A Suitable Boy: How to Select a Husband in 1349 Pages

 

 

Vikram Seth's mega novel, 'A Suitable Boy ', is not for the impatient reader used to slim volumes of some 250 pages to be polished off in one sitting. The saga straddles a hefty 1,349 pages in the hard-bound edition and 1,488 pages in paperback. But don't let the heft put you off reading. The Kindle edition is available.

Early warning for the reader

At the very outset, Seth warns the reader in a satirical vein. "The superfluous, that very necessary thing..." and "The secret of being a bore is to say everything". Both quotes from Voltaire. Towards the end of the novel, a poet-novelist, perhaps fashioned after the author himself, says at a literary meeting that, faced with ponderous volumes like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, he just rips out the particular play he would like to read. He says he stuffs the pages in his coat pocket to be read at leisure.

Fortunately, there is no need to rip out the pages, especially in a Kindle edition. nothing superfluous or boring about this book.  The length is also not a problem. 

A period piece

Set in the period just three years after independence, when a wounded nation was recovering from the trauma of partition, the book records the fading of idealism and the emergence of practical politics, including corruption, caste and communalism set to plague the nation in the decades to come.  

The novel, for the most part, is set in the fictional Brahmpur, an important town in Purva Pradesh, which seems to be a play on words on Uttar Pradesh. It has a booming leather industry like Kanpur. Located on the banks of the holy river Ganga, the town also hosts a Kumbh Mela-type event.

Politics, business affairs and Communal tensions

Though the main storyline is the search for a suitable bridegroom for Lata, it wanders off into several areas, including politics, business affairs and communal tensions. It features two powerful Ministers of the Congress Party. The leather trade, including shoe manufacturing, is covered in some detail due to the involvement of a main character.  

The Storyline

Opening with a wedding in the family of Roopa Mehra, who misses her long-dead husband Raghubir Mehra, a railway official who could even have been elevated to the Railway Board but for his death from overwork in his early forties, we are introduced to the family members of the bride and groom, along with the local bigwigs.

The occasion is the marriage of her elder daughter Savita to Pran Kapoor, a lecturer at the Brahmpur University. Rupa is satisfied that she has found a good match, as Pran is the son of the Revenue Minister Mahesh Kapoor. She was very unhappy when Meenakshi Chatterjee, a high-society girl from Calcutta, snared her elder son Arun, one of the few Indian executives at the British firm Benton & Pryce.

She warns Lata that she would have to marry a boy of her choice. Lata soon faces the dilemma of choosing between the handsome collegemate Kabir Durrani, footwear company executive Haresh Khanna and poet Amit Chatterjee.

But then, the story is not that of the search for a suitable boy. It is as much about Maan, the somewhat wayward younger son of Mahesh Kapoor, who resists his father's attempt to set him up as a cloth merchant in Varanasi, to marry and settle down. Instead, he has a torrid love affair with a courtesan, Sayeed Begum.

 Seth takes the reader through evenings filled with Urdu ghazals at Saeeda Begum's house, of a feudal universe collapsing all around. A Land Reforms bill, moved by Mahesh Kapoor would soon take away much of the properties of the zamindars, including that of his close friend, the Nawab of Baitar.

The author presents the pulls and pressures in politics where even senior ministers have to compete to gain the attention of the Chief Minister and other top leaders for career advancement. The secular Kapoor finds that his ministerial colleague L N Mishra would like nothing better than to whip up communal sentiments in the form of building a Shiva temple right next to a mosque. 

The Muslim community is also finding a diminished role in the newly independent nation. Purva Pradesh MLA Abida Khan protests the introduction of Hindi as a language of administration while ignoring Urdu used by the Hindus and Muslims for centuries.

On the whole, the book merits a leasurly read.