When you sit through nearly 1,500 pages of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, you expect a fairy tale ending. But Seth doesn't give his readers the pleasure — in a surprising climax, an unlikely suitor by the name of Haresh Khanna marries the feisty protagonist, Lata Mehra, even as the readers root for her union with her college sweetheart, Kabir Durrani. In an interview, the author had famously stated that he himself questioned his heroine's decision to marry Haresh.

As Mira Nair brings the book to life as a BBC series by the same name, we ask Namit Das, who plays Haresh, if he struggled to imbibe the character that suffers from an inherent disadvantage. "I questioned [the climax] myself when I first read the book in 2015. After 1,500 pages, you feel a bit cheated with the ending," he quips.