‘I’ve brought you a book,’ I said. ‘I thought you may like it?’ I now produced my treasure from behind the newspapers I’d carried with me.

‘Oh yes. I know the book,’ he remarked, after taking it from me.

‘Perhaps you’d like to read it again.’

‘My French is not so good. I’ve read the book in English. My daughter is at school in Switzerland. She speaks fluent French.’

‘There’s a saying of Confucius,’ I said following my own argument. ‘It says: “That kingdom is well ruled where a false note will topple the throne.”’

‘Yes, that’s true, that’s very true.’

‘Only a Bodhisattva can rule,’ I murmured.

‘What?’ He was almost angry. Then he shook the ashes off his cigarette, and with infinite compassion added, ‘We’ve no time. History does not wait for us.’

‘Who made history?’ I asked. ‘The Buddha or—’

‘Bimbisara.8 But—’

‘And now,’ I went on, ‘the moderates or Mahatma Gandhi?’

‘Well, well.’

‘Do you know Krishnamurti?’ I abruptly asked.

He looked away for a moment, as if he were contemplating the birds outside on the lawn and a gash of pitch-black depth in the clouds that seemed apocalyptic.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said in fierce affirmation. ‘He would like us to blossom out as flowers.’9 He stuck his palms up and folded his fingers into bulbous shapes.

‘But he and you,’ I broke in.

‘Yes, he and I?’

‘He and you can make . . .’

‘What?’

‘An Asokan Empire.’

He fell into himself, his half-closed eyes looking into an edgeless nowhere. Man’s cognitations are but the frontier posts of his awareness. When thought reels, you fall back into your poetry and sail an emperor of all the seas.

We came into the drawing room.

‘What time is your train?’ he asked.

‘I think there’s one in the evening,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ He stood thoughtful, almost vacant for a moment.

‘We’ll go to the sanatorium, up the hill, for a cup of tea. We’ll have tea with my wife. Meanwhile, have you anything to read?’

‘This book: Sur les Traces du Boudha.’

‘At three o’clock I’ll come down,’ he added as he went up the staircase. Obviously he was going to work on his manuscript.

The afternoon tea was a highly articulated ritual. Pandit Nehru prepared the tea. Then he made the toast. As he brought a plate of this and I tried to take a piece (for he’d given me a plate with a napkin and a dainty toast fork) my hands trembled and my piece of toast fell on the floor. I was just overwhelmed with such ancient courtesy. Kamala Nehru lay on her hospital bed with radiant naturalness. It was as if I’d known them always. We spoke of France, of India.

‘He speaks Urdu, you know,’ Panditji boasted. ‘Yes, for a South Indian!’

‘True,’ I said, ‘but please remember it’s Deccani Urdu.’

‘Well, well.’ He laughed commiseratingly.