Suddenly he appeared, Panditji did. He wore a light overcoat and felt hat, was rounder than I had imagined, and less tall. His lower left lip twitched and twitched again and made enchantment for anyone sensitive (as Panditji’s twitches spoke), and when he removed his hat the bald head was a shock. (I had imagined him with long locks of hair, curling and covering his elongated lobes like the Gandharan image of Gautama, the Buddha, from Hadda, at the Musee Guimet in Paris.) 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?

Panditji went up to his room quickly (he went to leave the manuscript of his autobiography, which he was then correcting) and came down, his passport in hand.

‘Let’s go to the bank first, and we’ll have our lunch afterward,’ he said. ‘Is that all right with you?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. Then I blurted, ‘You know, I am a vegetarian.’

‘Of course, of course,’ he remarked, and with one smile, so pure, so full, so shy, so all-feeling, he took me twenty-five centuries earlier—at last I’d reached Kapilavastu:

But the Future Buddha in his splendid chariot entered the city with a pomp and magnificence of glory that enraptured all minds. At the same moment Kisa Gotami ascended to the roof of her palace, and beheld the beauty and majesty of the Future Buddha, as he circumambulated the city; and in her pleasure and satisfaction at the sight, she burst forth into this song of joy:

Full happy now that mother is,

Full happy now that father is,

Full happy now that woman is,

Who owns his Lord so glorious.4

Now I remembered my 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, as if speaking to himself, and angry with me, with himself, and with the whole wide world around him. And suddenly we slipped back into our awakened silences, and so on to the indefinite definition of India.

We walked again on the ridges of Kapilavastu:

From Kapilavastu to the city of Devadaha he [the King Suddhodana] had the road made even, and garnished it with plantain-trees set in pots and with banners and streamers . . . Now between the two cities . . . was a pleasure grove of sal trees, called Lumbini Grove.5