I was feeling blue. It was September 1986 and I was in New York doing my master’s in law at Columbia. Classes were not exactly what I had expected. I was not cutting it with the girls. The food at International House was lousy. I was homesick.

As is my habit in such circumstances, I went to a bookshop and began browsing. I came across a book called The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth. Never heard of him but an Indian, I thought, as I picked up the handsome hardback with a yellow cover and began reading: To make a start more swift than weighty,/ Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon/ A time, say, circa 1980,/ There lived a man. His name was John...”

I was hooked. It was hailed as the great American novel. The verse fizzed and floated. California came alive with iguanas as pets, Castro clones, post-prandial pumpkin pies, olive picking, boy loves girl, boy loves boy. The story was simple, the form brilliant. The take on San Francisco and the Bay area, superb. The cultural underpinning was so contemporary it seemed to be Andy Warhol in verse. It transformed my year in New York. It lifted my spirits. Soon came the Mets who won the baseball world series. Soon came Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. The girls began smiling, albeit reluctantly. I ended up having a blast in New York.

When Seth’s A Suitable Boy was released in 1993 I was at the British Council in Bombay. I met up with him after the function and asked him when a sequel to The Golden Gate would be out. You can’t leave John in a lurch, I told him. Vikram said The Golden Gate was in the past. The Suitable Boy was the present. I read the book and thought it wasn’t a patch on The Golden Gate.

... contd.