The ancestors of Lincoln must have been like those of E.M. Forster’s, elders of a race, possessing the treasure of silence that rounds the English tongue, the veneration of laws, the awareness of man as noble connection. Thus, when one does not lay the foundation of a state—or help a maharaja to run a state—one writes a book, and shows that the crooked line is but a series of points, where each point but arises and sinks back into innocence. ‘I want my letters to you to be absolutely genuine,’ wrote the maharaja. ‘I mean letters written as I think in my mind at once. When there is another person like a clerk sitting near one, one always ponders a little and then dictates so as to avoid mistakes, etc. Then I think the letter is not quite genuine, though the thoughts are, but words and style are not.’ And Forster comments: ‘Genuineness is achieved’ (The Hill of Devi).

E.M. Forster does not want a statue, but infectious laughter and a corner of silence in a friend’s heart. He wrote in The Hill of Devi: ‘One of the puzzling things about the dead is that it is impossible to think of them evenly. They all go out of sight and are forgotten, they all go into silence, yet we cannot help assigning some of them a tune.’ Man is born but once, let us not kill him (even for the sake of the Union!), but let us be gentlemen of the intellect. States more often than not are stupid. Friends never. Forster says: ‘Most of those whom I have known leave no sound behind them; I cannot evoke them though I would like to. He [the maharaja] had the rare quality of evoking himself, and I do not believe that he is here doing it for the last time’ (The Hill of Devi).

One day in my house ar Trivandrum, in the state of Travancore, amidst the coconut palms, the jasmines, and the squirrels (the squirrels of India are smaller than those in Maryland, more grey, and with white marks of Sri Rama’s hands on them), I received a postcard. It was from Raymond Mortimer and E.M. Forster. They were thinking of me, they were talking of me; therefore, they sent me their friendly greetings. Distance is only fiction. One is never far when one is a friend of Forster’s. He had once said he wanted to come to India and spend some time with me. So here, I wrote to him, was my house, the magnificence of Malabar, and Indian wisdom, the purest, the highest, if only he wanted to go up the steps, across the road, to where the whereness would be dissolved.