At the Seth family house in Noida, Vikram Seth oscillates between charm and gloom. He hates interviews, but accepts with resigned tolerance that he must "do publicity" every six years or so, writes Business Standard.
He's resigned when an interview stretches for 10 minutes too long, resigned when the BSphotographer makes him change his shirt. "She's the second photographer who's made me do this."
Then we discover I've selected the same restaurant where the family's taking him for dinner. Vikram's mother, Leila Seth, protests. You don't argue with a photographer, or with a former Justice of the Supreme Court, so as we leave for Dakshin at the Marriott, I figure it's a tie: Seth Family, BS "" one all.
Two Lives, the non-fiction work that's forced Vikram back into the glare of publicity, is the most personal of his books, but also the only one where his own voice is so deliberately reined in.
As a teenager, he lived in England with his Shantih Uncle and Aunt Henny, who became "surrogate parents". He knew that Aunt Henny, a German Jew, had lost family to Hitler's concentration camps, and that Shantih Uncle had lost his arm during World War II, but that was all. He was floundering "" panicking, he says "" after A Suitable Boy, a writer in search of a subject, when Leila Seth suggested he interview Shantih Uncle.
Two Lives took almost a decade to write. It's part family memoir, part Holocaust remembrance, part personal history, told with a sensitivity that fluctuates between reticence and, for the very private Seth, a surprising openness. "I thought of it as a three-stranded book, not two-stranded. But then I didn't want Two Lives to become Three Lives."
Home in that period was London, where he used to bathe in the Serpentine ("I've become a bit of a wimp about winter swimming now") and where, walking across Hyde Park, the image of a man, a musician, came to him and grew into An Equal Music.
It's also been Delhi; Dariba Kalan, where his father still has family; Rajaji Marg, where the Seth family occupied a sprawling bungalow in a cheerful tangle of separate but intersecting lives, and now the suburb of Noida.
Aunt Henny taught him that language could be a home, too, as she took him through the intricacies of German, a language he found inimical but eventually settled into with great pleasure.
By the time we get to Dakshin, he's done with talking and is looking forward to his vodka (Absolut Pepper, chased with plain coconut water). We order fried prawns as a starter, meen moiley, gongura mutton and kai stew. "Kai" isshtew, kai shtew," he says meditatively, trying out the poetical possibilities of vegetable curry on his tongue.
I try to get us back on track. "About the Holocaust..." "Actually," says Vikram, looking around, "I like this place a lot." Dakshin is quietly understated, with an appam station, thalis lined with banana leaves. "I'm just going to hide the red light," he says, switching his attention to the tape recorder. "Put a little katori in front of it...that does the trick."
The prawns arrive. He's about to expand on the section in Two Lives where he's talked about his working habits, a state in which bills, letters pile up and books are scattered around, where he retreats into a disorder from which only close friends can rescue him. But he's distracted by the Carnatic music. He hums. I wait. He sings in snatches. "Trying to work out what the raga is." I give up, sit back, and prepare to enjoy myself.
Over the next hour, he discusses his work ("It took me a long time to call myself a writer"), marriage, where he believes, unlike Tolstoy, that all happy families are not the same. We discuss politics, and how ordinary people like Shantih Uncle and Aunty Henny can have their lives changed by parties whose agendas they wanted to have nothing to do with.
Researching the deaths of Aunt Henny's sister and mother has made him sensitive, not just to the horror of the Holocaust, but to the prevalence of commonplace violence. The map of Delhi is scarred by memories of 1984; we've passed roads where, as he says, not so long ago, Sikh families were killed in that terrible pogrom.
This book has changed him, I realise; what he wants to do with Two Lives is get his readers to look behind the closed doors of family history as well as a larger history.
We're at the coffee stage "" "kapi", he corrects me, pointing to the menu where it's spelled K-A-P-I; the conversation has lightened again. He's unburdened by fame, writers aren't recognised in the same way as sportspeople or film stars, he says, ordering the date toffee without looking at the menu.
"I always look ahead to the pudding, just so that I can put myself in the right frame of mind." What's next? Perhaps a collection of poetry, or essays, or a novella. Vikram doesn't really know, but for the first time in years, he feels free: "I'm not panicking."
As we walk out, the seldom-recognised Vikram Seth is accosted by a gorgeous, gushing fan who wants his autograph. He looks sheepish. "It happens sometimes," he says defensively.
Right now, he has more important things on his mind than the next fan, or the next interview, or even the next book: he's going off on a very important mission.
I watch as this respected, well-loved writer, praised by the likes of historian Anthony Beevor, steps out into the afternoon in search of a damask tablecloth for his mother. It's a suitable quest.
