When I first read Vikram Seth’s 1,349-page novel A Suitable Boy almost two decades ago, it seemed ideal for an adaptation as a film or bet...
When I first read Vikram Seth’s 1,349-page novel A Suitable Boy almost two decades ago, it seemed ideal for an adaptation as a film or better still, a television series. Set against a memorable historical backdrop, A Suitable Boy described life mainly in crowded old-new Brahmpur and its families and people, happy and unhappy in their own ways.
There’s something about long-drawn, multi-threaded family sagas. A fascination that becomes habit in watching lives unfold with all their strange complexity, the simple yet irresolvable tensions between members and the oftentimes quirky motivations that guide them. All of which present necessary insights and grant us an easy omniscience as well. Buniyaad, the multi-generational family saga set in India of the early 1940s and 1950s, had ended several years ago, and there was, in these years of the 1990s, nothing to take its place.
Seth’s novel, however, presented difficulties in adaptation. With one central storyline – finding a suitable boy for Lata Mehra – there were myriad other stories branching out in small and big ways. Some assumed critical importance, others meandered away into too easy resolutions.
Yet Seth’s fascinating range of characters – major, not so major, and the very minor, all with their baggage and back stories – begged...
