Tag Archives: a suitable boy

An Indian novel set in India

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A FEW MONTHS before January 1994 when I set off for my first visit to India, my soon-to-be wife gave me a copy of the recently published A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth.

I began reading it, and gave up after the first 300 pages.

33 years later, in September 2026, I began reading it again, and I have just finished reading the entire novel.

The book has over 1470 pages. Each one of them is a joy to read – not one of them is dull.

After having visited India more than 50 times and lived with my wife’s Indian family, the contents of the book make a great deal of sense to me. Words, traditions, and ways of life, which made little or no sense to me when I first tackled the novel in 1993, enhanced my second reading of the book. However, if one is not familiar with India and its recent (1950s) history, a reader might get less enjoyment fom the book than I have. That said, the novel provides a panoramic survey of the lives of various strata of Indian society during the first few years after 1947, when the country became independent.

It is amazing that the author has written a novel that remains compelling, exciting, interesting, and amusing over so many pages.

Anyone with even the slightest interest in India will gain much from reading “A Suitable Boy”.

A chance encounter in the pavilion and a suitable boy

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I HAVE NEVER MET the Indian author, Vikram Seth, who wrote the long novel “A Suitable Boy”, but today, 30 July 2026, my wife and I met his sister, Aradhana, quite by chance while visiting the beautiful brickwork Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens.

In about 1968, my wife was awarded a scholarship to study for her A-Levels (university entrance examinations) in the UK. That year, she was not the only one to receive such an award, which allowed her to travel from India to study in England. Another awardee that year was Vikram Seth, now a renowned author.

In 1994, a few months before my first ever visit to India, my then fiancé, now my wife, suggested that I read Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy” because it might have helped me to ‘acclimatise’ to Indian ways of life before I arrived in the country. The book, first published in 1993, is well over 1400 pages long. Dutifully, I began reading it, but then little of it made much sense to me, and I gave up reading the book by the time I reached page 300. Thereafter, I have not touched the book until this month, July 2026.

Since 1994, I have visited India at least 50 times, often for long sojourns, and have become familiar with many aspects of life in the country. A few days ago, I started reading “A Suitable Boy”, and I am finding it both enjoyable and incredibly engaging. Much of what Seth has written makes much more sense to me than it did in 1994. And despite it being published without a glossary, many of the Hindustani words (transliterations of Devanagari and Urdu scripts) now mean something to me.

Seth has managed to write an epic novel whose pages contain a brilliant portrait of life in certain social circles in India. Although I have only just passed page 230 (in four short episodes of reading), I feel that by the end of the following few weeks, I will have read the whole book.

Meeting Vikram Seth’s sister by chance was only one part of an amazing encounter today. My wife thought she looked vaguely familiar, and that is why we engaged her in conversation. It turned out that Aradhana and my wife had attended the same school, Loreto House, in Kolkata (Calcutta), and although they differ in age, their times at the school overlapped. In addition, Aradhana, was with her friend, Amrit, whose father, we discovered, had worked in the same company as my wife’s father.

Although India’s population is about one and a half billion, I am always amazed how often we ‘bump into’ Indians, with whom my wife can find some not too distant connection.