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The year was 1958. Leila Seth had topped the London Bar exam - the first woman to do so - and now she was back in Calcutta hoping to start her own practice. She went to Sachin Chaudhuri, a senior barrister, and asked him if she could 'devil' with him (legal parlance for training under a senior lawyer). Chaudhuri told the 28-year-old that a lawyer's profession was not for women and that she would be better off getting married.

Seth replied that she was married already.

Chaudhuri said that in that case, she should have a child.

To which Seth said that she did have one.

Undeterred, the older man told her, 'It's selfish to have just one child, you should have another.'

And Seth murmured that she had had a second child too.

After that, says Seth, laughing, Chaudhuri relented. ''You're a persistent young woman,' he said, and accepted me as his assistant.'

I meet Leila Seth, now a sprightly 84 and dressed in a resplendent gold and maroon silk sari, in the sitting room of her Noida home. Sunlight filters through the trees and potted plants that festoon the small garden outside. You know at once that this is a reader's room. It fairly spills over with books - they're stacked in glass fronted cabinets, on shelves and low tables, and piled high on nearly every available surface. There are books on history, mythology and religion, there are memoirs, biographies and fiction and, of course, several hardbound and paperback editions of A Suitable Boy and other works by her first-born, Vikram Seth.

Leila Seth, who went on to become the first woman judge of the Delhi High Court and also the first woman chief justice of a state high court (Himachal Pradesh), recently came out with a new book of her own called Talking of Justice. We talk about that and a host of other things because spending time with Seth is to be in the company of a remarkable woman whose interests are wide ranging and whose view of society and justice is not just progressive, but intrinsically - and refreshingly - optimistic.

Perhaps the most fascinating story about her is how she came to be a lawyer. A trailing spouse, Seth went to London with her husband, and decided to study law because attending lectures was not mandatory, and hence allowed her to devote time to her family. 'I had always wanted to be a teacher,' she says. 'I had no lawyer in the family and no particular interest in law... But this was something I could do along with my marriage and baby. So I took it up.' To her amazement, she ended up coming first in the Bar exam.

Today, one would be hard put to find a better person than Seth to talk about law and justice. Her book dwells on laws regarding sexual violence on women, child rights, widows' rights and so on. It's clear that these issues are dear to her, although she admits that she didn't take up the cause of women and social justice until much later. That's because when she started out, she did not want to be dubbed a 'women's lawyer'. 'There were very few women in the legal profession at that time,' says Seth. 'I needed to prove to myself that I was as good as a man. So I hardly did any women's cases. I went straight to income tax law, company law, constitutional law and so on. I felt I needed to be in the mainstream. I didn't want people to say, ' Woh toh ladies ke kaam karti hain.''

In a sense, the trigger for Talking of Justice was Seth's experience as a member of the Justice J.S. Verma Committee, which was set up in the wake of the horrific rape of a young paramedic on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. The recommendations, which the committee prepared in the record time of 29 days, became the basis for the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2013, that made several important changes to the laws regarding women's safety and security.

However, Seth rues the fact that ultimately, many of their suggestions were thrown out. One such was the recognition of marital rape. 'Just because you've got married and given consent to sexual intercourse, it doesn't mean it can't be withdrawn,' she says with spirit. 'What about a woman's bodily integrity? What about her feeling on whether she wants to have sex on that day or not?'

The government also baulked at retaining the recommendation that the crime of rape be made gender neutral, that is, one where both perpetrator and victim could be male or female. The Act that was passed, however, made the perpetrator male and the victim, female, which, says Seth, gives short shrift to men and transgenders who may also be victims of sexual assault.

If the legislature is often leery of enacting progressive laws, I ask her if the judiciary too isn't bewilderingly hidebound and retrograde at times. For example, earlier this year, in a stunning and widely criticised decision, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court overturned the Delhi High Court judgment of 2010 that had decriminalised homosexuality.

'That is why sensitising the judiciary is so important,' says Seth, whose son Vikram is gay and who has written movingly about the cruelty and inhumanity of the Supreme Court's decision. 'Besides, matters that have a constitutional bearing should be decided by a five-judge bench. Then you are less likely to have such verdicts. We say the law is objective. But judgments are also coloured by a judge's beliefs and views. After all, you are the product of your upbringing.'

Seth's own upbringing was liberal and she was always treated on a par with her three brothers. Her family was based in Calcutta and she went to school at Loreto, Darjeeling, and thence to Loreto College in the city. When she was a child her father would tell her that he would send her abroad if she did well in studies. But he died when she was 11 years old and so the question of her being sent abroad did not arise anymore.

And yet, fate took her exactly where her father had wanted her to be. Married at 20 to Premo Seth, who worked with Bata Shoe Company in Calcutta, she accompanied him to London when he was posted there in 1954. 'I thought this was my chance,' she says. She joined a Montessori course at first. But her husband encouraged her to aim for something bigger. And so began her 60-year-old journey on the road to law and justice.

How difficult was it to break into the male bastion that the legal profession was back then?

'Well, the judges were mostly accommodating. But there was some opposition from my colleagues,' she says. In Patna, where she practised for 10 years before moving to Delhi in 1972, they would often try to put people off from giving her work. 'They would say things like, ' Kyon unko kaam detein hain? Do din mein chali jayengi... pata nahin kyon aati hai'!'

Despite the animosity of her male colleagues, Seth clearly enjoyed the business of litigation - 'when you win a big case, it's just like champagne - it goes straight to your head,' she says with a laugh.

Becoming a judge for the first time was also a thrilling milestone. But at the same time, it was a huge responsibility, she says. 'It's like becoming an umpire from a player. You're not sure whether you're really going to like it.'

In a sense, this is the third stage of her life, says Seth - first a lawyer, then a judge and now a writer who focuses on women and social justice.

Enlightened as she is, was it difficult for her to come to terms with her son's sexual orientation when she came to know of it first?

'It was more difficult for my husband than it was for me because he had had a conservative upbringing. But because we loved him, we accepted it,' she says. She has written about it in her autobiography On Balance (2003) too. 'I wondered if I should talk about it in the book at all, but Vikram said I should, because it would give other parents a lot of courage - parents who were throwing out their children because they didn't understand that this was something natural.'

One thing that strikes you about Seth is her essential positivism. Though large swathes of Indian society may still be trapped in primitive mindsets, she believes change is coming. 'I'm tremendously hopeful about India's youth, about the growth of a real civil society,' she says. 'We saw how in the case of Nirbhaya people came together and demanded change. And got it too, to an extent. And there is so much of good work that is being done by people, work that we may not know about...'

Indeed, she feels that it's her interactions with young people that give her the energy to keep going. She is already planning to write another book. 'It will be a children's book, something on value education - but in a fun way,' says Seth who has written another children's book called We, the Children of India.

And what does her writer son think about her writing?

'Oh, he is my editor,' she says with proud smile. 'He is always saying your grammar is bad, your spelling is this... And I tell him, 'but Vikram, I taught you English grammar!' It's a lovely feeling, a lovely circle in a sense.'

As we talk, her husband of 64 years walks in to tell her about some errand to be done for their daughter Aradhana. (Her second son Shantam is a Buddhist teacher and her daughter is a filmmaker.) Seth laughs and says, 'Our children may be 50 or 60 years old, but we're still doing things for them. As someone told me, when your children are small they're small problems, when they are big, they're big problems, so you might as well accept it!'

Any regrets?

'Touch wood, no. I've had a happy life,' she says.

And I leave Seth where I found her - in her circle of serenity, amidst her books, her garden and her family, her quiet contentment in a life well lived and a life with which she is keenly engaged to this day.