‘Yes, I have often thought, Gandhi before Clive would be like Alexander before Porus. Europe,’ continued Malraux, smoking away, and following his smoke, ‘Europe, I said, is a cemetery. That is true. Look at Goya.’

‘If Europe is Goya,’ picked up Nehru, after a moment of deliberation, ‘what then Monsieur Malraux is . . . is my country, India?’

‘India is Ajanta,’ shot back Malraux, with a delighted childlike smile, ‘Ajanta, where Shiva is the dancer of the crematorium, and the Buddha starts his compassion on the other side, with a lotus in hand, and looking down on our poor humanity with a blue benignance. That, sir, is why Europe is enamoured of the Buddha, and has so little understanding of Shiva.’

‘Yes,’ interrupted Nehru coming back to himself slowly—the prison was gently fading—‘but there is Rodin.’

‘Yes, and there is also Picasso,’ smiled Malraux between his whiffs. ‘But Picasso might have to live another life for his supreme vision of Shiva. To understand Shiva one has to meditate and not act. The Western man can invent any manner of action. That is why for the early Buddhists, the Buddha was symbolized by his Two Feet—the Two Feet of the Acharya—the guru. The Greeks brought in their St Sulpicien sculpture and gave the Buddha of the Lahore museum, his moustache and his coiffeure of Apollo. The Western man can only live in duality,’ said Malraux and went into a deep indelible silence.

The restaurant was emptying out. The waiters were cleaning up the tables. There was activity on the Boulevard St Michel, the buses were making the proper noises, and students were teasing someone or the other. The world was alive—but André Malraux was not there. He was with his Buddha. It was a moment of recognition for Panditji. Here indeed is the man he had read about as a hero, a man who upheld violence—indeed violence in modern literature seemed invented by him in his Condition Humaine, but here was the other side of this strange creature. He could die into his silence, and stop playing mischief with himself. He could be true.

‘I was thinking,’ Malraux began, ‘I was thinking of a princess or queen of some sort, in Egypt, her eyes shining through the water of a well, someone so dead but she was absolutely alive, as only the Egyptians can make one believe. She belonged to the twenty-second dynasty, if I remember right, and she lay there, in this deep fountain, in Nubia. That was death to us, but not to her. She wanted to live for ever, and for some unknown reason, her eyes glowed. Indeed like Parvathi’s. Shiva had conquered her death. How could a wife to Shiva die?’

‘Why not?’ asked Panditji, somewhat angrily.