‘There was probably more green grass in Delhi than in Dewas. That reminds me. Have you met Prabhavathi Raje, the daughter of a dear friend?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and what a gifted woman. She speaks English as if it were Sanskrit and talks of politics as if it were poetry.’

‘Then she’s no politician.’ He smiled. ‘She was such a gifted child. Give my greetings to her if you meet her, will you?’

‘Ultimately,’ I said, ‘we all belong to the cowless world. There’s—you know, in the famous Vishnu Purana—do you know it?’

‘Alas, no.’

‘In the Vishnu Purana there’s such a beautiful description of the beginning of creation. First there was nothing. Then came the waters and out of it rose the first cow. So the first thing as thing was indeed the cow.’

‘Go on.’

‘So when there’s no cow, there’s no world,’ I continued.

‘To go back to the cowless world, therefore, is the very nature of man, of experience.’

‘I missed the point in India,’ he said, somewhat sorrowful.

‘No,’ I said, ‘your heart knew what the Indians themselves did not always remember: India is indeed the cowless land. Your friend Lowes Dickinson did not miss the point either. He thought he had—he had searched for a Platonic world in India.’

‘The gods had too many hands.’ Forster made multiple movements with his fingers.

‘The shadow in the cave,’ I continued, ‘produces long limbs. I admit. The question however is: Who or what knows the shadow. He has no limbs. Is he then a prisoner? No. He is free. That’s all the difference. One step deeper than Plato.’

‘Is the cowless—is India.’

Many years later I returned to Cambridge. A book in hand, I walked up to the French restaurant that is opposite to the chapel of King’s College. The book was the Brihad-stotra-ratnakara, a famous Sanskrit anthology. I opened at random and read:

Mano nivrithih paromopa shanthih

sa tirtha varya manikarnikacha . . .

The cessation of mental contextures, the sovereign peace

That holiest of holy pilgrimages.

The (ghats) of Manikarnika (in me).

The flow of knowledge the true Ganges

I am he of Benares, the (formless) form of Pure Consciousness.

The lines of Sankara explained the texture of the Gothic. King’s chapel was a dialectic of concomitant sound rounded into affirmation, and then rising straight into one pure unfinished note. Coming out of my Vedantic meditations on the Gothic, I walked down the road and met Forster. He was leaning heavily on a walking stick; he had hurt his feet badly. Yet he always had the smile of an Elder welcoming you to a monastery. I was going to have a drink with him that evening.