Queer Lives

Spamming over three months, with my attention span rising from three hours to three minutes a day, I finally drew a close to Two Lives by Vikram Seth today; a book in itself traversing a century and many generations of people across all the globe. (Catch the Rediff review here.)

He is definitely one of the most acclaimed Indian authors around, and deservingly so. The sheer size of "A Suitable Boy" has always made me carefully navigate away from it, every time I encountered it on a bookshelf. I see in myself a new found courage to pick it up sometime now (after my current list is done that is) and read more of the world he paints.

The mere lengths and breadths of landscape involved in Two Lives, in terms of both geography and philosophy, is mesmerizing. I haven't been reading it too continuously, yet I feel I ve lived across the lives of Shanti and Henny along with the author.
It is so much like a life in itself, dull at points, yet to be lived, more interesting at other times, and one hopes it stays that way all along.

There is something so peculiar about the ways families are and will always be. Indian, German, or British, does not matter one bit. At so many junctions across the book, I felt like I was reading about somebody I know, or could vaguely connect to in flesh and blood. Maybe that's one of the aspects, which makes readers feel connected to the author's world.

And the spaces one goes through in the course of a life.....nobody knows where this life will take us, how events will turn out, what will happen in one's personal life or in the world around them, that will alter it's course forever.
Yet we fight, struggle, and fret day in and day out, coz we think we have it all charted out, planned and ready to execute.

"Where do you see yourself ten years from now?" ; and I ve had to check myself laughing out aloud. Yet that's something we need to do - just to make more sense of this present, that funny past, and that obscure future.

I feel we can only live through each day, as if it were the last, and if lucky to be alive - look back at them over the years and find some of them to inspire confidence, and others bequeath regret. None of which makes much sense anyways.
So, I will end it with the author's words...

"May we, in short, believe in humane logic, and perhaps in due course, in love."