"Camilla was pestered by wasps as she entered one of the sites and took a quick swipe at the insects with the closed parasol she was carrying." So reads a PA report on the visit of Charles and his future Queen to the ancient Buddhist ruins at an archaeological site at Taxila, outside Islamabad, Pakistan.
Brutal Camilla! Has she not read EM Forster's A Passage To India? There's the moment when Mrs Moore spots a wasp on a coat peg. "Pretty, dear," she says of it, indicating her sense of the oneness of the universe; the wasp is a manifestation of Brahman in the Hindu tradition. How dare Camilla try to kill such a sacred creature.
Later Prof. Godbole thinks of Mrs Moore and a wasp and the two images "melt into the universal warmth". But the Christians in the novel are not so sure that divine bliss awaits the insect, not a nasty stinging thing like that, oh no - Camilla is a typical Christian.
It is a wonder that she was not stung to death as she waved her parasol about.
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