‘How happy I am to hear you say so,’ said Forster with deep emotion. ‘You know, nobody seems to have guessed what the book is about. Yes, my friend was a sort of saint. Who would understand that?’

‘Dostoevsky,’ I replied, ‘and the real Indians.’

‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘You remember I speak of Dostoevsky in the book. In fact, I speak of the wicked woman and the onion. “She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed—given an onion to a beggar.” But what an effect it had among the intellectuals of Dewas. “That’s Bhakti,” they cried. The Russian story touched them where no English anecdote ever moved them.’

‘There’s after all,’ I added, something of the Mitya Karamazov about your Bapu Sahib, the maharaja.’

‘And an Alyosha,’ affirmed Forster quickly in defence of his friend.

‘I thought—’ I hesitated. ‘I thought your friend was Mitya, and that Alyosha was, let us say, E.M. Forster. And then there’s the onion.’

‘What about some more fruit juice?’ he asked, rising, and he went to his kitchenette. I walked behind him, out of respect, and watched him open the refrigerator with quiet, awkward gestures and pour me another glass of orange juice.

‘And hurrah to Kolya,’ I laughed at myself.

‘Three cheers to India.’

Drinks and words and laughter seemed not three ways of saying something, but three ways of being silent. Every movement dropped back into itself and dissolved into silence, leaving not an emptiness or an intellectual perception but something more intimate, more personal, a solitude in which nothing ever happened because the nameless remained unnamed. Sanskrit poetry then seemed to me not an alien element in Cambridge; it was more as if Forster had spoken in it and I had replied in his tongue. A dialogue is true only when you speak for the other. One never has to speak for oneself. Is there a cow? I ask.

The silence of the yard at King’s College, with the Cam behind the chapel, seemed to me made of magic vocabulary. Forster’s window opened on this yard of green grass. Centuries of intelligence have made this monocotyledonous mutation. Are we sure plants do not change genetically with our moods, with our thoughts? Have you ever seen such literary trees as in Cambridge? It’s man who makes his tree.

In spite of his swollen feet, he came with me to the steps. The quadrangle of the yard, the chapel of King’s College, had such measurements of wisdom. The true word pronounced, the real kingship understood; it’s all to the glory of the One. ‘Christ is arisen, Christ is arisen,’ the characters of Dostoevsky often say, speaking of the days after Easter. For Forster the truth is resuscitated when man is understood.