For someone who’s written a 1,368-pager on his family and followed it up with another 503 pages of a family memoir, Two Lives, of his great-uncle and his German wife, Vikram Seth is fierce in defending his family’s privacy. There are two sacred cows in his life, we discover very soon after arriving at his parents’ home for one of the back-to-back interviews his publisher has set up on his first day back from London for a whirlwind book tour of five metros. The first is Family Time, and there will be no poaching on it, as he informs us with unusual curtness when we tentatively ask for a photo shoot at a family dinner later that evening. The other, of course, is Creative Time. With just one of the innumerable interviews of the next two days ending as we meet, Vikram is already a little snappish under the pressure, leaving his Mama, the serene ex-Justice Leila Seth, to hold fort with tea, lemonade and her calm grace, while Vikram stalks off into her bedroom, declaring: "I need a five minutes’ break before the next interview." He returns exactly on time, only his slightly ruffled hair and expression betraying how much he longs to get away from us all—cameraman, interviewer, publicist. But our suggestion that we make this a three-way conversation between Vikram, Leila and me brought back the literary star’s legendary—and sometimes acerbic—good humour. And revealed the writer in the closest—and most important—private space he shares with his mother/muse/mentor who he acknowledges as "someone who is slightly scarily intelligent and who has achieved so much that all of us are pretty much in her shadow".