Here is a Death

It happened exactly a year ago: Mary came out to where we sat in cane chairs on the lawn. It was late afternoon, the light was about to fade, mosquitoes had started biting. She said that a woman from the huts near our house had been working at the big construction site down the road, when a brick fell from the top of the building, hit the back of her head and came out the front, over her eye. She died, just like that. She had four small children, only this high. Her husband had sugar - diabetes - and had no strength in his arms and legs. Mary knew him because he went to her church. He had gotten stronger by praying there, but only his woman was able to work, and now she was dead, and who would take care of them? The people of the slum had carried the body home and gathered around. There was a big crowd. The construction company would pay some money to the family.

The next afternoon the drums began beating, and people were whistling and whooping. I stood by the window staring out at the crowd of men, mostly milling or strolling, but some dancing in place with their arms raised. Behind them a van draped with garlands crept along, its rear doors open. Someone sitting inside with the body threw handfuls of flowers on the road. The procession moved very slowly, starting and stopping, while the drums told everyone, 'Here is a death.'

Now the big building is still incomplete, but two weeks ago the workers' slum vanished, virtually overnight. They had been crowded into a corner of a big area of empty land -- fifty acres, government-owned, part of the Adyar River estuary, wetlands never to be built on, home to many species of birds, snakes, mongoose. Now a small tractor is levelling and filling it. Its engine grinds in the background, twenty-four hours a day. So -- more building sites, more deaths perhaps, as the workers clamber over flimsy casuarina-pole scaffoldings. Certainly our own small peace gone.