Game, Seth and match

London's streets are paved with gold for Vikram Seth who has spent the past few weeks revelling in the £1.4 million financial scoop for his still-to-be written work of memoirs.

Publishing advances are rarely, if ever, paid in one lump sum. A typical arrangement is 40 per cent on signature, 30 per cent on delivery and 30 per cent on publication. Even allowing for the 15 per cent plus value added tax that Seth's agent will take as his fee, that still leaves a huge amount for the best selling author of A Suitable Boy who can expect a cool £500,000 plus to filter into his bank account in the coming days from London publishers Little Brown.

This is all quite separate from deals he is negotiating with publishers in the U.S., Germany, India and Australia.

By the time Seth has concluded his global deals, there will be more than enough to pay for a lifetime of meals at his favourite London restaurants, whether it is an Indian haunt in deepest Mayfair or a Cypriot restaurant close to his Bayswater flat.

By all accounts the haggling for the rights to Seth's book was intense, sometimes even frantic, according to London publishing sources. Seth's earlier publishers, Orion, set the pace by offering £750,000, only to be surpassed by Penguin's one million, which was superseded in turn by Little Brown's £1.4 million.

"Vikram was really thrilled when it became a done deal," says a publishing insider who followed some of the negotiations. "He kept saying, 'I'm really pleased, I'm really pleased'."

Literary agent Giles Gordon, who handled the London negotiations, says his client's reactions was: "I think I'll have a glass of champagne." Gordon responded: "Why don't you have a whole bottle." "Cute" was the adjective most often used to describe young Vikram Seth when he was a boarder at the Doon School, the institution created in the bosom of the Himalayas to nurture the next generation of India's elites and rulers.

He was cute because of the way he waved his hands about to distract the flies and mosquitoes trying to settle on him during school debating contests.

And he was cute for some of the visiting parents and those members of the teaching staff who saw him as the child they wished they had; in short both a family and a school treasure. The small head of closely cropped hair, big eyes and grey school shorts reaching down to his knees combined to create the image of an elf from a children's adventure book.

Appropriate description

Thirty five years after leaving Doon, "cute" no longer seems an appropriate description for an internationally renowned author who has secured a record advance to write a book about the uncle and aunt with whom he lodged during his student years in England.

Despite a receding hairline and an thickening girth, Seth has not changed outwardly in any significant way since his school days. Still diminutive in size, he is only fractionally taller than the famous ex Royal Ballet dancer Wayne Sleep to whom he bears a passing resemblance.

But, unlike Sleep, an outgoing effervescent who has embraced the 21st century with gusto, Seth is still rooted in his Doon School past. His teenage interests – learning shorthand by the age of 13, writing backwards, sitting in the lotus position – were seen by his contemporaries as quirky attempts to escape the conformist "Hooray Henry" culture of boarding school.

They are part of a pattern that now fits the agreeable profile of an eccentric entering advanced middle age. Outdoor swimming in London's freezing winter temperatures is a throwback to the cold showers of his school years. Nor has he forgotten his shorthand, or the ability to write backwards.

A variety of interviewers have been also exposed to Seth sitting on a carpet, playing with his feet, writing his answers on a paper napkin because he had a sore throat and even falling asleep mid way through a conversation.

But these behavioural characteristics amount to nothing more than a distraction from the core value he has honed, such as a ferocious capacity for hard work that has assisted him in his development as a major contemporary writer.

The focus and concentration, which friends describe as daunting, was evident when Seth returned to Delhi in 1987 at the age of 35 and started to write his international best seller, A Suitable Boy, which went on to sell a million copies.

Family friends who remember the six years he spent writing his novel recall him working like a man possessed. A Delhi contemporary, William Bissell, says: "Food, sleep, nothing else mattered. We went to stay with the family in Simla, where his mother was a judge, and he was closeted all day in his room. He would only emerge in the evening in his dressing gown clutching a batch of new pages."

The end result was a 1,349 page love story and the longest novel ever written in the English language. Sold to his publisher, Orion, for £200,000, it is now being adapted for British television as a 28 part series and will enrich Seth beyond his wildest dreams.

Doon affected him in many other ways as well. Back at home, he tells of how, "My father was distant, a figure who came home tired and depressed."

From this home background he went on to Doon, where "I had this terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation.. Sometimes at lights out I wished I would never wake up. I was teased and bullied by my class mates and my seniors because of my interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest in games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and groups."

Forced to endure

Yet for all the misery he was forced to endure, Doon also bred in him a supreme self confidence. This self confidence has run like a golden thread through Seth's subsequent years at an English public school (Tonbridge), Oxford, where he graduated in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and Stanford, where he enrolled for a doctorate in economics before switching to Chinese.

It was at Stanford that he started writing English poetry more seriously. "I wanted to have some contact with the writing programme," Seth recalled in an interview published earlier this year.

"So I went to this office and asked if there was anyone who could help with poetry. There were two poets there and the one nearest the door was Timothy Steele, who writes with rhyme and metre. If the other fellow had been closer, I'd probably have turned out a poet of free verse."

The same self confidence sustained him through the year he spent in China and Tibet, culminating in a wonderful travel book, From Heaven Lake, and in the many long nights he has stayed awake moulding himself from travel writer to poet, acclaimed novelist and soon-to-be biographer of his much loved Indian great-uncle and German great-aunt who met in Berlin in the 1930s.

The record advance paid out for this particular work, which is not due to be handed in for another two years, has attracted sour grape comments from British journalists.

They describe Seth as a relatively unknown writer who has been able to secure a higher advance for his projected book than establishment-approved writers like William Shawcross who was recently commissioned by the royal family to write the biogr