Book Review: From Heaven Lake – Vikram Seth

Twenty nine years ago is long time back. A whole life time ago. The world was divided into two major camps – The Capitalistic West and the Communist East. It was a crime to be communist in a capitalist world, and enterprising free markets were smothered in the communistic world. It was the last few heady years of the Cold War, when countries were recklessly boycotting Olympic games; shooting down each others passenger planes; training and arming people who would come back and haunt us twenty years later; and generally being spectacularly infantile.

In the midst of this mayhem, an Indian student travelled from Delhi (in India, a Non-Aligned Movement nation) to Stanford (in Capitalistic America) to study economics, and then rather incongruously chose to spend 2 years at Nanjing University (in Communistic China). If the China of then was a closed nation, then Tibet was an impregnable fortress. Fortified by the high walls of Chinese bureaucracy on one side and the dizzying Himalayan mountain range  one the other side. That this Indian student hitch hiked and scaled his way through this treacherous terrain; stayed alive, took photographs and kept notes; and a couple of years later went on to write a book about this improbable journey; a book which won the “Thomas Cook Travel Book award”  is an incredulous plot worthy of a Bollywood movie.

The first novel by Vikram Seth, which I read, was “An equal music”. A book so riveting, that I read it in the middle of my final year Engineering Examinations. It was my escape from reality. It touched on human emotions at a very raw and basic level. I loved the book. I could, for some unfathomable reason, connect with the characters. I wanted to feel their pain. They were to me more real than the equations and circuit diagrams flying around me. Surely a man who wrote such a book had to be a cocktail sipping pansy psychoanalyst.

Really. That is how I thought of him. That is, until I read “From heaven lake”. The characters are real. So is the story. For it is a narrative of what really transpired. Vikarm Seth transformed from that silk scarf wearing, pince-nez totting, cold psychoanalyst into a free spirited wild adventurer. My judgmental eyes pleaded guilty and begged for forgiveness.

The book in parts took me back to my days in China – I could relate again to the character. But I tell you, I was not brave enough to eat dog meat. His journey from Liuyan to Lhasa, in the driver’s cabin of a rickety old truck with a chain smoking driver, his nephew and a Tibetian hitch hiker for company, is regularly interrupted by floods, unplanned stopovers, stolen luggage picked up by unscrupulous truck drivers, altitude sickness, and passersby who stop and laugh at you, but not help, when you are hopelessly trying to fix your broken vehicle.  This too reminded me of a rather strange holiday I had a few years ago. On which involved doing almost the same things, but on motorcycles, with a bunch of colleagues from University, on the Indian side of Tibet – in Leh. And of course that omnipresent Tibetian chant, “Om mani padme hun”.

How lucky he was, that he had a chance to see Tibet. At a time when it was still more of less forbidden for any foreigner to be there. How lucky we are that he was (and still is) also a gifted writer - we get to share his experience. In the grand scheme of things, a lot remains the same after 29 years in the Himalayas.

On a personal level, to learn about another great culture is to enrich one's life, to understand one's own country better, to feel more at home in the world, and indirectly to add to that reservoir of individual goodwill that may, generations from now, temper the cynical use of national power.

Amen to that Mr. Seth. Amen.

Book Review: From Heaven Lake – Vikram Seth