When A Suitable Boy was published more than 15 years ago to a register of its excesses (around 1400 pages, more than a million dollars gained in advances, eight years in the writing), its blurb writers were inclined towards a snappy sign-off: no, Vikram Seth was not writing a sequel called “A Suitable Girl”. In a happy turnaround, this week Seth confessed that he is doing precisely that. He says the new book, scheduled for publication in 2013, is as of now just a few snatches. All that seems certain is that the “girl” of the title is being sought for Lata’s grandson and that in bringing the story six decades on, he will tell us what befell his vast cast of characters, so vast they could not be accommodated in pages of family trees.

A Suitable Boy ostensibly opened as a chronicle of a groom-hunt with Mrs Rupa Mehra’s stern words to her younger daughter: “You too will marry a boy I choose.” As the search began, however, the novel acquired an expanse which even its hundreds of pages may not have prepared the reader for. It took in the social and administrative changes sweeping through a country than had now been independent for five years and was preparing for its first general election. And for a book likened by its small band of shrill critics to a soap opera, it provided what is still one of the most engrossing accounts of land reform in north India. It anticipated the decline of Calcutta as a corporate hub, the axes of communal tensions that would appear by the ’90s, and the rise of the new middle class.

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