In the morning he told her his plan. It had come to him, he said, at the instant he had seen her face framed by the bridal garland of jasmine. His American education and his Indian nationalism had merged with the nuptial embrace, and the idea of the electric crematorium had been conceived. It would be the first in the state of Kerala, perhaps the first south of Bombay (though he suspected there was already one in 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 confided in a few days later, was appalled by the plan. He did not have the restless problem-solving mind of an engineer.
“It’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.
“It’s a dreadful idea, Krish,” he repeated.
“What 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?”
“Your 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 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 Corpora
tion 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.
“Incredible!” said John. “Beautiful! Tragic!”
“Tragic?” Krishnankutty was startled.
“Such 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 a man from Cochin, who had heard nothing of the matter, agreed to supervise the construction if his accommodation were provided in Trivandrum. Of course he learned the story within days of his arrival, and when word came from Cochin the following week that an aged uncle had died, the man hastily resigned and left the city as quickly as possible.
The more difficult the scheme became, the more determined Krishnankutty grew to see it through to a triumphant conclusion. He spared himself a pointless visit to the nervous elders of the Corporation, but with a single-minded zeal he advertised for a contractor from the adjacent state of Tamil Nadu, hired a man and brought him to Trivandrum at his own expense, gathered a completely different set of Harijan labourers, and saw to it that the contractor ate and slept as a guest at his own house, so that he would have little opportunity to talk to local people. And so the work was finished.
Krishnankutty went to the printer’s and ordered fifty neatly scripted white invitation cards. They said: You are invited to the inauguration of the new electric crematorium of Trivandrum. Conceived and designed by V. Krishnankutty, M. Eng. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He set the date a week in advance to give himself time to find a corpse. He mailed the cards to the councillors of the Corporation of Trivandrum, to representatives of The Indian Express and The Hindu as well as of the Malayalam newspapers, and to various local dignitaries.
There was some fluster about obtaining a corpse, since recently bereaved families seemed quite unprogressively horrified at the idea. Luckily Saraswathi remembered an old beggar woman who for months had been coming to their door for a daily handful of rice, for weeks had been coughing and spitting blood, and for days had not been seen. Servants were dispatched to make inquiries and they found – alas – the beggar woman’s body in a derelict hut. Since there seemed to be no kin to claim her, it was logical that she should have the honour of the first technologically advanced send-off in Trivandrum.
At the appointed hour, Krishnankutty and the beggar woman awaited their guests. Only one person arrived, the reporter from The Indian Express. Krishnankutty was incensed, and postponed the ceremonial pushing of the button for a day. He spent the afternoon contacting and visiting as many city councillors as he could. There were many reasons of great import and unavoidable crisis to account for the absences, and of course, they all assured him, they would be present on the morrow. But the next day it was the same, and although it pained Krishnankutty deeply, imperatives of climate and hygiene dictated no further hesitation. History was made before the irreverent eyes of the lone reporter.
Undaunted, Krishnankutty planned a re-inauguration, more public and inspiring. It was, however, difficult to obtain another corpse. Since the Muslims and Christians did not cremate their dead, one third of the city’s population had to be discounted as potential clientele, and even the more progressive Hindu families were wary because of the history of the institution. It then occurred to Krishnankutty that his friend John was Christian, yet John’s mother had been cremated. Why was this? Why did Christians in Kerala bury their dead, while for Christians in America the manner of disposal was apparently optional? Perhaps the answer to this problem lay in a re-education of the Christian community in Trivandrum. Once the public became used to the idea of the crematorium, once there had been a significant number of uneventful funerals, Krishnankutty was convinced that his difficulties would be over.
He went to visit the heads of the three leading churches of the Christian community of Trivandrum – the Syrian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Church of South India. The Syrian priest, who did not of course believe in the caste system, but nevertheless considered the Syrian Christians to be superior to the Nair caste (of which Krishnankutty was a member), received him frostily. Since it was well known to the Nairs that in Kerala their caste was of a greater and nobler antiquity than even that of the Brahmin immigrants from the Aryan north, Krishnankutty was not impressed. The priest explained matters to him as to a child. American Christians, he said, were living in a state of serious theological error. The Syrians, a people of great antiquity and nobility – he stressed this meaningfully – were the preservers of original historical truth, and would never deviate from ancient custom. Since the time of their founder St Thomas the Apostle, whose hallowed bones rested in Madras, they had buried their dead.
Samuel Varghese, the Roman Catholic priest, was a man of Indo-Portuguese descent from Goa. He was more courteous, deferring politely to Krishnankutty. He explained that since Our Lord himself had been buried, and si
nce Christians awaited the final resurrection of the body. Catholic Christians all over the world, including America, considered burial the only acceptable final rite in the sight of God.
There were two equally important congregations of the Church of South India in Trivandrum. Theoretically they had merged thirty years previously in the union of all Protestant denominations, but in practice they had little to do with each other. The English-speaking high-born congregation was the legacy of the Anglican missionaries of the British Raj, and still used the Episcopalian liturgy. The bishop told Krishnankutty that cremation could never be contemplated because there was no provision for it in the Book of Common Prayer.
The pastor of the poorer Malayalam-speaking congregation, the Reverend Jesudas, had been trained by the evangelical Con- gregationalists of the London Missionary Society. He conceded that while there was no express theological injunction against cremation, within India it did of course have the connotation of a Hindu ritual. And Christians, he said, were a people called to be different, to bear witness to the gospel of Christ. He quoted from the King James version of the Bible. “Come ye out from among them, saith the Lord, and be ye separate and touch not the unclean thing.” For Christians, he said as gently as possible, Hindu rituals were – metaphorically speaking, of course – unclean.
* * *
All this was very confusing, and not very promising, for Krish- nankutty. But he felt that hope was not completely excluded with respect to the former London Missionary Society people. Perhaps if John, who was of that same Protestant tradition, were to talk with the pastor, something might be achieved. So he went to find his friend John, whom he had not seen during the many months of his construction project. But John, it seemed, had bent as new rice before the monsoon of enlightenment, and it was several days before he was found in a small and wretched hut alongside the temple. He was barely recognisable.
Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Page 7