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Seth the performer weaves spell with 'Two Lives'
By Manish Chand, Indo-Asian News Service 

New Delhi, Oct 21 (IANS) Poet and novelist Vikram Seth, the once painfully shy boy inspired by the extraordinary lives of his dentist uncle and his German wife to write his new best-selling book, has morphed into an impressive performer equally at home in the privacy of writing and the public stage of celebrity glitter. 

The occasion for the latest bout of inspired performance by Seth was a perfect one: the formal launch of "Two Lives" -- his new genre-defying book that is part autobiography, part memoirs -- in his home turf Delhi and the 75th birthday of his mother, Justice Leila Seth. 

The private and the public could not have meshed more beautifully in life as well as in art as Seth read out from his new masterpiece amid a blitz of paparazzi at the Taj Mahal Hotel here Thursday evening. 

The room was bursting with devotees of all stripes - socialites, models, artists, gossip queens and, yes, fellow writers turned out in abundance to celebrate the author of bestsellers like "An Equal Music" and "A Suitable Boy".

Seth hit the literary stratosphere with his novel in verse "The Golden Gate" nearly two decades back, followed by an epic novel of manners "A Suitable Boy" that made him a divinity in that minority cult called 'Indian Writing in English'. 

"I thought after I wrote `A Suitable Boy' I was written out. I never thought I would write again. I was grumbling petulantly to my family that I would never write again and my mother told why don't you write about Uncle Shanti who had had an eventful life," Seth said, as he recalled how the idea of writing "Two Lives" was planted in his head by his mother. 

But an imagined reconstruction of personal lives of his uncle and aunt posed its own set of artistic and ethical problems around the right of ordinary people to be left alone, at least after their death.

"Should we delve into the private correspondence of a reserved person's life," Seth articulated his initial anxieties after he hit upon a treasure trove of the private letters of his German aunt Henny - a survivor from the worst horrors of the Nazi Germany. 

But as he dug deeper, his initial hesitations melted away as he found an epic story of "extraordinary choices made by ordinary people under extreme conditions" in those private letters.

For admirers of Seth the writer, the evening offered a privileged glimpse into Seth the performer. As the suave, elegantly mannered Seth, holding a glass of white wine, traipsed across the stage taking questions from an awe-struck audience, his sparkling wit made one hope that Seth also take a stab at writing a social comedy for the stage. 

To a lady determined to trap him into a comparison with the legendary practitioner of magic realism, Salman Rushdie, Seth said: "I hope you asked Salman the same question! I assure you we don't collaborate."

"It would be counter-productive," he added nonchalantly, eliciting a howl of laughter from the audience.