Robin Redbreast

Through the long grass a cobra glided toward the dark-eyed little girl as she lay in the garden, reading. Silently it slithered behind her, raised its head, spread its threatening hood. As her father, looking up from his book, saw the cobra swaying above her, he whispered a tense warning not to move. Realizing that some danger lurked behind her, she stayed quite still until the snake slid away into the grass. From that day on, her superstitious mother was sure that a great destiny awaited the little girl, for there is an old Indian legend that luck will attend a sitting or sleeping person above whom a cobra has spread its hood.

Lots of Harmony. Last week the Indian girl, now a handsome 47-year-old diplomat, was still finding her destiny in dangerous company. When Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, sister of India's Premier Nehru, and the new Dominion's first Ambassador to Soviet Russia, stepped out of a gleaming Air India DC-3 at Moscow's Vnukovo airport early last month, she got a big reception. Amid the welcoming crowd, portly K. A. Kochetkov, acting chief of protocol, presented her with flowers and showed her unctuously into a new Zis sedan.

At a press conference, she did not appear, but a printed statement from her declared: "India has a special link with the Soviet Union, since both India and Russia have shown a capacity to blend and harmonize different races and civilizations." Her softly modulated voice was saved for private Kremlin chats with Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet Nikolai Shvernik and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vishinsky. Though her appointment was approved by George VI and she is officially His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador, Mrs. Pandit has always been popular with the Russians for her consistently anti-British line. As India's U.N. representative, her sharp-tongued performance in denouncing "British imperialism" had earned her the smiles and flattery of Vishinsky.

Lots of Mutton. The daughter of a rich Anglophile Brahmin lawyer, she was taken to England at five and entrusted to an English governess. Until her marriage at 21, she was called "Nan," acquired a pronounced English accent, ate typical English food like mutton, boiled cabbage and pudding; Indian food was served only on Sundays. But what really turned her against Britain was not mutton and boiled cabbage but the recurring jail sentences imposed on her late husband, Lawyer Ranjit Pandit, her brother Jawaharlal Nehru, and herself, for political activity. From 1931 to 1943 she was thrice jailed, for a total of two years and nine months.

The practical rewards she was enjoying in Moscow last week were earned by her defense of Russia's use of the veto, her hostility to Britain and occasional cracks at the U.S. (Sample: "Though it is claimed that democracy is the rule of the day in America, actually there is no voice of the people at the helm of affairs.") While other nations were still waiting to be allotted suitable Embassy quarters in the crowded capital, newly arrived Mrs. Pandit went straight to the head of the diplomatic queue, was promptly given a well-kept brick residence by Soviet officials.

Wryly, other members of Moscow's diplomatic colony could recall a gushing press description once given of Mrs. Pandit : "What a delight she is proving to be! Small, she has all the vivacity of a daring robin that dashes in and steals the tidbit right from under the beak of some bigger, more ferocious bird."

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