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Kashi's soul remembered all the characteristics of Kashi, the boy, and therefore mimicked his hoarse voice in order to stir my recognition. "Rabindranath Tagore taught us to sing, as a natural form of self-expression, like the birds." Bhola Nath, a bright fourteen-year-old lad at my Ranchi school, gave me this explanation after I had complimented him one morning on his melodious outbursts.
His body he was really sorry for its gross helplessness lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees. "How very ridiculous!" he said to himself from his eyrie " that is Findlayson chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be drowned, too. Drowned when it's close to shore. I'm I'm on shore already. Why doesn't it come along?"
His body he was really sorry for its gross helplessness lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees. "How very ridiculous!" he said to himself, from his eyrie "that is Findlayson chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be drowned, too. Drowned when it's close to shore. I'm I'm onshore already. Why doesn't it come along."
For fifteen days he tried to break the will of his son, explaining that if Kashi would go to Calcutta for only four days to see his mother, he could then return. Kashi persistently refused. The father finally said he would take the boy away with the help of the police. The threat disturbed Kashi, who was unwilling to be the cause of any unfavorable publicity to the school.
He saw no choice but to go. I returned to Ranchi a few days later. When I heard how Kashi had been removed, I entrained at once for Calcutta. There I engaged a horse cab. Very strangely, as the vehicle passed beyond the Howrah bridge over the Ganges, I beheld Kashi's father and other relatives in mourning clothes. Shouting to my driver to stop, I rushed out and glared at the unfortunate father.
"By day and night they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads. Who is like Bhairon to-day? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that never were so many altars as today, and the fire-carriage serves them well. Bhairon am I Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of the Heavenly Ones to-day.
"By day and night they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads. Who is like Bhairon to-day? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that never were so many altars as today, and the fire carriage serves them well. Bhairon am I Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of the Heavenly Ones to-day.
The thought became almost audible as I concentrated on my heart radio. "It looks as though I have located Kashi!" I began to turn round and round, to the undisguised amusement of my friends and the passing throng. The electrical impulses tingled through my fingers only when I faced toward a near-by path, aptly named "Serpentine Lane."
But for weeks afterward, Kashi pressed me doggedly. Seeing him unnerved to the breaking point, I finally consoled him. "Yes," I promised. "If the Heavenly Father lends His aid, I will try to find you." During the summer vacation, I started on a short trip.
Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations and Hitchcock, new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner-table, and he feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name.
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