Volume 53, Number 6 · April 6, 2006
Pilgrim's Progress
By Anita Desai
Two Lives
by Vikram Seth
HarperCollins, 503 pp., $27.95
In July 1931, a young Indian student named Shanti Seth arrived in Berlin to study dentistry. His eldest brother, Raj, who was a father figure to him, had said, 'In our family we have an engineer, an accountant, a judge and a doctor, but no dentist. Why don't you train to do that?' and although Shanti 'wasn't at all keen on the profession,...out of desperation about his uncertain future, he agreed.' He was advised at his pension in Berlin to look out for a sign that said Zimmer zu vermieten ('room for rent') so he did, and found one on Mommsenstrasse in the elegant quarter of Charlottenburg, quite close to the dentistry institute. The door was opened to him by Gabriele Caro, a recently widowed Jewish woman in straitened circumstances who had two daughters and a son, and a large room to let. She took him in as a lodger and telephoned to tell her daughter Henny, who responded, 'Nimm den Schwarzen nicht'—'Do not take the black man.' But she did, and Henny and Shanti began a relationship that lasted for five and a half decades and a marriage that lasted for three.
Review, 3789 words
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