learns that one of his poems happens to be a favourite with my father, he writes it out for him - and asks me not to mention this in my article. By now it is almost 4.30pm and Seth has decided to explain the metre of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, saying it was the inspiration for the moving, witty verse of The Golden Gate. At one point when a coin falls to the floor Seth segues into an explanation about why the 50p needs to be either heptagon or round (I still don't get it). I can't help thinking that one of the occupational hazards of lunching with a genius is that you end up convinced you're stupid. "Two Lives" is published by Little, Brown (£20). ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Life without art & music? Keep the arts alive today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/FXrMlA/dnQLAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
