We were both born in India, a few years apart. No big deal there, I guess. The Seths were Hindus, with immemorial ancestral roots in the country. My ancestry was much more hybrid, European in origin, though with pretty long and elaborate colonial tentacles. In the case of my mother’s family, who were Dutch on her father’s side, these connections stretched back to Ceylon in the early seventeenth century. Born in Malaya, she went to university in India and taught in various schools in Poona and Bombay, where she met my father in 1939. The Britains, my father’s family, could hardly be other than Anglo with that name, but they had been long-term residents of India, five or so generations by the time I came along, so were definitely Anglo-Indian in the traditional sense of that term. My father, in his youth, had broken with the Christian allegiances of the Anglo-Indian tribe. This was not to swap them for any more ‘indigenous’ faiths ¾ he passionately rejected all religions ¾ but there were at least as many Hindus, Muslims, Parsis or Goan Christians in his immediate circle of friends as fellow Anglo-Indians, and also among his closest work colleagues in the provincial government service of Bombay and later the Indian Army. He refused opportunities to join the British Army, and he openly espoused the cause of anti-colonialism and Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ movement.

These political sympathies were part of the reason he decided to quit India himself after independence was granted in 1947. Though given the opportunity of staying on in the army, he reasoned that India was now for the Indians to run, not remnants of the Raj, however sympathetic they might be to the new régime. We came to Australia towards the end of 1950, when I was barely two.

Vikram Seth was not yet born, and his family remained firmly anchored in India. The exception was Great Uncle Shanti. In the mid-1930s he had left his homeland to study dentistry in Berlin, which is where he met Henny and her family. He went on to further his career in Britain, where Henny managed to join him just before the outbreak of World War II ¾ though with no intention of marriage at that stage. The marriage didn’t take place until more than a decade afterwards; and, as we learn in the opening section of their nephew’s chronicle, it was to be almost another two decades before Vikram left India to come and stay with his uncle and aunt in London during the holidays from the English boarding school to which he had won a scholarship. The school was Tonbridge, the same, relatively minor English public school to which the author of Passage to India, E.M. Forster, had been packed off when a boy. Seth doesn’t say or make anything of this (admittedly slender) connection, though Two Lives might alternatively have been called Passages to England ¾ and yet more aptly, given the significance to his story of the author’s own trajectory in the same direction as that of his main subjects.

I embarked on my own passage to England about a year after Vikram’s, and it is there, half a world away from our joint country of origin, that the intersections of our lives become tantalisingly closer. We can’t now remember whether we ever actually met at that point, but there would have been ample opportunity, as our paths would literally have crossed almost every day for a couple of years. After his stint at Tonbridge, Vikram was admitted to ‘read’ English (as the local parlance has it) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, though he soon switched to PPE ¾ more local parlance; it stands for Politics, Philosophy and Economics. I was accepted to enrol in a postgraduate degree in history at the same college a short time later, and I subsequently stayed on for a while as college lecturer in the politics segment of that triple-headed hydra.

One of the most academically illustrious of Oxford colleges, Corpus Christi at that time was also the smallest in size and numbers, so the worlds of the undergraduate and the postgraduate were not as segregated as those at the larger colleges tended to be. Vikram and I shared some of the same mentors (he doesn’t name them, but I can instantly identify them in his text from his wryly affectionate delineation of their eccentricities), and two of my closest friends there were undergraduates who happened to have been to the same school as he, though a year or two behind him. Both he and I were also rather self-conscious about our diminutive stature, as I’ve just learnt, in his case, from a passing remark he makes at the beginning of Two Lives; and, whether or not connected with this seeming affliction, both of us also fell victim to a succession of unrequited romantic passions. Again, we’ll find passing allusions to his forlorn tendresses in the new book, though there’s a more eloquent, concentrated and rueful testimony to them in the little poem he contributed to a collective memoir of our Oxford college that was published some twelve years ago. I was also among those invited to contribute to that volume (Brian Harrison, ed., Corpuscles: A History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Twentieth Century, by Its Members, 1994). So our paths all but intersected again in the pages of a book.

Towards the end of my own contribution to that collective memoir, I complained that the very strengths and attractions of small-college life ¾ its social cosiness and intellectual intensity ¾ may have worked to limit its members’ horizons, curtail their full potential. ‘Except academically,’ I noted, ‘it’s never been much of a nursery for stardom of any variety.’ Nothing punctures this rather Pharisaical generalisation more neatly than the mini CV attached to Vikram’s poem:

Vikram Seth read PPE at Corpus and gained his PhD in the economic demography of China from Stanford University in 1986. He published his travel book From Heaven Lake in 1984, The Golden Gate [his long poem] in 1986, and his best-selling novel A Suitable Boy in 1993.

He went on, of course, to publish another best-selling novel, An Equal Music, in 1999, and I predict he is already on the royal road to a Nobel; but the definitive riposte to my all-too-categorical assertion has to be his latest book.

Part family biography, part personal memoir, Two Lives draws its riches from the superlative capacities of its author as novelist and scholar in one. The unfailingly limpid grace of his prose is mesmerising. But over a stretch of more than 500 pages it could become quite numbing were it not combined, as it is here, with masterfully paced plotting of the most subtly suspenseful kind, and keen-eyed characterisation of all the real-life figures that pass before us. Fairly, and unashamedly, ordinary in themselves, the two central real-life characters, Shanti and Henny, are given a wider and compelling emblematic significance through dogged research into their historical circumstances. While such personal papers of theirs as have survived or come to light in their married home in London provide their nephew with his main source and his narrative focus, he studiously places these in a global context through extensive consultation of published family histories, contemporary newspapers, and official archives in Germany, India and Israel, and of a range of secondary scholarship in the fields of military, social and political history.

There is one particularly impressive passage, deftly planted about three-quarters of the way through the book, in which he puts the main narrative on hold for a few pages in order to comment directly on the cultural and political significance of Germany in twentieth-century world affairs. This essay ¾ and it could easily stand alone as one ¾ displays such lightly worn erudition, such compact judiciousness, that it couldn’t help striking me as a ringing vindication, the perfect product even, of the kind of pedagogy we sought to practise as teachers of PPE at Oxford back in the 1970s.

However fanciful or self-indulgent that might sound, it remains a part of the book’s charm that somewhere, in its pages, every reader might expect to find (or be surprised to find) some such echo of his or her past, some piquant parallel with the experience of their own families, friends, colleagues.

If I may conclude with an even more personal example: on page fifty-three I read, ‘In 1998, a few months before his ninetieth birthday, he died’. This stopped me in my tracks. The author is referring to his Uncle Shanti, but my thoughts flew immediately to my mother, who also died in 1998, just a week before her ninetieth birthday. They were almost exact contemporaries, therefore. Pure coincidence ¾ but not mere coincidence. It led me to recall how some eighteen months before she died, my mother had gone blind. An avid reader all her life, she was now dependent on my father to read to her. The plan was: he would read her a chapter or two of a book every night before they went to bed. The book with which they chose to initiate this poignant ritual was set in India at just around the time they left there. It was A Suitable Boy. It proved to be the last as well as the first book they chose. A Suitable Boy has 465 chapters. They did reach the end of it. My mother reached her end two days later.

This is a revised version of a talk broadcast on The Book Show (ABC Radio National), 10 May 2006.