Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories by Janette Turner Hospital

Madras), and certainly one of the few in the whole country.
    On the way to the wedding, the groom’s party had crossed paths with a funeral procession. The bier was thickly flower-strewn, and even the bearers, carrying it high over their heads, had been weeping. The corpse was that of a beautiful young woman.
    Krishnankutty’s American friend John – he of the Kama Sutra loan – had considered himself fortunate to have his movie camera at the ready, being engaged in recording the procession from the groom’s house to that of the bride. In a frisson of Eastern excitement, anticipating, he felt, the ultimate perfection of moksha, he captured forever on the one reel the continuity of life and death. It was just as Hermann Hesse had intimated in Siddhartha – a wedding, a funeral, the beggars at the roadside, the lavish silks and jewels of the bridegroom’s party, the river of life flowing on, the vast oneness of it all.
    But Krishnankutty’s mother, Lakshmi, had been aghast at such an inauspicious encounter. Weeping and trembling, she had begged her husband and son to postpone the wedding lest disaster strike the young couple. Krishnankutty, however, with his American education in electrical engineering, was not worried by such things. Was not this Chingam, the auspicious month for marriages? And had not the astrologer consulted by the family indicated that this particular hour on this particular day was the auspicious time?
    Clearly then some special thing, good rather than evil, would come of the meeting. And so it had been.
    The funeral had reminded Krishnankutty of the final rites for his friend John’s mother. She had lain in state, surrounded by flowers, in a room at the funeral home. Krishnankutty had been greatly impressed by the furnishings and wall-to-wall carpet of this room, and by the restrained grief and decorum of the visitors. Later he had marvelled at the quiet simplicity with which, at a certain point in the chapel service at the crematory, the coffin had smoothly rolled out of sight behind a velvet curtain at the unseen touch of a remote control button. The next week he had returned and expressed his professional interest as an engineer, and the management had given him a tour of the crematorium, the discreet workings of which had fascinated him.
    Krishnankutty was embarrassed by John’s interest in the funeral procession. He strongly suspected that his friend would briefly slip away from the wedding festivities to film the burning of the young girl down on the river bank. He visualised his former acquaintances in Cambridge, Massachusetts watching on screen the blatant leap of flames around the pyre, the muddy river and its filthy excremental banks, the extravagant wailing of the family – all confirming their image of India as a romantically primitive place. It was so unfair. He knew John would not bother to photograph the Shree Kanth, Trivandrum’s modern two-storey air-conditioned cinema, which not only showed nightly films in Malayalam, Hindi, and Tamil, but also ran an American movie once a month.
    Krishnankutty was, in fact, planning to take his new wife to see the famous James Bond in Live and Let Die. He would undertake to open her eyes to the modern world. All these thoughts had been running through his head until the moment she had raised her face to him. He had then experienced a sort of vision in triplicate – the faces of Saraswathi, the recent corpse, and John’s mother, all ringed with flowers, hazily intermingling like a multiple-exposure colour slide. It had then come to him that his mission was to establish in Trivandrum an electric crematorium. It was the answer to his newly graduated, newly returned zeal to do something for his country. Not only was it the ideal way to utilise his qualifications, but it would also contribute substantially to the modernisation of the city and would incidentally bring him fame and fortune.
    John, when