Two or three days later I came to the Luxembourg. Pierrot was not there. Again and again, I came. Pierrot was not there. Towards the end of the month, he came and with a new nanny—middle-aged. And when he saw me, he ran towards me and said: ‘Monsieur . . . Monsieur le Prince,’ and leaped straight into my arms. He was very fond of his new navy suit. It had golden buttons that shone in one’s eyes. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Look, faces!’ and he laughed. He seemed to have grown in years. ‘I know now,’ he said. ‘I am now a big, big, Raja. Look! I ride the elephant. The wedding is over.’

3

My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal

It was so very long ago. I was very young then. I used to dream of Bodhisattvas. Living in a northern French town endowed with fog, greed, and ruins (and chapped human faces and a botched cathedral), I used to go up every afternoon, come rain, come hailstorm (for so rarely was the sun seen), and rush up the only hill there, nobly called La Montagne de Paris, that rose three hundred feet or so above the flat, brown, beetroot earth (with its long alley of tall, ashen plane trees, the tucked-in hamlet, the workless horse, the barking dog), and once on the top and beside the only tree up there that the war had not destroyed (as all this was a battlefield for four long years, the French on its ridge and the Germans across the river on the other, and shells and gas masks strewed the forests and clearings, as cemeteries with black wooden crosses for the Germans and white marble ones for the French and the Allies covered the hillsides)—going back and forth on that ridge, and touching my vestal tree with prayer, with anguish, I would await the sun. The sun rarely came (about four or five times the whole winter), but sometimes a vague hemisphere brightened amidst the clouds and there was such happiness.

Kridanto rasma abhuvah sam bhasmana vayuna veidanah

O Ray, mayst thou be with us and play with us

Unifying thy knowledge with the shining of the breath of life.1

I used in those days to read a great many books on Buddhism. Little by little the face of the sun transfigured the descent of the Bodhisattva, and when Jawaharlal was announced in Europe, I knew he was there. How could anyone, except an Indian, know the secret historicity of his presence? Lord, how great be thy gifts to Hitlerite, Stalinistic, suffering mankind. The broken chapels and abbeys (with gashed saints and the sky showing under miracle-held architraves) seemed to acknowledge this subsumed light. Their members purpled into remembered significance, and then the clouds gathered again.