FLORA (Truly pleased) Oh, but this will be just my book! Thank you! Up the Country … Emily Eden. Oh it’s a lovely present!

DAS Well … I will write, ‘To remind you of Jummapur and your friend and fellow artist Nirad Das’. And I will draw myself listening to you.

Flora pours the nimbupani. Das writes on the pencil drawing with his own fountain pen, and settles down to draw her.

ANISH When my father met Flora Crewe he had been a widower for several years, although he was still quite a young man, younger than her, yes, the beginning of the Hot Weather in 1930 … he had his 34th birthday on April 2nd, just after he met your sister. He had lost his wife to cholera and he was childless. I knew nothing of my father’s life before me. In my earliest memory, my father was an old gentleman who spoke very little except when he sometimes read aloud to me. He liked to read in English. Robert Browning, Tennyson, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, and Dickens, of course …

MRS SWAN How surprising.

ANISH Oh yes—he went from a vernacular school to Elphinstone College in Bombay, and you only have to look at Elphinstone College to see that it was built to give us a proper English education.

MRS SWAN I meant, in view of his ‘opinions’. But I spoke without thinking. Your father took part in actions against the British Raj and loved English literature, which was perfectly consistent of him.

ANISH (Laughs) Usually, the education succeeded admirably! In Jummapur we were ‘loyal’ as you would say, we had been loyal to the British right through the first War of Independence.

MRS SWAN The … ? What war was that?

ANISH The Rising of 1857.

MRS SWAN Oh, you mean the Mutiny. What did you call it?

ANISH Dear Mrs Swan, Imperial history is merely … no, no—I promise you I didn’t come to give you a history lesson.

MRS SWAN You seem ill-equipped to do so. We were your Romans, you know. We might have been your Normans.

ANISH And did you expect us to be grateful?

MRS SWAN That’s neither here nor there. I don’t suppose I’d have been grateful if a lot of Romans turned up and started laying down the law and teaching Latin and so forth. ‘What a cheek,’ is probably what I would have thought. ‘Go away, and take your roads and your baths with you.’ It doesn’t matter what I would have thought. It’s what I think now that matters. You speak English better than most young people I meet. Did you go to school here?

ANISH No, I went to a convent school in … You are spreading a net for me, Mrs Swan!

MRS SWAN What net would that be? Have some more cake.

ANISH Mrs Swan, you are a very wicked woman. You advance a preposterous argument and try to fill my mouth with cake so I cannot answer you. I will resist you and your cake. We were the Romans! We were up to date when you were a backward nation. The foreigners who invaded you found a third-world country! Even when you discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our Shakespeares. And our science—architecture—our literature and art, we had a culture older and more splendid, we were rich! After all, that’s why you came.