Ashok Banker, the acclaimed Indian writer of the internationally best-selling six-volume Ramayana series, recently penned a glowing review of author Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, a recently-released realistic novel on Bombay gangsters. Sacred Games, the much-hyped first edition hardbound is 900 pages long and Mr Banker has inevitably compared it with another thick Indian epic belonging to another Vikram - A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth - a book which he describes as 'a one-volume novel' that 'taxed readers' wrists and sprained brains with its staggering 1359-page bulk'.

The somewhat harsh opinions that Mr Banker expressed for A Suitable Boy in his review have left me agitated and outraged. It is amazing that the same book could leave such different impressions on different readers.

My Suitable Boy

Mr Banker mentioned tackling the novel in short bursts of about 300-400 pages at a time. To him, Vikram Seth's magnum opus "smelled like the work of an eloquent young Adonis madly in love with his own powdered-and-perfumed self and obsessed with a British hangover".

But my experience was entirely of a different kind. When I read A Suitable Boy for the first time, which was around five years ago, I found myself captivated by its characters, its setting, its various and richly described themes - mostly Jane Austen-ish but at times Dickensian. I believed that the novel did not leave a scope for any improvement. It seemed perfect. Yes, the book did tax my wrists, but no, it did not sprain my brain at any passage.

I read the book for the fourth time early this year and did not find any alteration in my opinions. I am still extremely fond of it. Unlike Mr Banker, I am not capable of savoring it in 'short bursts' though.

Perfume and Powder

While I acknowledge that the author of A Suitable Boy had his upbringing in a sophisticated household (his mother was India's first woman Chief Justice), and was educated at exclusive schools, and that the chief families in his novel belonged to the upper class society of post-independent India whose members lived a British-influenced life, I never imagined the book to be too "perfumed and powdered".

Literally speaking, perhaps the major characters did regularly perfume and powder themselves after their morning showers, but then they were the privileged English-speaking citizens of a newly independent country led by an erudite, almost-British statesman called Jawaharlal Nehru, a literature-loving gentleman who had been in love with the obliging wife of Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India.

To be sure, the suave and urbane families of Mehras and Chatterjees of A Suitabe Boy do not share any values with the unshaven, unsophisticated, undeodorized goons of Vikram Chandra's modern-day Mumbai, a rackety city presently controlled by corrupt politicians and grim gangsters. True, there is nothing common between the worlds of Vikram Seth and Vikram Chandra. But could the refined world of Mr Seth be simply dismissed as "perfumed and powdered"? Isn't that world also real? Doesn't that high-brow class of people count in the narrative of a society? Did not both Jane Austen and Charles Dickens belong to the same country? Is Dickens superior while Austen merely perfumed and powdered?