The I of Malraux was big, high, impeccable, in gesture, language or dress, with such passion in his eyes, for the abstract, the invisible—for the real Revolution. He wrote to me later, asking if one should not die for Bangladesh, and he shouted and geared France for intervention, and he wanted to die on the Indian side, but India would not have him, alas. His love of Revolution was spiritual, a love of pure greatness. It took him through so many mythic adventures—adventures in Indo-China against French domination, when the French arrested him saying he was stealing archaeological artefacts, and where he almost got himself killed; involvement in the Chinese Revolution, where he met young Mao (1926); adventures in Germany arguing with Hitler for the freedom of Dimitrov, then jumping over to Soviet Russia and addressing writers from all over the world in Moscow for the freedom of man (and this under Stalin!); and finally, after mixing up mythology and adventure, high adventure, going in a small plane over unknown Arabia, to discover the lost kingdom of the queen of Sheba, heaped up by the millennia of high-blown sands of Yemen, where if he had touched the ground, he would have been killed, maybe, by the Bedouins, but later that same great adventure made him fight in Spain with the Republicans against the Fascists: he had his own squadron of fighters, international ones, fearless, and defending the revolutionaries of Spain not only against Franco but against Stalin as well, his adventure finally ending during the Second World War, in his joining the Resistance in France against Hitler, and when caught, and asked who he was, he said proudly, ‘I am André Malraux.’ He was psychologically tortured with sham executions perhaps, but not shot. Such was the man Panditji met in Paris, in January 1936. And this is how it happened.

I was living at that time in a small town, though an ancient capital of the Merovingians, called Soissons. Soissons was about a hundred kilometres from Paris. I had met Panditji for the first time in Badenweiler (in the Black Forest, Germany) some months earlier, and with his usual courtesy he had informed me, he was finally able to come to Paris for a few days, and that he would be happy to see me, if I had time. His handwriting was always so delicate, it was delicate as a woman’s but firm in its t’s and I’s. And r’s. People in India forget today the glory of India we carried in our hearts—we, who for one reason or the other, were away from India. India was a goddess, like Sita, and prisoner of Ravana again and again, and Pandit Nehru was not like Sri Rama, but rather like Bharatha, because Gandhiji was Sri Rama of course, and so for us, Bharatha, the great sage-hero’s loyal younger brother. How shall we ever forget that? We never shall.