Panditji came to the door, and with quick gestures of hand showed me the twists of the road and the far footpaths, down to there, somewhere where the railway winds its way through the sentinel forests. It was all like a Wagnerian opera set in the Himalayan Terai.

‘I hope it will not rain,’ he said.

‘The air is so crisp.’

‘Take care.’

There’s a precipitation of air that seems like a chthonic dilemma. Man is not to be measured in terms of his height but in the stature of his resurgence. He is ever the victor. The world encloses one from every side, and the crisp air becomes dense, the earth swellsome, esurient. The ambiguity of the human condition shatters itself into a sort of perpendicular silence. The very trees are males in an apocalyptic pause. Of a sudden the air becomes vacuous with inward sighs and retributions. White flakes of snow fall one after the other, like feathers in a dream. They touch your hair, your limbs, your face, and all the world is touched. (They even penetrate into your perforated shoes.) A white world descends on a dark forest, and birds begin to clamour, to call, to babble in settling discomfort. The skies have resurrected the earth, and all the world is magical white.

‘Whose marriage is it?’ you ask yourself.

Astyuttarasyam disi devatatma

Himalayo nama Nagadhirajah

Purvaparau toyanidhi vagahya

Sthitah prithivyah iva manadandah

(There’s in the northern sphere, of the very essence divine,

The Himalaya, emperor of mountains,

Dipping into the eastern and western oceans,

Ever a measuring rod for the earth.)

I have never, never seen such a snowfall again.

4

When Malraux Meets Jawaharlal Nehru