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Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936

"From Mine Own People"


The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside the
house--nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the blackness of
Amir Nath's Gully behind.
The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a madman
between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the river as the
dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went home bareheaded.
What the tragedy was--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair, told
everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured to tell,
whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what became of Bisesa--Trejago does
not know to this day. Something horrible had happened, and the thought of what
it must have been comes upon Trejago in the night now and again, and keeps him
company till the morning. One special feature of the case is that he does not
know where lies the front of Durga Charan's house. It may open on to a
courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the
gates of Jitha Megji's bustee. Trejago cannot tell.
He cannot get Bisesa--poor little Bisesa--back again. He has lost her in the
City, where each man's house is as guarded and as unknowable as the grave; and
the grating that opens into Amir Nath's Gully has been walled up.


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