So there was the lunch, the thickening of outside air, the hushed temper of a pension where the parents and friends of the sick stay visiting those at the sanatoria. There’s always a line of fear among them, of unacknowledged darkness, as if death were not an inexplicable usherance from what was to what is not; death becomes an iron-helmeted visitor, walking amidst tables, behind doors, and beyond in the gaunt countryside. But we were high up, in the nowhere which is India.

‘You certainly believe in something, Panditji? In some form of Deity, in philosophy?’

‘Deity, what Deity?’ He twitched angrily.

‘Why Siva and Parvati, Sri Krishna!’

‘Three thousand years of that and where’s that got us—slavery, poverty.’

‘And incomparable splendour, even today.’

‘What, with twenty-two-and-a-half years of life expectancy and five pice per person per day of national income? 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.’

‘Yes, and after that?’ I asked, as if to myself, somewhat timidly.

He seemed angry, ‘Now, now, don’t make me say this matter is matter,’ he said, touching the table. He was trying very hard to cut meat. Obviously the knife was in need of care or Panditji was not overdextrous with his hands.

‘No, Panditji, I know you won’t.’ I was winning the battle.

‘I am not such a fool. I won’t. I also have my private philosophy.’

He was silent for a while. And I did not say anything. ‘Of course,’ he continued, leaving the meat to its fate, ‘of course there’s something else. All this sun and moon and earth and galaxies, they don’t hang about in some chaotic universe. You probably do not know, I studied the natural sciences at Cambridge.’

‘No, I did not,’ I said. But he did not hear me.

‘There’s an intelligence about the world. There’s harmony. I am convinced we’re linked to that harmony. Individually linked,’ he added with deliberation, and merged into such sorrowfulness that the earth seemed lighter with his pain.

‘So God is mathematical.’

‘Well, perhaps. Why worry? And man is not just a . . .’

‘Just what? . . .’

‘A biological phenomenon.’

‘A creature of the “eighteen aggregates”.’

‘Yes, Buddhism comes quite near it; that is, there is something which must be, and which connects and sustains.’

‘But that’s Vedanta,’ I interrupted. ‘The Buddha was a phenomenologist. Beyond manifestation, the void.’

The meat by now had become cold. So had my spinach.

‘Go where you will,’ he said slowly, and with a deep wealth of rising sensibility, ‘man is not a creature of accident. Nor are his apprehensions gratuitous. Man is a whole and he belongs to . . . to, well let’s say a universal harmony.’

He lit a cigarette. The coffee had come.