India Abroad June 19, 2015 M42
Presented by
INDIA ABROAD PERSON OF THE YEAR 2014
His father’s portrait Painted in Vijay Seshadri’s words
W
e were strange — doubly strange, because Indians are strange even in India, having been exiled from time and history by an overdeveloped, supersaturated civilization, and strange also because no one remotely resembling us had ever before lived where we lived. But I was the only person in my family beset and burdened by this strangeness. My parents were absorbed in the details of our material and spiritual survival — my mother, gregarious and active, was busy with her intense domestic arrangements; my father was either working on his spectra or bivouacked with the Army of the Potomac. But I was transfixed by our image reflected in the order that surrounded us. It was painful to look, but I couldn’t tear myself away, and became trapped by what I saw us as in the mirror of our benign, distant, Protestant Midwestern world. I was like Shakespeare’s liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, and eventually had to ooze my way free through the cracks formed in that glass by the earthquakes of the nineteen-sixties. This confused us as a family, forced us to expend psychic resources we had always carefully husbanded, and made us all unhappy, especially my father, who had wanted me to climb up, climb up to his impossible level of concretion and discipline. I didn’t come back to the Civil War for a long time. But then, slowly, peculiarly compelled, I did, watching the documentaries on public television and browsing in the history shelves of libraries and bookstores. I kept this resurrected interest secret from my father for years. One Thanksgiving in the mid-nineteenThe generations: Vijay Seshadri, center, with his parents and son. nineties, though, when I thought I was PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY: THE SESHADRIS safe, I mentioned that I’d recently read Shelby Foote’s account of Gettysburg, and was surprised at changes that no one could have encompassed, not even how clearly I could visualize the battle, and see it unfold Lincoln. Look at how right he was about the Mexican war. hour by hour. He didn’t say much at the time. His response Look at how he wrote those memoirs while he was dying of was delayed, and when it came it was calculated and mascancer, in order to provide for his wife. That alone was sive. Three weeks later he sent me a Christmas present, a enough to wipe away the blemishes of his Administration. first edition of the two volumes of the Personal Memoirs of Grant was always impressive. His only fault was that he was too trusting. Grant, my father said, had requited himU S Grant. When I called to thank him, I told him that self. Grant, my father insisted before we hung up, was an Gertrude Stein had had a high appreciation of the memunderestimated man. n oirs. He said that was good, and that he might read Stein (he never did). And then, with both of us recognizing that Vijay Seshadri’s father taught chemistry at Ohio State the long interregnum had finally ended, that we were stuck University. The author captured his relationship with his with each other, we got into it about Grant. Grant was fine father — through road trips to Civil War landmarks — in this until he became President, I said, but what a terrible poetic essay titled The Nature of the Chemical Bond, which President. The corruption! The railroads! This agitated was part of his book The Long Meadow. him. It wasn’t Grant’s fault, he couldn’t be held responsible Excerpted with the author’s kind permission. for his corrupt companions. The Civil War had brought
Vijay Seshadri as a child in Bengaluru, where he was born.
‘Mom, don’t worry. I will be No 1’ Champaka Lakshmi Seshadri Mother
H
e always wanted to be a poet. We (her husband and her) were very worried about that. It is difficult to be a poet and be No 1. Both of us shared a passion for poetry, especially Wordsworth. He would say, “Mom, don’t worry. I will be No 1” (she laughs). When he was young he traveled a lot. But there’s nothing we could do. I used to worry until he came home. My husband encouraged him to read a lot. He was always reading. When he was 7 years old, he read all top poets. From India, we went to Ottawa, Canada, first. Two years later we came to America. Vijay was 6 when we came to America. My daughter was born in Canada. He is a very good friend to his sister. He is always very kind to her and other people. I taught him cooking. Now, he cooks for me. He cooks some of the south Indian dishes. n Champaka Lakshmi Seshadri, 85, home bound in Pittsburgh, spoke to Arthur J Pais.