Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy will, in the next few months, 'finish' a quarter century. When it was launched, in March 1993, there was a general expectation that the modern 'epic' would win that year's Booker. It did not and many thought publisher hype about the prize being 'a certainty' worked against it. I am not sure of that nor particularly sorry that 'Booker Prize Winner' has not been the book's selling tag. The book stands on the strength of its fictional veracity.

Fictional veracity? Is that not an oxymoron? Not if one reads A Suitable Boy as a story based on many real life experiences that went into making India.

What has surprised me is that the story did not become a tele-serial or a film in a mix of English and Hindustani. I can imagine a Merchant-Ivory film based on it with some stunning songs by Gulzar or Javed Akhtar. Anita Desai's In Custody became a great film around the same time that A Suitable Boy appeared, with some powerful poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz sung in it, becoming that film's very life.

One can never tell with films but my hunch is that had it become such a film with some of Vikram Seth's own poems set to music in it, A Suitable Boy would have been more than a box-office hit. Like Mehboob Khan's Mother India, its strong political core would have made a difference to a whole generation's sense of India's destiny. And it would have taken Seth's sensibility from its English domicile to its original home - among the people of Hindustan, with all their complications, contradictions and tragedies.

But this column is not about Seth's outstanding novel.

It is about Vikram Seth's place in India today.

And of the place of one like Vikram Seth in today's India.

But, before going into that, the question needs to be asked: Who is Vikram Seth? What exactly does he stand for, represent?

Famous for his novels that he is and will always be, Vikram Seth is, in the essence of his being, a poet. And that makes him a person who needs and cherishes being alone. "...I am so lonely, so content" is a one-line autobiography of his. He is complete being himself. He is his uniqueness, his uniqueness is him.

And what is his uniqueness?

More Indian than any Indian one can know, he is yet not of India. He therefore has been and remains for us, his fellow-Indians, ' hazir bhi, aur ghayab bhi ( invisible and yet, right here )'. Now, that makes him an enigma. The traveller from China to India in his amazing travelogue From Heaven's Lake (1983) was Indian. His home-coming at the end of that gripping book is that of a Delhizen. But in his altogether sui generis novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986), there is not a trace of India or of anything Indian. A slim collection of the most compelling verse had appeared under the title Mappings (1980) earlier, without fuss or much notice thanks to the far-seeing scholar-publisher, P. Lal. Those poems come from a poet who happens to be Indian, not an Indian poet. There - in his un-denominated insaniyat - lies Vikram Seth's uniqueness.

The appearance of A Suitable Boy in a sense retrieved him for India. And yet the novel remained part of the poetic world of Vikram Seth, in which there was goodness and its exact opposite, good luck and its exact opposite and there was Vikram Seth, leaving those two incompatibles to die in one another's arms, and disappearing thereafter from view.

I can never forget the evening in London in 1993 when he was reading from his mint-fresh novel to an admiring, almost mesmerized crowd. There he was, at the centre of all attention, perfectly at home in it, comfortable in his celebrity-ness and in no hurry to conclude the event. But when it was done, before anyone quite realized it, he put on his cap, his coat and quietly, without a single backward glance, disappeared into the anonymity of that city. As I caught a glimpse of the slight figure turning into a bend down the dark road, I said to myself it was a happy thing to see him be so himself.

Kahan se aye, Vikram Seth, kahan gaye Vikram Seth, yah koyi nahin kah saka hai. Aur is par koyi afsos nahin. Kyunki, jab tak ve samne hain, tab tak ve puri tarah se samne hain, hasne, hasane, khushi bantne, gham bantne jaise, darya-e-dil ki mohabbat dene, jaise aur koyi nahin kar sakta... Par agle kshan ve kahan honge, ve kya karne kya kahne, kisko...yah koyi nahin kah sakta...

Where Vikram Seth has come from, where Vikram Seth has gone, none has been able to tell. And it has not mattered that this is so. For, as long as he is there with you, he is there, right there, in front of you, laughing and making you laugh, sharing your happiness, sharing your gloom, generous and loving like no one else... Once that moment is gone, he is gone with it, where to no one can know, to do what, say what, who to, none can tell...

Gayness is an unproclaimed feature of his personality, just as his genius is and his no nonsense-ness. These go with him, as his eyes and his forehead do, both capable of the most dazzling smile and the most chilling scorn. No one may mess with Vikram Seth as a person, as a holder of views. Nothing low, tasteless, vile stands a chance with the author of All You Who Sleep Tonight. And that includes illiberalism, bigotry.

What and where is the place for such a Vikram Seth in India today?

It is precarious and it is dangerous.

In the akharas of social prejudice in today's India, purblind custom is making the individual hostage to hypocrisy and patriarchy. In the halls of political posturing, arrogant majoritarianism is taking the measure of Indian pluralism. In the quadrangles of justice, the Supreme Court is told, privacy is not a fundamental right. And in the streets of India, dissent is portrayed as sedition and criticism of State policy, anti-national. A hyper-nationalism rules the communication Mogul of our times, which goes by the name of social media. The voice of Indian liberalism, raised at protests, through writing and different forms of advocacy is spattered with abuse, vile abuse and threats on Twitter and Facebook postings. In Du Fu's words of 1300 years ago which Vikram Seth has translated with such delicacy: "...we must mind our words, with spies about..."

Thank god for the Supreme Court which has ruled that privacy is a fundamental right. That protects, as I see it, poetry. Not just the poet's verse but freedom's score. Thank god for our still free media which resist threats.

Vikram Seth's place in intolerant India is the place Faiz Ahmed Faiz occupied in intolerant Pakistan. India's beleaguered freedoms, as dusk settles over them, urge that Faiz in him to help it unchi rakhe lau.

They say to him, in Faiz's words again, pas raho... tum merey pas raho... Stay near me now, just stay very near me.