The 'great king' proved to be as imposing as his home, a magnificent, gleaming white residence of opulent splendor with hundreds of rooms. He stood at the entryway as if he were a common man, which he decidedly was not, to judge from the multitude of attendants swarming up and down the palace steps and deferring to him with hands clasped at their foreheads as if he were a god, which, I suppose, to them he was.

Handsome hardly seemed the right word to describe him. He was so beautiful, his expression so benign, his demeanor so humble, that you felt you really had come into the presence of a deity. His white hair flowed like a mane over straight shoulders, but from a balding spot at the middle of his head. He had removed a white silk turban with a large diamond at the brow as we descended from the elephants and came up the broad stairs. He came toward us with white silk trousers rustling beneath a knee-length coat of gold-embroidered red satin, his arms outstretched, the turban dangling from one hand.

He halted abruptly, his eyebrows lifted as if in surprise as he said, "Ah, for a moment you could have been your father, you are so like him, my son! I have not seen you since you were that high." With a graceful gesture, he indicated a baby elephant standing off to the side, draped with a golden cloth. "Here, young man, do you remember this?"

He waved his hand and a child came forward with a basket of delicate, very small bananas. He took one up and held it before Darrin, who smiled and bowed before he answered,"Yes, Lord, I remember. May I?"

He took the banana and peeled it and tossed it into the air. The small elephant, watching every move, leaned forward and snatched it with his trunk as it fell, and gobbled it down. The two men laughed, and moved into each other's arms. The maharajah embraced Darrin so warmly that I was deeply moved at sight of the tenderness of his touch. My Darrin responded as warmly, and I saw tears on the rajah's cheeks.

That night, after a marvelous dinner of red hot curries, cool rose-flavored yogurt drinks and lime-green pistachio-nut sweetcakes decorated with edible silver foil, Darrin and I retired to the vast library with the rajah, where we were served a mellow French brandy and were offered hand-rolled Indian cigars. Several hours of conversation led us deep into night. At some point, I realized later, I must have drowsed off in my chair, and then, suddenly it was morning, and we were saying farewell and setting off on the train for the region of the Khyber Pass.

This was all a long time ago. I never gave it much thought until an experience I had in a dark theater in San Francisco last year, in 1997. I had gone to see "The English Patient" when, in the middle of a scene in which the nurse was reading passages from a book to the patient, I sat up startled in my seat and grabbed the arm of the friend at my side.

"I remember!" I exclaimed. "What?" asked he. So I told him of a night some years before when it was thought that I lay dying in Intensive Care, and a kindly nurse had read to me from a book, and I had remembered nothing of this until that moment in the theater, when the nurse on the screen read the same words I had heard that night. I called my former nurse the next day. She was delighted that I at last remembered her special concern for me. She had been reading aloud to me to keep my attention on life and away from death, those very same passages in the book, "The English Patient."