‘He’s been here with me for the last six months. Keeping me company. The body is at St Mary’s. I have to take it back to Kaipuzha.’

‘Then do it,’ Bineesh stood up. ‘Who’s here with you? Has anyone come?’

‘No, it was just us here. My two uncles will land at the airport in Nedumbassery only tomorrow morning.’

Neethu told him all about her efforts since that morning, almost as though she was talking to herself. An ambulance driver she had approached had asked her for eighty thousand rupees to take the body to Kottayam. As a matter of fact, not one person she had approached had quoted anything less than seventy-five thousand rupees. She could take a flight but it would take at least two days to arrange to have the body booked into the cargo. As for other vehicles, the local people refused to transport dead bodies in them.

‘Bastards.’ In peppering his speech with swear words, he was exactly like his father, Damu. ‘The other day, when two Telugu men died, our government paid to have the bodies taken back to their place, but when they got there, those who had accompanied the bodies got thoroughly beaten up by the local people,’ Bineesh said. ‘Aren’t you a nurse in a hospital here? Don’t they have an ambulance?’

‘Just the one,’ Neethu said. ‘And that’s gone to Mercara. It may or may not get back by tomorrow. Besides, the management can’t stand those of us who are here on work bonds.’

‘Ah, behold the glory of the Kannadiga land,’ said Bineesh in Tamil. ‘So, in short, you need the services of a smart, capable young man, right?’

‘Yeah, well, don’t be too eager to offer your services,’ Neethu retorted.

By evening, Bineesh had turned an old Maruti Omni into an adequate hearse. He put the back seats down, bought a few bottles of perfumes that God had created especially for the dead, burners for frankincense and sambrani sticks, and tied a piece of black cloth to the front of the vehicle as a warning to worms and weeds and other worldly creatures.

‘There are things that become useful only when we are dead,’ he said. ‘Reading the Puthen Pana and decorated umbrellas for you Christian folk, raw rice and darbha grass for us Hindus. We all have our insurance policies!’

When she saw the vehicle prepared for her dead father, Neethu wept recalling the hearse, meant for the destitute, left abandoned and exposed to the elements near the Kaipuzha church cemetery. It was the type that needed to be pulled by hand, and had a brass bell at the front and a few words of God rejoicing in the misfortune of humans painted on the sides. When her papa had lost his company job and sat at home, she had dreamt that her mummy played ‘Sat’ around it, sold vegetables sitting on top of it, and that it rolled uncontrollably down an incline. These days, the only people who found a use for it were the grandfathers—so old that they looked as though they were born 500 years ago when the church itself was built—who stored their hoes and baskets in it.