Abe took the cigar out of his mouth. He grimaced as if it tasted as foul as it looked. "The kid couldn't have been much more than ten, maybe younger," he said. "He'd been impaled on some iron reinforcement rods sticking up out of the cement abutment on the west side of the bridge. You could tell that he hadn't died right away; that he'd struggled for some time after the rods went through him —"

"He'd been climbing on the new bridge?" I said.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," said Abe. "And that's what the local authorities said at the inquest. But for the life of me I couldn't figure out how he'd managed to hit those rods. . . . He would've had to have jumped way out from the high girders. Then, a couple of weeks later, right before Gandhi broke his fast and the rioting stopped back in Calcutta, I went over to the British consulate there to dig out a copy of Kipling's story 'The Bridge Builders.' You've read it, haven't you?"

"No," I said. I couldn't stand Kipling's prose or poetry.

"You should," said Abe. "Kipling's short fiction is quite good."

"So what's the story?" I asked.

"Well, the story hinges around the fact that at the end of every bridge-building, Bengalis used to have an elaborate religious ceremony."

"That's not unusual, is it?" I said, half guessing the punch line of all of this.

"Not at all," said Abe. "Every event in India calls for some sort of religious ceremony. It's just the way the Bengalis went about it that caused Kipling to write the story." Abe put the cigar back in his mouth and spoke through gritted teeth. "At the end of each bridge construction, they offered up a human sacrifice."

"Right," I said. "Great." I gathered up my photocopies, stuffed them in my briefcase, and rose to leave. "If you remember any more Kipling tales, Abe, be sure to give us a call. Amrita'll get a big kick out of them."