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 voice at my elbow, and turning round I recognised a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali law student, called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England to become civilised. The old man was a retired native official, and on an income of five pounds a month contrived to allow his son two hundred pounds a year, and the run of his teeth in a city where he could pretend to be the cadet of a royal house, and tell stories of the brutal Indian bureaucrats who ground the faces of the poor.

Grish Chunder was a young, fat, full-bodied Bengali, dressed with scrupulous care in frock coat, tall hat, light trousers, and tan gloves. But 1 had known him in the days when the brutal Indian Government paid for his university education, and he contributed cheap sedition to the Sachi Durpan, and intrigued with the wives of his fourteen-year-old schoolmates.

'That is very funny and very foolish; he said, nodding at the poster. 'I am going down to the Northbrook Club. Will you come too?'

I walked with him for some time. 'You are not well, he said. 'What is there on your mind? You do not talk,'

'Grish Chunder, you've been too well educated to belicve in a God, haven't you?'

'Oah, yes, here! But when I go home I must conciliate popular superstition, and make ceremonies of purification, and my women will anoint idols.'

'And hang up tulsi and feast the purohit, and take you back into caste again and make a good khuttri of you again, you advanced Freethinker. And you'll eat desi food, and like it all, from the smell in the courtyard to the mustard oll over you.'