Point of View

Vikram Seth writes his novel in the omniscient mode. It is as though the reader is looking through windows into the family relationships and the mental and emotional attitudes of the individual characters. Aside from Seth himself, there is no narrator in the book which allows the author to put in excellent descriptions of objects and the landscape, sometimes in clever phrases such as "wheels [that had] lost all memory of their shock absorbers." This omniscient point of view also allows both author and reader to look into the private lives of the characters without the need for any particular consciousness. For example, the reader learns about Meenakshi's character not from what she is thinking but rather from her actions and words. There is no internalizing of Meenakshi's character, but after discovering her ongoing affair with Billy, the reader hears Meenakshi ask if it is possible...