Between the Continent and the Subcontinent

Seth spoke to Mini Kapoor about those two lives and the process of profiling them:

• Is this a sequel to A Suitable Boy? That novel engaged with independent India’s early years. Now you move to the diaspora and your characters connect with major events of the 20th century, World War II and the Holocaust.

It’s certainly arguable in the sense that it’s family material written one way or another. I quite deliberately chose to write it as nonfiction. In a story like this, I’d much rather the reader did not doubt whether a particular detail was true or not.

• You write that you began this as an account of your uncle’s life, and along the way discovered Henny’s story. How did the book change in the writing?

I thought I’d write maybe a short family archival account, just more for the sake of the family than anyone else. But once I read Aunty Henny’s letters, I realised not only was her story very worth telling in its own right, but the contrast between the two kinds of materials — letters versus interviews — was itself interesting. Also, there were two of them, the story of their marriage, with explanations from both sides, with mention in her letters about whether she should have married Shanti and so on. History came into play as well. And then quite apart from that, you could say the idea of how to write a book and the structure for it, that also comes in. It was as if new elements were added to the mix, and as they were added, the book changed. I do at the end of the book discuss the process of writing the book, where I could have have begun it, why I chose to begin it at a particular point. And even during the course of the book from time to time I say, well, that was from an earlier draft.

• Was this the most difficult of all your books?

In some ways. It’s very difficult to write about people you love without making it either hagiographical or too critical, because of your emotions being brought into play. I wanted them to be pictured. But at the same time I felt that since I formed part of their life, if I kept myself out of it, it would be too naively objective. That balance was a difficult one to achieve, as well as the emotional complexity of writing about people and things you care about. Or discovering in the case of Aunty Henny things I had never imagined.

• Like her papers in the attic.

After she died Shanti Uncle destroyed all her papers. It is only because this case survived, because it was in the far reaches of the attic, that I got any chance to see it at all. And that too because Papa was upstairs and saw these things in German and thought, Vikram’s writing a book and these papers may be helpful to him. He brought it down, Shanti Uncle saw them, said he’d never seen them before. He said, you take these letters, make whatever you can of them. I don’t know whether I would actually have had permission from her. And yet I did want her to be remembered. I felt the history of the times is very important, and the complex moral and psychological choices that people have to make under devastating pressure. One doesn’t know how we would have behaved in extremis.

• And finding transport details about Henny’s sister in Israel, did you have a feeling you’d get something significant?

I went there because a book of mine was translated into Hebrew. I didn’t realise there was an archive in Yad Vashem. I ended up spending a couple of days there. The really difficult part was writing about what happened to Aunty Henny’s family. As was the decision whether I should describe what very likely happened, as opposed to saying, well, they just disappeared into the camps.

• You have often complained about reviewers who give the story away. For this book, where the story is pretty much told in the first few pages, you must have have worried.

I don’t like the kind of review which says, Lata marries so-and-so. That’s very unfair. The other kind of review I object to is that which uses your book as a kind of trampoline to bounce off into the reviewer’s own obsessions.