Free Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

of importance, that he was especially arranging for the American woman to leave the country as quickly as possible. At any rate, she was now in a taxi on her way to the airport with nothing but her return ticket and her pocket-book. Next to the driver in the front seat was the gentleman who had defended her. She was thinking how sweet and easy and simple it was to sacrifice the few clothes and books, the purchased batiks and brasses, left back at the hostel. But the gentleman was saying something.
    â€œMy name is Matthew Thomas and I am having a daughter in Burlingtonvermont. I am hearing you say this place yesterday, and I am thinking perhaps you know my daughter?”
    She shook her head and smiled.
    â€œMy daughter … I am missing her very much … She is having a child … There are many things I am not understanding …”
    They talked then, waiting at the airport where the fans were not working and the plane was late. When the boarding call finally came, Jennifer promised: “I will visit your daughter, and I will write. I understand all the things you want to know.”
    Mr Matthew Thomas put his hands on her shoulders in a courteous formal embrace. She was startled and moved. “It is because you are the age of my daughter,” he said, “and because you go to where she is.”
    Mr Chandrashekharan Nair watched the plane circle overhead. He was on his way to the temple of Sree Padmanabhaswamy to receive prasadam and to give thanks to Lord Vishnu. He had just made a most satisfactory report of the incident to the newspaper reporter, and had been able to link it rather nicely to the Coca-Cola issue. It was a most auspicious day.
    The ways of God are truly remarkable, thought Mr Matthew Thomas as he left the airport. To think that the whole purpose behind the education of his wife’s cousin’s son had been the answer to his prayers about Kumari.
    Jennifer Harper watched the red-tiled flat roofs and the coconut plantations and the rice paddies dwindle into her past. “Oh yes,” she would say casually in Burlington, Vermont. “India. A remarkable country.”

Ashes to Ashes
    Corpses, that is the answer. Corpses are my future, thought Krishnankutty with elation and smiled upon his bride Saraswathi as they exchanged the garlands of flowers. She was dazzled by the light of his destiny. It is love, she thought, for she had a college degree in English literature and was an avid reader of Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt, and other English novelists circulated in paperback among the well-educated and well-born young women of Trivandrum. She recognised the bold and dark passion of the foreign-returned man and quivered with delicious fear.
    Krishnankutty took it as an auspicious sign. Corpses, he saw unmistakably, were his karma and his fortune. He had experienced a moment of enlightenment and she had perceived it. After the tying of the tali they held hands in an ecstasy of mutual misunderstanding. They had seen each other only once before, in the presence of others, and neither had been displeased with the parental choice, but nor had either expected such incandescence. It was the prelude to a night of passion. Krishnankutty had read the Kama Sutra while he was a graduate student at MIT – it had been lent to him by his American friend John in a paperback English translation – and that night he laid claim to his Indian heritage. Saraswathi, who had never heard of the Kama Sutra, felt that the glorious mysteries of American sex had been revealed to her.
    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