DILIP You have to understand that begging is a profession. Like dentistry. Like shining shoes. It’s a service. Every so often, you need to get a tooth filled, or your shoes shined, or to give alms. So when a beggar presents himself to you, you have to ask yourself—do I need a beggar today? If you do, give him alms. If you don’t, don’t. You have beggars in America.

PIKE We have bums, winos, people down on their luck … it’s not a service, for God’s sake.

DILIP Ah well, we are in a higher stage of development.

PIKE Is that Hinduism, Dilip?

DILIP (Kindly) It was a witticism, Eldon.

PIKE Oh … right.

DILIP One can see why the Theosophical Society transplanted itself from America. (With his drink) Let’s drink to Madame Blavatsky.

PIKE Who’s she?

DILIP What? Don’t you know ‘Bagpipe Music’?

PIKE Oh … (yeah).

DILIP ‘It’s no go the yogi man, it’s no go Blavatsky …’

PIKE MacNeice, right.

DILIP Madame Blavatsky was a famous name in India, she was the Theosophical Society. Of course, she was long dead by 1930, and now long forgotten, except in my favourite poem in the Oxford Book of English Verse.

PIKE Why are you so crazy about English, Dilip?

DILIP I’m not!

PIKE You love it!

DILIP Yes, I do. I love it.

PIKE Yes. You do.

DILIP (Cheerfully) Yes, it’s a disaster for us! Fifty years of Independence and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must be worn! English-model public schools for the children of the elite, and the voice of Bush House is heard in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think. Only, this time he’d die. It was not for this India, I think, that your Nirad Das and his friends held up their home-made banner at the Empire Day gymkhana. It was not for this that he threw his mango at the Resident’s car. What a pity, though, that all his revolutionary spirit went into his life and none into his art.

PIKE Do you think he had a relationship with Flora Crewe?

DILIP But of course—a portrait is a relationship.

PIKE No, a relationship.

DILIP I don’t understand you.

PIKE He painted her nude.

DILIP I don’t think so.

PIKE Somebody did.

DILIP In 1930, an Englishwoman, an Indian painter … it is out of the question.

PIKE Not if they had a relationship.

DILIP Oh … a relationship? Is that what you say? (Amused) A relationship!

PIKE This is serious.

DILIP (Laughing) Oh, it’s very serious. What do you say for—well, for ‘relationship’?

PIKE Buddies. (Dilip almost falls off his chair with merriment.) Please, Dilip …

DILIP (Recovering) Well, we will never know. You are constructing an edifice of speculation on a smudge of paint on paper, which no longer exists.

PIKE It must exist—look how far I’ve come to find it.

DILIP Oh, very Indian! Well, if so, there are two ways to proceed. First, you can go around Jummapur looking at every piece of paper you come to. Second, you can stand in one place and look at every piece of paper that comes to you.