"Padre" Edwin Brush welcomes worshippers at the New Year´s Eve "Watchnight" service at the Union Church, Khargpur-Bengal India. The scene was painted by Lewin Brown in 1940 as a nostalgic greeting card for my brother John, who was in college in Lewisburg, PA, USA.

Kharagpur (the standard modern spelling)

The Union Church and house, the station, the residential areas and the market are still there. But "Bengal Nagpur Railway" as a name has disappeared, having been replaced by the more prosaic "South Eastern Railway." Contemporary Kharagpur's chief claim to fame is its elite Institute of Technology.

     Our seaside resort at Chandipur has been absorbed into a missile test range for the Indian navy. But the beautiful beach of our day is gone. It was destroyed by a Bay of Bengal cyclone in the early 1990s
.
     The wartime airfields (except for Chakulia and Kalaikunda), which half a century ago were busy with airmen and their planes, are abandoned. Their crumbled runways now mingle with the general historical detritus left by other exotic warriors who passed through India before them. The dead at Kalaikunda were transferred after the war, in accordance to the wishes of relatives, either home to the US or to the permanent American military cemetery at Carthage,Tunisia.

Now, approaching the sesquicentennial of its founding in 1854, Woodstock has transformed itself into an international school suited to the educational needs of the new India.

From the Endpiece:

Water twisted in heavy ropes from drainpipes
and arched from the roof corners,
water so thick I couldn´t see
across the verandah.