Vikram Seth’s 'A Suitable Boy' is that ex-lover who simply won’t go away. You see her at weddings, and are compelled into those awkward jokes about how everyone and their future children will be married before you’ll ever dip your feet. You run into her during dates, with the gods of comedy aligning your tables within eye and earshot of one another. And you chance upon her during a mindless scroll, while pretending to be overjoyed at a tot’s birthday celebration on Zoom.
The long-awaited transference of Seth’s magnum opus to screen, via a BBC-developed six-part series, is the latest in this saga of former, fettered lovers. I haven’t watched the first few episodes of the miniseries much, though the opening montage of petals, parrots, and a sufficiently eastern melody appears to have been plucked right out of the Indian Yogic Academy’s Book of Appropriately Vedic Indian Things.
By becoming part of the confinement zeitgeist, the story is part of most everyday conversations, each time inflicting fresh masala to my guilt associated with the affair. You see, I’m yet to actually read the thing.
Pound for pound, Seth is among my three favourite writers. His books have transported and sweet-talked me into his worlds of exile and cadence whether equal or unequal. But A Suitable Boy has languished on the shelf, foreign to the taste. I’ve tried, even getting through its first few hundred pages on occasion. But that’s where the ardour has ended, exacting a fresh partition.
It isn’t as though the book isn’t touched with sublimity; it is. It’s just that some literary affairs were meant to remain the distant, imagined pleasure anchored to fraying shelves, their characters consigned to the imagination and fictional foreplay. With some of the larger, feted ones, it’s boredom that causes the rift; a few appear too draped in antiquated dialect for you to treat them seriously. And it’s not just the number of pages that’s the predicament, I have plenty of larger, cherished tomes, overflowing with a plethora of intertwinement. Many of the acclaimed bibles are simply too heavy on the soul, capable of inducing bafflement or just plain tedium.
And so they remain there the illegitimate caretakers of your bookshelves. Spoken about in hushed tones. Or flourished with knowledgeable pride should an academic arrive for dinner (now there’s a sexy party).
I will give the miniseries a go, given its cinematic pedigree. And I might yet give the book a twirl. Lovers are nothing, if not fickle.
The author can be contacted at siddha3th@gmail.com