“I expected you to make such a reply. You are a faithful friend. Shall we now talk about something else?”
“Willingly. What subject?”
“Poetry,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “Let us discuss why poetry has lost the power of making men brave. My mother’s father was also a poet, and fought against you in the Mutiny. I might equal him if there was another mutiny. As it is, I am a doctor, who has won a case and has three children to support, and whose chief subject of conversation is official plans.”
“Let us talk about poetry.” He turned his mind to the innocuous subject. “You people are sadly circumstanced. Whatever are you to write about? You cannot say, ‘The rose is faded,’ for evermore. We know it’s faded. Yet you can’t have patriotic poetry of the ‘India, my India’ type, when it’s nobody’s India.”
“I like this conversation. It may lead to something interesting.”
“You are quite right in thinking that poetry must touch life. When I knew you first, you used it as an incantation.”
“I was a child when you knew me first. Everyone was my friend then. The Friend: a Persian expression for God. But I do not want to be a religious poet either.”
“I hoped you would be.”
“Why, when you yourself are an atheist?”
“There is something in religion that may not be true, but has not yet been sung.”