Certainly, in California, Seth found a freedom he had not known before, and which he enjoyed, though while there are some happy love poems in his early work, there are more recording rejection and misery. By this point Seth was disenchanted with his academic studies, but without any other obvious path to take in life, he took off for two years to study economics in China. While there, Seth managed to wangle a rare pass to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and decided to return to India by hitch-hiking overland through western China and Tibet to the Nepalese border. Back in Delhi, his father suggested his journeys might make a book, and the resulting travelogue, From Heaven Lake, is a charming and easy read. It won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and gave Seth the confidence to start thinking of himself as a writer.
Writers can be notoriously cagey about their influences.
It does not have a single Indian character in it and Seth has resisted being classified as an Indian writer. The Golden Gate, as much as A Suitable Boy, owes a debt to Indian fiction in English, so much of which, like the Malgudi chronicles of Seth's great favorite, R.K. Narayan, is characterised by low comedy and the affectionate pricking of pomposity. Seth can be as funny in person as he is in writing. Like many Indians he can't resist a good pun but this irreverence does not mean Seth is not serious about his writing. The first section of A Suitable Boy, beginning with the wedding of the older sister of Lata, whose search for a husband is the heart of the book, was written quite quickly.