Coming from Paris one day, I wrote to Forster: ‘I am in London. I would so much like to see you if you have a moment to spare. I have not been very well lately. But I think in a few days I could come to Cambridge. May I?’ Forster wrote to say he was already in London, and because I did not feel well, he would stay a day more. If four o’clock and a cup of tea would suit me, he would be delighted to see me. But, he added, do not bother to send a reply. He would just wait for me anyway at the Reform Club.

Exactly at four o’clock Forster came to the door. He had been sitting in the lounge waiting for me.

‘Why did you take the trouble to send a reply?’ he asked as we went up the steps. ‘I would have waited for you anyway.’

‘But if I could not have come?’

‘Well, I would have taken my cup of tea, and then I would have taken my first train back to Cambridge. But, tell me, how are you?’

‘I feel much better, thank you. And you? The last time I saw you, you were leaning against a walking stick.’

‘Oh, that was nothing,’ he waved it away with his hands. ‘I am not a young man, you know.’

‘And I had come to invite you to India. You had said to me, years ago, how much you regretted not having seen south India.’

‘But look at me. I am too old for it all now.’

‘I will make it as if you were still in Cambridge—I mean your stay in Trivandrum.’

‘But I have still to get to Trivandrum.’

‘And you will, perhaps, find there what you always wanted to know—to know,’ I continued.

‘You mean . . .?’ I had gone too far for Forster.

‘Because wisdom sometimes uncovers itself,’ I digressed, and he fell into an audible silence. He knew what he knew, and his awareness seemed to have touched a reference, a pointless point, as it were, and his knowledge then seemed to know itself known. For a moment he seemed to have gone on a long, long journey.

‘Come,’ I said.

‘Not in this life.’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps in another. And now tell me, am I not a Hindu?’ Such metaphysical politeness is indeed the natural gesture of a saint.

Once on the street, he did not allow me to carry his little suitcase. Younger I was, true, but ill. So I could not. And we slowly walked up to Piccadilly, he measuring his pace to suit my breath. He was going to take his seven-thirty train. He looked at his watch. ‘I am not walking too fast for you, am I? Not too tired?’

‘No, thank you. I feel so much better.’