Vikram Seth is saying “Thank God” in Salisbury, England. The writer has just read the 105-page judgment of the Delhi High Court that says Section 377 of the IPC violates fundamental rights. “It is wonderfully good, humane and lucid,” he says over a telephone conversation on Thursday.

Seth, who once tangentially wondered in a poem, “In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight/ What is my status: Stray? Or Great?”, later let his mother Leila Seth write about his bisexuality in her memoir On Balance. He has been associated with Voices Against 377, and was part of its open letter to the government and members of judiciary supporting “the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code”.

“Now a homosexual in India does not have to feel that he or she is an unarrested criminal,” says Seth. “Law can go a great way in influencing how people see homosexuals.”

But, he is still not sure whether there would be a gay subplot in his new novel. And that’s Seth’s big surprise: he is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy. After denying for years that he would consider writing a sequel to that magnificent doorstep of a novel, Seth now says he is indeed writing A Suitable Girl. “I have written bits and pieces of it,” he says. “I was wondering what Lata would be like in these strangely similar but radically different times — she should be in her 80s — and how it would be for her grandson who is looking for a suitable girl whether he wants it or not.” The novel, which will be published by Penguin’s imprint Hamish Hamilton in 2013, will be set in the present day. “It will be in year 2000-something,” he says. And it will go back, over 60 years. “I am still getting to know the characters. I don’t even know whether Lata should be a widow or not,” he says.

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