DAS Oh!—you’re not dying are you?!

FLORA I expect so, but I intend to take years and years about it. You’ll be dead too, one day, so let me be a lesson to you. Learn to take no notice. I said nothing about your painting, if you want to know, because I thought you’d be an Indian artist.

DAS An Indian artist?

FLORA Yes. You are an Indian artist, aren’t you? Stick up for yourself. Why do you like everything English?

DAS I do not like everything English.

FLORA Yes, you do. You’re enthralled. Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Gold Flake cigarettes, Winsor and Newton … even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours—what you think is my point of view. You deserve the bloody Empire!

DAS (Sharply) May I sit down please?

FLORA Yes, do. Flora is herself again.

DAS I will move the chair near the door.

FLORA You can move the chair onto the verandah if you like, so the servants won’t—

DAS I would like to smoke, that is what I meant.

FLORA Oh. I’m sorry. Thank you. In that case, can you see me through the net from over there?

DAS Barely.

FLORA Is that no or yes? (She raises the sheet off her body and flaps it like a sail and lets it settle again.) Oof!—that’s better! That’s what I love about my little house—you can see out better than you can see in.

DAS (Passionately) But you are looking at such a house! The bloody Empire finished off Indian painting! (Pause.) Excuse me.

FLORA No, that’s better.

DAS Perhaps your sister is right. And Mr Chamberlain. Perhaps we have been robbed. Yes; when the books are balanced. The women here wear saris made in Lancashire. The cotton is Indian but we cannot compete in the weaving. Mr Chamberlain explained it all to us in simple Marxist language. Actually, he caused some offence. He didn’t realize we had Marxists of our own, many of them in the Jummapur Theosophical Society.

FLORA Mr Coomaraswami … ?

DAS No, not Mr Coomaraswami. His criticism is that you haven’t exploited India enough. ‘Where are the cotton mills? The steel mills? No investment, no planning. The Empire has failed us!’ That is Mr Coomaraswami. Well, the Empire will one day be gone like the Mughal Empire before it, and only their monuments remain—the visions of Shah Jahan!—of Sir Edwin Lutyens!

FLORA ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

DAS (Delighted) Oh yes! Finally like the empire of Ozymandias! Entirely forgotten except in a poem by an English poet. You see how privileged we are, Miss Crewe. Only in art can empires cheat oblivion, because only the artist can say, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

FLORA I just didn’t like you thinking English was better because it was English. Can’t you paint me without thinking of Rossetti or Millais? Especially without thinking of Holman Hunt. Did you consider my question?