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you captured. You know, Mr Kipling, you can still sit in a third-class railway carriage and meet the most wonderful assortment of people. In any village you will still find the same courtesy, dignity and courage that the Lama and Kim found on their travels.’
    ‘And the Grand Trunk Road? Is it still a long winding procession of humanity?’
    ‘Well, not exactly,’ I said, a little ruefully. ‘It’s just a procession of motor vehicles now. The poor Lama would be run down by a truck if he became too dreamy on the Grand Trunk Road. Times
have
changed. There are no more Mrs Hawksbees in Simla, for instance.’
    There was a far-away look in Kipling’s eyes. Perhaps he was imagining himself a boy again; perhaps he could see the hills or the red dust of Rajputana; perhaps he was having a private conversation with Privates Mulvaney and Ortheris, or perhaps he was out hunting with the Seonee wolf-pack. The sound of London’s traffic came to us through the glass doors, but we heard only the creaking of bullock-cart wheels and the distant music of a flute.
    He was talking to himself, repeating a passage from one of his stories. ‘And the last puff of the daywind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.’
    A mist seemed to have risen between us—or had it come in from the streets?—and when it cleared, Kipling had gone away.
    I asked the gatekeeper if he had seen a tall man with a slight stoop, wearing spectacles.
    ‘Nope,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘Nobody been by for the last ten minutes.’
    ‘Did someone like that come into the gallery a little while
    ago?’
    ‘No one that I recall. What did you say the bloke’s name was?’
    ‘Kipling,’ I said.
    ‘Don’t know him.’
    ‘Didn’t you ever read
The
Jungle
Books
?’
    ‘Sounds familiar. Tarzan stuff, wasn’t it?’
    I left the museum, and wandered about the streets for a long time, but I couldn’t find Kipling anywhere. Was it the boom of London’s traffic that I heard, or the boom of the Sutlej river racing through the valleys?

The Last Time I Saw Delhi
    I ’d had this old and faded negative with me for a number of years and had never bothered to make a print from it. It was a picture of my maternal grandparents. I remembered my grandmother quite well, because a large part of my childhood had been spent in her house in Dehra after she had been widowed; but although everyone said she was fond of me, I remembered her as a stern, somewhat aloof person, of whom I was a little afraid.
    I hadn’t kept many family pictures and this negative was yellow and spotted with damp.
    Then last week, when I was visiting my mother in hospital in Delhi, while she awaited her operation, we got talking about my grandparents, and I remembered the negative and decided I’d make a print for my mother.
    When I got the photograph and saw my grandmother’s face for the first time in twenty-five years, I was immediately struck by my resemblance to her. I have, like her, lived a rather spartan life, happy with my one room, just as she was content to live in a room of her own while the rest of the family took over the house! And like her, I have lived tidily. But I did not know the physical resemblance was so close—the fair hair, the heavy build, the wide forehead. She looks more like me than my mother!
    In the photograph she is seated on her favourite chair, at the top of the veranda steps, and Grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a large mango tree which is not in the picture. I can tell it was a mango tree because of the pattern the leaves make on the wall. Grandfather was a slim, trim man, with a drooping moustache that was fashionable in the twenties. By all accounts he had a mischievous sense of humour, although he looks