“I am Chandrabai,” comes the answer.  “Hast thou any wish unfulfilled?” asks the midwife.  “Nay, all my wishes have been met,” cries the spirit through the lips of the medium, “I am in very truth Chandrabai, who was, but am not now, of this world.”  As the last words die away the men dash forward, twist Krishna’s hair into a knot behind, dress him, as he struggles, in the female attire which the midwife has been guarding, and place in his hand a wooden slab rudely carved into the semblance of a woman and child.  “Away, away to the underworld” chant the singers; and at the command Krishna wrenches himself free from the men who are holding him and dashes out with a yell into the night.

Straight as an arrow he heads for the seashore, his hands clutching the air convulsively, his ‘sari’ streaming in the night-breeze; and behind, like hounds on the trail of the deer, come Rama, the brethren, the sisters, and rest of the community.  Over the shingle they stream and down on to the hard wet sand.  Some one digs a hole; another produces a black cock; and Rama with a knife cuts its throat over the hole, imploring the spirit’s departure, at the very moment that Krishna with a final shriek plunges into the sea.  They follow him, carry him out of danger, and lay him, stark and speechless, upon the margin of the waves.

Thence, after a pause and a final prayer, they bear him homeward, as men bear a corpse, nor leave him until he has regained consciousness and his very self.  For with that last shrill cry the ghost of Chandrabai fled across the waste waters to meet the pale ancestral dead and dwell with them for evermore:  and the house of Vishnu the fisherman was freed from the curse of her vagrant and unpropitiated spirit.  “She has never troubled me since that day,” says Vishnu; “but at times when I am out in my fishing-boat and the wind blows softly from the west, I hear her voice calling to me across the waters.  And one day, if the gods are kind, I shall sail westward to meet her!”

* * * * *

II.

Bombay scenes.

Morning.

  “Binishin bar sari juyo guzari umr bibin
   kin isharat zi jahani guzeran mara bas.”

So wrote the great poet of Persia:  “Sit thou on the bank of a stream and in the flow of its waters watch the passing of thy life.  Than this a vain and fleeting world can grant thee no higher lesson.”  Of the human tides which roll through the streets of the cities of the world, none are brighter or more varied than that which fills the streets of Bombay.  Here are Memon and Khoja women in shirt and trousers ("kurta” and “izzar”) of green and gold or pink or yellow, with dark blue sheets used as veils, wandering along with their children dressed in all the hues of the rainbow.  Here are sleek Hindus from northern India in soft muslin and neat coloured turbans:  Gujarathis in red head-gear