Such innocence, such anticipation! A contemporary reader would be taken aback. But Rao’s fertile imagination is informed by the urge and belief to replicate the archetypal ideal Indian state. Call it ‘Ram Rajya’, to use Mahatma Gandhi’s phrase for it. No wonder, unlike Khilnani, Rao has more than two telling chapters on Gandhi in The Meaning of India.

Thinking of Nehru, rather wistfully if not wishfully, Rao hopes and prays, ‘What a great thing it would be for India and the world . . . if Panditji were to declare: “Yes, of course, friend, this be my path. This, the sure, trodden, ancient way. The eightfold path to the knowledge of the root of bondage and freedom from sorrowings.”’ (26) But it would seem that Rao is fated to be disappointed. Nehru is quite unlike Rao’s image of him:

His quick gestures, his sudden solipsisms, silences, his radiant recognitions, were not of any Jataka text. I was taken aback, having almost reeled into the contemporaneity of the world. I felt lost. Why had I come? Where had I come?

(26)

There is also a slightly disconcerting exchange over the Evian bottles:

‘Here are the Evians you asked for,’ I said.

‘How much did you pay for them?’ he asked, taking them and leaving them with the cashier.

‘Oh, Panditji, for God’s sake!’ I begged.

‘For God’s sake what?’ he queried nervously.

‘I’m an Indian,’ I said.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he remarked with indifferent irritation. He didn’t know about my Kapilavastu.

‘Well, we’re not a nation of shopkeepers,’ I said. ‘That’s not the way I was brought up.’

‘We live in the world of today,’ he said . . .

(27–28)

Then Nehru, the supreme modernizer, as if to disabuse young Raja’s extreme Indophilia, declares:

We’ve had enough of Rama and Krishna. Not that I do not admire these great figures of our traditions, but there’s work to be done. And not to clasp hands before idols while misery and slavery beleaguer us.

(31)

Rao, though slightly shaken from his idealized conception of Nehru, doesn’t entirely give up on his dream. What follows this initial shock of partial disillusionment, however, is sheer magic. The old Kapilavastu appears—and disappears—as the two banter. Nehru wants some of Rao’s ample shock of hair. When the latter says he will happily surrender it, Nehru wonders, ‘But how will it stick?’ (29)

Kamala Nehru also appears, albeit briefly, as a luminous presence, as she ‘lay on her hospital bed with radiant naturalness’ (34). To Rao,

She seemed so like a figure from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata—simple, wise, dedicated, timeless. To her, acceptance seemed the very breath of beauty. She lay unafraid of the darkness of the clouds, the solitude of the hills, the cruelty of Hitlerite mankind.

(36)

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