Certainly somewhere in history there are the prototypes of these horses, in Palaeolithic times perhaps. Because everywhere one sees these horses, leaping into the air, to remind us that we do not truly belong to this earth. The daughter-in-law will have her child. The harvests will come; the rains will fall and allow us to irrigate the earth. The gods give us everything, but we are strangers to this earth. Man is born a stranger to himself. ‘Do you think,’ asks Malraux, ‘that these women understand it all?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘but they know. We even send our children to sleep singing: Remember, O child, in deep sleep, in waking and in dream, you are your Self. You are the Changeless where all things change.’

‘What were your feelings in the Madurai temple?’ asks André Malraux.

‘I knew that the temple was fabulous, the gods philanthropic, the gopurams transcendent. Nevertheless there is something that we miss, something escapes us all the time. The temple points to the inconceivable, the supreme “I”. Even in our prayers we say: “Lord, I place myself there in thine image, and I adore thee, my God who is but myself.”’

‘Yes,’ says Malraux, ‘that is what makes it so strange being in India—there is always something that escapes us, and all the time. It is this and yet not quite this . . .’

‘That is why,’ I answered, ‘Hindus can live at ease amid such phantasies: When nothing has reality, all things are possible.’

‘That is true,’ says Malraux. ‘In the temple of Madurai, I was reminded all the time of the words of Rimbaud: Je devins un opéra fabuleux.1 ‘Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘it’s bewildering. Remember that Goddess Kali, enormous and blood-red with the skulls of her devotees around her waist, looking down with such terrifying benevolence at the world which she protects from every malady. One does not die in India, because one has killed death.’

When one has killed death, one dances; one dances in the crematorium. Under the Indian sun the world seems to be seen through the smoke of crematoria. Cremation kills no man; freed from bondage of the body, the anima dances, describing the movement of liberty, which is dance. The world seen in freedom is exactly as the vision of this road that goes from Madurai to Coimbatore, and which rises, surpassing itself at every turn, climbing hill after hill, to be lost in the illimitable. Only the dust in the sunlight reminds us that we are moving. Movement is always a going from oneself to something else. When movement is from oneself to the Self, one dances.

‘Our Lord is a dancer who lights the fire in matter, and makes it dance in its turn.’

Ellora and Ajanta