This cornering is made possible only because of the constitutional right provided to minorities to start and run educational institutions. There is a… - Ishwar Sharan

As these diggings did not produce the required result, Diogo Fernandez was asked, in 1523, to excavate a third tomb which lay partly under the foundation of a dilapidated building that had been occupied by the Portuguese. He refused at first but was persuaded by the attending priest, Fr. Antonio Gil, who heard his confession and that of the two men, Braz Fernandez and Diogo Lourenco, who would assist him in the pious enterprise. They then began the excavation of a deep and elaborate, and very much empty, tomb. It was Saturday afternoon, and they continued the work into the late evening, when, on the suggestion of Diogo Fernandez, they abandoned their unproductive labours and retired for the night. The excavation was left open and unattended until the next morning, a Sunday, when the men began digging again. It was not long now before the grave disgorged bones that were "much worn out", portions of skull and spine, and a clay pot of earth "bedewed with blood", with a thigh bone in it, and hidden in the red earth an iron Malabar spearhead shaped like an olive leaf, which, after fifteen Christian centuries, still had a piece of wooden shaft miraculously preserved in its socket.

This hill is crowned with a Portuguese church dedicated to the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Expectation, and was built around 1547 on the foundations of a demolished Hindu temple. It contains a wooden icon of the Virgin said to have been painted by St. Luke and given to St. Thomas at Jerusalem, an eighth century Persian “bleeding” cross said to have been carved by St. Thomas (which stopped bleeding as soon as the British moved into the area), and two paintings of St. Thomas and his spear-bearing Hindu assassin. The older painting fixed behind the altar suggests an Iyengar Brahmin wearing namam on his forehead, about to stab the praying apostle from behind, and the other painting, one of a series of the martyred apostles, shows an unidentified Hindu as the assassin.

San Thome Cathedral and Bishop’s House have been renovated and rebuilt many times over in the last hundred and fifty years, and there is a quiet effort being made by Church authorities to hide the evidence of destroyed Hindu, Jain and Buddhist 54 religious buildings that once occupied this sacred stretch of Mylapore seafront. The clean-up coincides with the work of resurrecting the communal Brahmin-killed- Thomas fable that was first propagated by the Portuguese – Marco Polo cannot be blamed for this story; his St. Thomas was accidentally killed by a pariah hunting peacocks.