Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

confided in a few days later, was appalled by the plan. He did not have the restless problem-solving mind of an engineer.
    â€œIt’s practically obscene, Krish,” he objected, still full of the beauty of the oneness of all things.
    The two friends had met not in university classes, but in the rambling old frame house where they both rented one-bedroom apartments. Since Krishnankutty could not cook, John frequently shared his vegetarian and macrobiotic cuisine. John’s family had so much money that it was only natural he should turn from things material to things spiritual. He had been delighted to come to India for his friend’s wedding. He decided to stay on. He felt geographically closer to enlightenment, sensed a speeding-up in his search for truth. A crematorium among the coconut groves, it seemed to him, would interfere with the search.
    â€œIt’s a dreadful idea, Krish,” he repeated.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” asked Krishnankutty, wounded. “You are taking photographs of the lighting of the pyre at the river bank. The water is smelling very bad, and the bank is having much filth, isn’t it? Yes, yes. Are these rites suitable for modern educated peoples?”
    â€œYour rites are elemental and beautiful, Krish. One’s ashes mingle with the ash and mud of life itself, down there. It is so much purer than the commercial racket of the death industry back home. It would be criminal to change it.”
    Krishnankutty thought sourly: Those who have already seen their parents croak in style (he was proud of his grasp of American idiom), with the dignity of wall-to-wall carpeting and unseen flame, can afford to be romantic about squalor and the acrid smell of burning flesh.
    Krishnankutty wasted no time. Achuthan Nair, a cousin on his mother’s side, was a city councillor. Krishnankutty invited his relative to dinner and revealed to him the splendours of his proposal. He volunteered to draw up designs, in collaboration with an architect, and to submit them to the Corporation of Trivandrum if Achuthan Nair could win that body’s support and funding of the scheme.
    Achuthan Nair’s speech to the Corporation was considered notable, particularly in retrospect. It began with a quotation from Hamlet, which was most impressive. Alas! poor Yorick, said Achuthan Nair, inviting the councillors to gaze on the imaginary skull in his hand. How was this sort of noble sentiment possible, he demanded, without lasting mementos of the dead? And even though one’s father would return in another form, did not a man cherish the life of his father as he had known it? Would not a small urn of ashes and a plaque bearing the father’s name be something of beauty and dignity to be cherished by the family?
    There were uneasy diggings at dhotis and stirrings of sandalled feet, and Divakaran Nambudiripad, an elderly and respected Brahmin, interjected angrily: “Contamination! All is contamination!” The old man rose to his feet. What could be compared, he demanded, with the beauty and dignity of standing on land’s end at Cape Comorin where Gandhiji’s ashes had been scattered to the elements? What sentiment could the trivial West offer to compare with the religious grandeur of that stormy point where three seas met and where one could be reabsorbed into the universe?
    But there were others who were more progressively minded, and they wanted Achuthan Nair to continue. He appealed to Kerala’s reputation for enlightened advancement; he alluded to the reformist legacy of His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore; he pointed out that Gandhiji himself had studied in the West and had not been afraid to learn from it; he quoted, with a beautiful cadence, from Keats on the brevity of life, and ended in a crescendo of Milton.
    His audience was swept before him. The motion was passed, the money allotted, and a contractor designated. There was a general feeling of well-being, broken