Will Farnaby had made his own breakfast and, when Dr Robert returned from his early morning visit to the hospital, was drinking his second cup of Palanese tea and eating toasted breadfruit with pumelo marmalade.

“Not too much pain in the night,” was Dr Robert’s response to his enquiries. “Lakshmi had four or five hours of good sleep, and this morning she was able to take some broth.”

They could look forward, he continued, to another day of respite. And so, since it tired the patient to have him there all the time, and since life, after all, had to go on and be made the best of, he had decided to drive up to the High Altitude Station and put in a few hours work on the research team in the pharmaceutical laboratory.

“Work on the moksha -medicine?”

Dr Robert shook his head. “That’s just a matter of repeating a standard operation—something for technicians, not for the researchers. They’re busy with something new.”

And he began to talk about the indoles recently isolated from the ololiuqui seeds that had been brought in from Mexico last year and were now being grown in the Station’s botanic garden. At least three different indoles, of which one seemed to be extremely potent. Animal experiments indicated that it affected the reticular system. . . .

Left to himself, Will sat down under the overhead fan and went on with his reading of the Notes on What’s What .

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

In Pala, after three generations of Reform, there are no sheeplike flocks and no ecclesiastical Good Shepherds to shear and castrate; there are no bovine or swinish herds and no licensed drovers, royal or military, capitalistic or revolutionary, to brand, confine and butcher. There are only voluntary associations of men and women on the road to full humanity.

Tunes or pebbles, processes or substantial things? ‘Tunes’, answer Buddhism and modern science. ‘Pebbles’, say the classical philosophers of the West. Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music. The image that comes to mind when one reads the philosophers of the West, is a figure in a Byzantine mosaic, rigid, symmetrical, made up of millions of little squares of some stony material and firmly cemented to the walls of a windowless basilica.

The dancer’s grace and, forty years on, her arthritis—both are functions of the skeleton. It is thanks to an inflexible framework of bones that the girl is able to do her pirouettes, thanks to the same bones, grown a little rusty, that the grandmother is condemned to a wheel chair. Analogously, the firm support of a culture is the prime condition of all individual originality and creativeness; it is also their principal enemy. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into complete human beings is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing.

A century of research on the moksha -medicine has clearly shown that quite ordinary people are perfectly capable of having visionary or even fully liberating experiences. In this respect the men and women who make and enjoy high culture are no better off than the low-brows. High experience is perfectly compatible with low symbolic expression. The expressive symbols created by Palanese artists are no better than the expressive symbols created by artists elsewhere. Being the products of happiness and a sense of fulfilment, they are probably less moving, perhaps less satisfying aesthetically, than the tragic or compensatory symbols created by victims of frustration and ignorance, of tyranny, war and guilt-fostering crime-inciting superstitions. Palanese superiority does not lie in symbolic expression but in an art which, though higher and far more valuable than all the rest, can yet be practised by everyone—the art of adequately experiencing, the art of becoming more intimately acquainted with all the worlds that, as human beings, we find ourselves inhabiting. Palanese culture is not to be judged as (for lack of any better criterion) we judge other cultures. It is not to be judged by the accomplishments of a few gifted manipulators of artistic or philosophical symbols. No, it is to be judged by what all the members of the community, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, can and do experience in every contingency and at each successive intersection of time with eternity.

The telephone bell had started to ring. Should he let it ring, or would it be better to answer and let the caller know that Dr Robert was out for the day? Deciding on the second course, Will lifted the receiver.

“Dr MacPhail’s bungalow,” he said, in a parody of secretarial efficiency. “But the doctor is out for the day.”

“ Tant mieux ,” said the rich royal voice at the other end of the wire. “How are you, mon cher Farnaby?”

Taken aback, Will stammered out his thanks for Her Highness’s gracious enquiry.

“So they took you,” said the Rani, “to see one of their so-called initiations yesterday afternoon.”

Will had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to respond with a neutral word and in the most non-committal of tones. “It was most remarkable,” he said.

“Remarkable,” said the Rani, dwelling emphatically on the spoken equivalents of pejorative and laudatory capital letters, “but only as the Blasphemous Caricature of TRUE Initiation. They’ve never learned to make the elementary distinction between the Natural Order and the Supernatural.”

“Quite,” Will murmured, “Quite . . .”

“What did you say?” the voice at the other end of the line demanded.

“Quite,” Will repeated more loudly.

“I’m glad you agree. But I didn’t call you,” the Rani went on, “to discuss the difference between the Natural and the Supernatural—Supremely Important as that difference is. No, I called you about a more urgent matter.”

“Oil?”

“Oil,” she confirmed. “I’ve just received a very disquieting communication from my Personal Representative in Rendang. Very Highly Placed,” she added parenthetically, “and invariably Well Informed.”

Will found himself wondering which of all those sleek and much be-medalled guests at the Foreign Office cocktail party had double-crossed his fellow double-crossers—himself, of course, included.

“Within the last few days,” the Rani went on, “representatives of no less than three Major Oil Companies, European and American, have flown into Rendang-Lobo. My informant tells me that they’re already working on the four or five Key Figures in the Administration who might, at some future date, be influential in deciding who is to get the concession for Pala.”

Will clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

Considerable sums, she hinted, had been, if not directly offered, at least named and temptingly dangled.

“Nefarious,” he commented.

Nefarious, the Rani agreed, was the word. And that was why Something must be Done About It, and Done Immediately. From Bahu she had learned that Will had already written to Lord Aldehyde, and within a few days a reply would doubtless be forthcoming. But a few days were too long. Time was of the essence—not only because of what those rival companies were up to, but also (and the Rani lowered her voice mysteriously) for Other Reasons. ‘Now, now!’ her Little Voice kept exhorting. ‘Now, without delay!’ Lord Aldehyde must be informed by cable of what was happening (the faithful Bahu, she added parenthetically, had offered to transmit the message in code by way of the Rendang Legation in London) and along with the information must go an urgent request that he empower his Special Correspondent to take such steps—at this stage the appropriate steps would be predominantly of a financial nature—as might be necessary to secure the triumph of their Common Cause.

“So with your permission,” the voice concluded, “I’ll tell Bahu to send the cable immediately. In our joint names, Mr Farnaby, yours and Mine. I hope, mon cher , that this will be agreeable to you.”

It wasn’t at all agreeable, but there seemed to be no excuse, seeing that he had already written that letter to Joe Aldehyde, for demurring. And so, “Yes, of course,” he cried with a show of enthusiasm belied by his long dubious pause, before the words were uttered, in search of an alternative answer. “We ought to get the reply some time tomorrow,” he added.

“We shall get it tonight,” the Rani assured him.

“Is that possible?”

“With God” ( con espressione ) “all things are possible.”

“Quite,” he said, “quite. But still. . . .”

“I go by what my Little Voice tells me. ‘Tonight,’ it’s saying. And ‘he will give Mr Farnaby carte blanche ,’ carte blanche .” she repeated with gusto. “ ‘And Farnaby will be completely successful.’ ”

“I wonder?” he said doubtfully.

“You must be successful.”

“Must be?”

“Must be,” she insisted.

“Why?”

“Because it was God who inspired me to launch the Crusade of the Spirit.”

“I don’t quite get the connection.”

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you,” she said. Then, after a moment of silence, “But after all, why not? If our Cause triumphs, Lord Aldehyde has promised to back the Crusade with all his resources. And since God wants the Crusade to succeed, our Cause cannot fail to triumph.”

“QED,” he wanted to shout, but restrained himself. It wouldn’t be polite. And anyhow this was no joking matter.

“Well I must call Bahu,” said the Rani. “ A bientôt , my dear Farnaby.” And she rang off.

Shrugging his shoulders, Will turned back to the Notes on What’s What . What else was there to do?

Dualism . . .Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.

“I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance, “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words; but what an enormity of untruth!

The religiously minded dualist calls home-made spirits from the vasty deep: The non-dualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

There was the noise of an approaching car, then silence as the motor was turned off, then the slamming of a door and the sound of footsteps on gravel, on the steps of the verandah.

“Are you ready?” called Vijaya’s deep voice.

Will put down the Notes on What’s What , picked up his bamboo staff and, hoisting himself to his feet walked to the front door.

“Ready and champing at the bit,” he said as he stepped out on to the verandah.

“Then let’s go.” Vijaya took his arm. “Careful of these steps,” he recommended.

Dressed all in pink and with corals round her neck and in her ears, a plump, round-faced woman in her middle forties was standing beside the jeep.

“This is Leela Rao,” said Vijaya. “Our librarian, secretary, treasurer and general keeper-in-order. Without her we’d be lost.”

She looked, Will thought as he shook hands with her, like a browner version of one of those gentle but inexhaustibly energetic English ladies who, when their children are grown, go in for good works or organized culture. Not too intelligent, poor dears; but how selfless, how devoted, how genuinely good—and, alas, how boring!

“I was hearing of you,” Mrs Rao volunteered as they rattled along past the lotus pond and out on to the highway, “from my young friends, Radha and Ranga.”

“I hope,” said Will, “that they approved of me as heartily as I approved of them.”

Mrs Rao’s face brightened with pleasure. “I’m so glad you like them!”

“Ranga’s exceptionally bright,” Vijaya put in.

And so delicately balanced, Mrs Rao elaborated, between introversion and the outside world. Always tempted—and how strongly!—to escape into the Arhat’s Nirvana or the scientist’s beautifully tidy little paradise of pure abstraction. Always tempted, but often resisting temptation, for Ranga, the arhat-scientist, was also another kind of Ranga, a Ranga capable of compassion, ready, if one knew how to make the right kind of appeal, to lay himself open to the concrete realities of life, to be aware, concerned and actively helpful. How fortunate for him and for everyone else that he had found a girl like little Radha, a girl so intelligently simple, so humorous and tender, so richly endowed for love and happiness! Radha and Ranga, Mrs Rao confided, had been among her favourite pupils.

Pupils, Will patronizingly assumed, in some kind of Buddhist Sunday School. But in fact, as he was now flabbergasted to learn, it was in the yoga of love that this devoted Settlement Worker had been, for the past six years and in the intervals of librarianship, instructing the young. By the kind of methods, Will supposed, that Murugan had shrunk from and the Rani, in her all but incestuous possessiveness, had found so outrageous. He opened his mouth to question her. But his reflexes had been conditioned in higher latitude and by Settlement Workers of another species. The questions simply refused to pass his lips. And now it was too late to ask them. Mrs Rao had begun to talk about her other avocation.

“If you knew,” she was saying, “what trouble we have with books in this climate! The paper rots, the glue liquefies, the bindings disintegrate, the insects devour. Literature and the tropics are really incompatible.”

“And if one’s to believe your Old Raja,” said Will, “literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features besides your climate—incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration and unnecessary guilt. But never mind.” He grinned ferociously. “Colonel Dipa will put everything right. After Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you’ll undoubtedly have a Golden Age of literature and theology.”

“I’d like to laugh,” said Vijaya. “The only trouble is that you’re probably right. I have an uncomfortable feeling that my children will grow up to see your prophecy come true.”

They left their jeep, parked between an oxcart and a brand new Japanese lorry, at the entrance to the village, and proceeded on foot. Between thatched houses, set in gardens shaded by palms and papayas and bread-fruit trees, the narrow street led to a central market place. Will halted and, leaning on his bamboo staff, looked around him. On one side of the square stood a charming piece of oriental rococo with a pink stucco façade and gazebos at the four corners—evidently the town hall. Facing it, on the opposite side of the square, rose a small temple of reddish stone, with a central tower on which, tier after tier, a host of sculptured figures recounted the legends of the Buddha’s progress from spoiled child to Tathagata. Between these two monuments, more than half of the open space was covered by a huge banyan tree. Along its winding and shadowy aisles were ranged the stalls of a score of merchants and market women. Slanting down through chinks in the green vaulting overhead, the long probes of sunlight picked out here a row of black and yellow water jars, there a silver bracelet, a painted wooden toy, a bolt of cotton print; here a pile of fruits, and a girl’s gaily flowered bodice, there the flash of laughing teeth and eyes, the ruddy gold of a naked torso.

“Everybody looks so healthy,” Will commented, as they made their way between the stalls under the great tree.

“They look healthy because they are healthy,” said Mrs Rao.

“And happy—for a change.” He was thinking of the faces he had seen in Calcutta, in Manila, in Rendang-Lobo—the faces, for that matter, one saw every day in Fleet Street and the Strand. “Even the women,” he noted, glancing from face to face, “even the women look happy.”

“They don’t have ten children,” Mrs Rao explained.

“They don’t have ten children where I come from,” said Will. “In spite of which . . . ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’.” He halted for a moment to watch a middle-aged market woman weighing out slices of sun-dried bread-fruit for a very young mother with a baby in a carrying bag on her back. “There’s a kind of radiance,” he concluded.

“Thanks to maithuna ,” said Mrs Rao triumphantly. “Thanks to the yoga of love.” Her face shone with a mixture of religious fervour and professional pride.

They walked out from under the shade of the banyan, across a stretch of fierce sunlight, up a flight of worn steps and into the gloom of the temple. A golden Bodhisattva loomed, gigantic, out of the darkness. There was a smell of incense and fading flowers, and from somewhere behind the statue the voice of an unseen worshipper was muttering an endless litany. Noiselessly, on bare feet, a little girl came hurrying in from a side door. Paying no attention to the grown-ups she climbed with the agility of a cat on to the altar and laid a spray of white orchids on the statue’s upturned palm. Then, looking up into the huge golden face, she murmured a few words, shut her eyes for a moment, murmured again, then turned, scrambled down and, softly singing to herself, went out by the door through which she had entered.

“Charming,” said Will, as he watched her go. “Couldn’t be prettier. But precisely what does a child like that think she’s doing? What kind of religion is she supposed to be practising?”

“She’s practising,” Vijaya explained, “the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side.”

“And do you high-brows encourage this kind of thing?”

“We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making flytraps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion. Good religion or bad religion—it depends on the blending of the cocktail. For example, in the kind of Calvinism that Dr Andrew was brought up in, you’re given only the tiniest jigger of realism to a whole jug-full of malignant fancy. In other cases the mixture is more wholesome. Fifty-fifty, or even sixty-forty, even seventy-thirty in favour of truth and decency. Our local Old Fashioned contains a remarkably small admixture of poison.”

Will nodded. “Offerings of white orchids to an image of compassion and enlightenment—it certainly seems harmless enough. And after what I saw yesterday, I’d be prepared to put in a good word for cosmic dancing and divine copulations.” “And remember,” said Vijaya, “this sort of thing isn’t compulsory. Everybody’s given a chance to go further. You asked what that child thinks she’s doing. I’ll tell you. With one part of her mind, she thinks she’s talking to a person—an enormous, divine person who can be cajoled with orchids into giving her what she wants. But she’s already old enough to have been told about the profounder symbols behind Amitabha’s statue and about the experiences that give birth to those profounder symbols. Consequently with another part of her mind she knows perfectly well that Amitabha isn’t a person. She even knows, because it’s been explained to her, that if prayers are sometimes answered it’s because, in this very odd psycho-physical world of ours, ideas have a tendency, if you concentrate your mind on them, to get themselves realized. She knows too that this temple isn’t what she still likes to think it is—the house of Buddha. She knows it’s just a diagram of her own unconscious mind—a dark little cubby-hole with lizards crawling upside down on the ceiling, and cockroaches in all the crevices. But at the heart of the verminous darkness sits Enlightenment. And that’s another thing the child is doing—she’s unconsciously learning a lesson about herself, she’s being told that if she’d only stop giving herself suggestions to the contrary, she might discover that her own busy little mind is also Mind with a large M.”

“And how soon will the lesson be learned? When will she stop giving herself those suggestions?”

“She may never learn. A lot of people don’t. On the other hand, a lot of people do.”

He took Will’s arm and led him into the deeper darkness behind the image of Enlightenment. The chanting grew more distinct, and there, hardly visible in the shadows, sat the chanter—a very old man, naked to the waist and, except for his moving lips, as rigidly still as Amitabha’s golden statue.

“What’s he intoning?” Will asked.

“Something in Sanskrit.”

Seven incomprehensible syllables, again and again.

“Good old vain repetition!”

“Not necessarily vain,” Mrs Rao objected. “Sometimes it really gets you somewhere.”

“It gets you somewhere,” Vijaya elaborated, “not because of what the words mean or suggest, but simply because they’re being repeated. You could repeat Hey Diddle Diddle and it would work just as well as Om or Kyrie Eleison or La ila ilia ’llah . It works because when you’re busy with the repetition of Hey Diddle Diddle or the name of God, you can’t be entirely preoccupied with yourself. The only trouble is that you can Hey-Diddle-Diddle yourself downwards as well as upwards—down into the not-thought of idiocy as well as up into the not-thought of pure awareness.”

“So, I take it, you wouldn’t recommend this kind of thing,” said Will, “to our little friend with the orchids?”

“Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious. Which she isn’t. I know her very well; she plays with my children.”

“Then what would you do in her case?”

“Among other things,” said Vijaya, “I’d take her, in another year or so, to the place we’re going to now.”

“What place?”

“The meditation room.”

Will followed him through an archway and along a short corridor. Heavy curtains were parted and they stepped into a large whitewashed room with a long window, to their left, that opened on to a little garden planted with banana and bread-fruit trees. There was no furniture, only a scattering on the floor of small square cushions. On the wall opposite the window hung a large oil painting. Will gave it a glance, then approached to look into it more closely.

“My word!” he said at last. “Who is it by?”

“Gobind Singh.”

“And who’s Gobind Singh?”

“The best landscape painter Pala ever produced. He died in ’forty-eight.”

“Why haven’t we ever seen anything by him?”

“Because we like his work too well to export any of it.”

“Good for you,” said Will. “But bad for us.” He looked again at the picture. “Did this man ever go to China?”

“No; but he studied with a Cantonese painter who was living in Pala. And of course he’d seen plenty of reproductions of Sung landscapes.”

“A Sung master,” said Will, “who chose to paint in oils and was interested in chiaroscuro.”

“Only after he went to Paris. That was in 1910. He struck up a friendship with Vuillard.”

Will nodded. “One might have guessed as much from this extraordinary richness of texture.” He went on looking at the picture in silence. “Why do you hang it in the meditation room?” he asked at last.

“Why do you suppose?” Vijaya countered.

“Is it because this thing is what you call a diagram of the mind?”

“The temple was a diagram. This is something much better. It’s an actual manifestation. A manifestation of Mind with a large M in an individual mind in relation to a landscape, to canvas and to the experience of painting. It’s a picture, incidentally, of the next valley to the west. Painted from the place where the power lines disappear over the ridge.”

“What clouds!” said Will. “And the light!”

“The light,” Vijaya elaborated, “of the last hour before dusk. It’s just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the praeternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow.”

‘Deepens every shadow,’ Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of ploughed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the centre of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, ‘Of what?’ you found no answer. Will put the question into words.

“What do they mean?” Vijaya repeated. “They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that’s why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudo-religious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent—some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that’s why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room.”

“Always landscapes?”

“Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who they are.”

“Better than scenes from the life of a Saint or Saviour?”

Vijaya nodded. “It’s the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a Behaviourist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you’re confronted with a landscape like this, it’s psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J. B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You’re almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you’re practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing.”

“Self-knowing?”

“Self-knowing,” Vijaya insisted. “This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody’s mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that’s getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a notion. Stick to the data, stick to the concrete facts.” He pointed a finger at the picture. “The fact of half a village in sunshine and half in shadow and in secret. The fact of those indigo mountains and of the more fantastic mountains of vapour above them. The fact of blue lakes in the sky, lakes of pale green and raw sienna on the sunlit earth. The fact of this grass in the foreground, this clump of bamboos only a few yards down the slope, and the fact, at the same time, of those far-away peaks and the absurd little houses two thousand feet below in the valley. Distance,” he added, parenthetically, “their ability to express the fact of distance—that’s yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures.”

“Because distance lends enchantment to the view?”

“No; because it lends reality. Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people—that there’s even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space—it’s the first and fundamental religious experience. ‘O Death in life, the days that are no more’—and O the places, the infinite number of places that are not this place! Past pleasures, past unhappinesses and insights—all so intensely alive in our memories and yet all dead, dead without hope of resurrection. And the village down there in the valley so clearly seen even in the shadow, so real and indubitable, and yet so hopelessly out of reach, incommunicado. A picture like this is the proof of man’s capacity to accept all the deaths in life, all the yawning absences surrounding every presence. To my mind,” Vijaya added, “the worst feature of your non-representational art is its systematic two-dimensionality, its refusal to take account of the universal experience of distance. As a coloured object, a piece of abstract expressionism can be very handsome. It can also serve as a kind of glorified Rohrshach ink blot. Everybody can find in it a symbolic expression of his own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams. But can one ever find in it those more than human (or should one say those other than all too human) facts that one discovers in oneself when the mind is confronted by the outer distances of nature, or by the simultaneously inner and outer distances of a painted landscape like this one we’re looking at? All I know is that in your abstractions I don’t find the realities that reveal themselves here, and I doubt if anyone else can. Which is why this fashionable abstract non-objective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious—and also, I may add, why even the best of it is so profoundly boring, so bottomlessly trivial.”

“Do you come here often?” Will asked after a silence.

“Whenever I feel like meditating in a group rather than alone.”

“How often is that?”

“Once every week or so. But of course some people like to do it oftener—and some much more rarely, or even never. It depends on one’s temperament. Take our friend Susila, for example—she needs big doses of solitude; so she hardly ever comes to the meditation room. Whereas Shanta (that’s my wife) likes to look in here almost every day.”

“So do I,” said Mrs Rao. “But that’s only to be expected,” she added with a laugh. “Fat people enjoy company—even when they’re meditating.”

“And do you meditate on this picture?” Will asked.

“Not on it. From it, if you see what I mean. Or rather parallel with it. I look at it, and the other people look at it, and it reminds us all of who we are and what we aren’t, and how what we aren’t might turn into who we are.”

“Is there any connection,” Will asked, “between what you’ve been talking about and what I saw up there in the Shiva temple?”

“Of course there is,” she answered. “The moksha -medicine takes you to the same place as you get to in meditation.”

“So why bother to meditate?”

“You might as well ask, Why bother to eat your dinner?”

“But, according to you, the moksha -medicine is dinner.”

“It’s a banquet,” she said emphatically. “And that’s precisely why there has to be meditation. You can’t have banquets every day. They’re too rich and they last too long. Besides banquets are provided by a caterer; you don’t have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet you have to do your own cooking. The moksha -medicine comes as an occasional treat.”

“In theological terms,” said Vijaya, “the moksha -medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces—pre-mystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces.”

“How?”

“By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations. By getting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.”

“You mean, it helps one to be more intelligent?”

“Not more intelligent in relation to science or logical argument—more intelligent on the deeper level of concrete experiences and personal relationships.”

“More intelligent on that level,” said Mrs Rao, “even though one may be very stupid upstairs.” She patted the top of her head. “I’m too dumb to be any good at the things that Dr Robert and Vijaya are good at—genetics and biochemistry and philosophy and all the rest. And I’m no good at painting or poetry or acting. No talents and no cleverness. So I ought to feel horribly inferior and depressed. But in fact I don’t—thanks entirely to the moksha -medicine and meditation. No talents or cleverness. But when it comes to living, when it comes to understanding people and helping them, I feel myself growing more and more sensitive and skilful. And when it comes to what Vijaya calls gratuitous graces . . .” She broke off. “You could be the greatest genius in the world, but you wouldn’t have anything more than what I’ve been given. Isn’t that true, Vijaya?”

“Perfectly true.”

She turned back to Will. “So you see, Mr Farnaby, Pala’s the place for stupid people. The greatest happiness of the greatest number—and we stupid ones are the greatest number. People like Dr Robert and Vijaya and my darling Ranga—we recognize their superiority, we know very well that their kind of intelligence is enormously important. But we also know that our kind of intelligence is just as important. And we don’t envy them, because we’re given just as much as they are. Sometimes even more.”

“Sometimes,” Vijaya agreed, “even more. For the simple reason that a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol-manipulation, and habitual symbol-manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.”

“So you see,” said Mrs Rao, “you don’t have to feel too sorry for us.” She looked at her watch. “Goodness, I shall be late for Dillip’s dinner if I don’t hurry.”

She started briskly towards the door.

“Time, time, time,” Will mocked. “Time even in this place of timeless meditation. Time for dinner breaking incorrigibly into eternity.” He laughed. Never take yes for an answer. The nature of things is always no.

Mrs Rao halted for a moment and looked back at him.

“But sometimes,” she said with a smile, “it’s eternity that miraculously breaks into time—even into dinner time. Good-bye.” She waved her hand and was gone.

“Which is better,” Will wondered aloud as he followed Vijaya through the dark temple, out into the noonday glare, “which is better—to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”