gradually clearer and then slowly faded and faded till it died away in the distance.
That was Indranath. The first day I met him I had thought, 'If I could only possess his strength and fight like him!' And this night the one thought that kept revolving in my mind till I fell asleep was, 'Would that I could play on the bamboo flute like Indranath!'
But how was I to strike up an acquaintance with him? He was far above me, and was not even at school. I had heard that, being aggrieved by the headmaster's perverse decision to put the 'donkey cap' on his head, he had contemptuously scaled the railings of the school-compound and had gone home, never to return to school again. Long afterwards I learnt from his own mouth that his offence had been very trivial indeed. It had been a habit with the up-country Pundit to go off to sleep in his class-room. On one of these occasions Indranath with a pair of scissors curtailed the length of the Brahminical rat's tail on the Pundit's head. Not much harm had been done: for the teacher, on his return home, had found the lost tuft inside the pocket of his own long coat. Indranath had failed to understand why the Pundit had been unable to forgive him and had even made a complaint to the headmaster. He knew, however, that for one who had left school by the original procedure of scaling the railings, the school-gates hardly remained open in welcome. Nor did he greatly care whether they remained open or closed to him. In spite of the efforts of the numerous elders in the house, to whom Indra's attitude should have been one of implicit obedience, he never turned his face towards the school again. He exchanged his pen for an oar, spending whole days on the Ganges in a canoe.
7
