Though Goddess Lakshmi was very generous to us in Hyderabad and the school kind (for the children of Hyderabad nawabs were well groomed and intriguing, but not really interested in studies—there was too much palace gossip to be serious with books and teachers), I developed some chest trouble, and the doctors asked me to go back to my home mountains, where I went, and this time to my sister, to that hallowed place of pilgrimage, Nanjangud, on the river Kapila—I lived just behind the temple, among priestly Brahmins, I, a student of Durand (who taught us Prisoner of Zenda) and Burnet, who, later, taught us Aristotle. And such the play of karma that in the Mysore city library, which still stands there, yellow, bright yellow and long—I discovered (in the Indian Who’s Who) the address of an English friend of our families, Eric Dickinson, a minor poet, and from Oxford, who taught English at Aligarh, and had come to India because he was a good friend of my cousin Shama Rao (a theosophical discovery of Mrs Annie Besant, this cousin an adept from the apostle to be). Shama Rao went to Oxford to study, but died there of the Spanish flu. Thus from Oxford, Dickinson, in memory of Shama Rao, came a pilgrim to India, and I having started to write, naturally, to him I sent my first piece. But since the doctor again advised I should go as far away as possible from the sea, and also because I was interested in writing, my karma, or certainly more august forces, took me to Aligarh and to the Muslim University. There I was once more a student in an Islamic institution (my karma had certainly something to do with my Muslim connections), and here it was from Dickinson I first heard of Arles and Avignon, of Michelangelo and of Santayana. Poor Mr Burnet must have known only Kent (from where he came, I think) and Oxford, and maybe he’d seen Flanders during those terrible War Years (1914–18) though I never really knew. Jack Hill from Oxford taught me French in Aligarh—we were both staying with Dickinson—and later when I went back to Hyderabad, I continued to be involved with literature till one day, a letter came in a blue envelope (I still remember) from Sir Patrick Geddes, who said he had established an international college at Montpellier, and since he liked what little he’d seen of my writing, ‘So why not come?’ The Government of Hyderabad and good Burnet were duly impressed with this exalted invitation, and as such with their blessings and money, straight I went to Montpellier, that ancient Greek and Saracenic town, so close to Sète where Valéry was born, and Béziers where there are still charred walls (so they said) at the place the Albigensians were burnt by the Pope’s helots.