Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

only by the mutterings of Divakaran Nambudiripad who warned darkly of the Kali Yuga, that Last Age of decline and dissolution.
    Two weeks later, when Achuthan Nair died suddenly of a heart attack, Divakaran Nambudiripad felt vindicated and the rest of the Corporation somewhat shaken. But the contractor had been hired and work on the project was already under way. Krishnankutty himself appeared before a special session of the Corporation and spoke with fervour of the rightness, the modernity, and the necessity of the enterprise. With a majority of the city councillors still behind him, he daily supervised the construction site and each nightfall distributed the day’s wages to the Harijan labourers.
    He invited John to film the work in progress. Not very enthusiastic, John brought his movie camera but was then delighted by the photographic possibilities. He was surprised to see as many women as men engaged in the heavy work. He watched, breathless, running his film, as four men struggled to lift a great piece of rock for the foundations. Painfully they raised it, and then placed it carefully on the head of a squatting woman, very young and beautiful, with only a small coil of braided coconut leaf on her glossy hair to support the rock. When it was properly balanced, the four men let go and the girl very slowly rose to full height and walked across to the foundation, where she again stooped so that several men could lift the rock and place it in position on the wet mortar. This operation was repeated many times and the wall inched its way upward.
    â€œIncredible!” said John. “Beautiful! Tragic!”
    â€œTragic?” Krishnankutty was startled.
    â€œSuch fragile bodies for such brutal work!”
    Krishnankutty watched the labourers with surprised interest. Now that he thought about it, it was unusual. He had never seen women on construction sites in America. “Our poor people are very strong,” he said proudly. “They are having simple and happy lives.”
    John was both disturbed and uplifted by the incident. He retreated into contemplation. Suffering in India, he felt, had a sort of ineffable beauty about it, framed as it was by lush rice paddies and coconut groves and the smell of incense and jasmine garlands in the market-place. He took to sitting by the temple baths each day, talking to the old men who sat on the stone steps in the sun. It was a source of grief to him that Kerala (unlike other Indian states) did not permit non-Hindus to enter the temples. Each day he meditated in view of the busily carved gopuram of Shree Padmanabhaswamy temple, longing to stand in the presence of Lord Vishnu. He saw less and less of Krishnankutty, found a guru who would help him read the Vedas, searched as far afield as Tiruvannamalai to find an ashram that would initiate Westerners as Hindus, after which he decided to set out on foot to Cape Comorin as a pilgrim.
    In the third month of Krishnankutty’s project, when the exterior walls had risen impressively from the foundations, the building contractor was seriously injured in a fall from the scaffolding, which had been improperly roped together. His back was broken, he lived on for three days of agony, and died murmuring that perhaps Lord Vishnu was offended by the crematorium.
    The Corporation was in an uproar. Even Krishnankutty was shaken, yet so certain was he that his inspiration, coming as it had in the high nuptial moment, had been an auspicious one, that he could not easily abandon his dream. He consulted an astrologer, and when that man gave him an unfavourable reading he consulted another one. The second prediction was genial, and armed with this reassurance he again went before the councillors. The task was long and difficult, but he eventually regained the backing of a bare majority.
    However, it proved to be impossible to hire a contractor anywhere in the district of Trivandrum. Word had even spread as far north as Quilon, but finally