Bernard’s concealment of Asima’s ashes

Bernard’s concealment of Asima’s ashes is the secret at the centre of his letter to Joyce: after Asima’s death, he secretly kept her real ashes rather than allow them to be scattered on the Ganges. He substituted sawdust and bonemeal in the funeral urn, which his daughter Sufi and her husband Majid carried to Varanasi, and buried the ashes in a tin beneath a bench. The account makes the concealment both an act of bereavement and a breach of trust within Bernard’s family.

The wish and the deception

Asima had wished for her ashes to be scattered on the Ganges, a wish that Sufi had grown up hearing. Two days after the funeral, Sufi and Majid travelled to Varanasi and scattered what they believed were Asima’s ashes. In his letter, Bernard reveals to Joyce that they were not the real ashes. He does not dispute Asima’s wish; instead, he explains that, immediately after losing her, he could not bear the thought of her being placed in hand luggage and then carried away from him.

Bernard first kept the urn at home. Sufi and Majid, who had stayed at a hotel rather than in his spare room, did not know what he had done. Bernard then emptied the urn into a Tiger-shaped tea caddy and filled the urn with sawdust and bonemeal, which he says made a convincing substitute. He sealed the urn again, leaving the deception intact for the journey and the scattering ceremony.

The tea caddy and the hidden ashes

The caddy carried a private history of its own. Years earlier, Bernard and Asima had found it in an antique shop. They had joked about the tiger shape and given one another matching tiger nicknames. Bernard later returned to buy it as a Christmas surprise, only to discover that Asima had already bought it for him. He kept it from then on. By choosing this familiar object as the hiding place, he entrusted Asima’s ashes to something bound to their shared life rather than to the official funeral vessel.

The day after substituting the ashes, Bernard waited until soon after dark, took a spade from the allotment shed, and walked up the hill. He cut the turf from beneath a bench, dug a hole, and buried the tin there. He knew even then that the burial could only be temporary, but was not ready to let Asima go. The turf settled back, and no one noticed. Bernard returned to the bench each day: he greeted passers-by and, when they were gone, spoke to Asima.

Grief, loyalty, and confession

Bernard’s letter does not present grief as an excuse. He tells Joyce that he was paralysed by it and would have done anything to prevent Asima from floating away, but also admits that he had forgotten she was Sufi’s mother too. He understood that keeping the ashes betrayed his daughter and that he could never make amends. His confession therefore reveals the cost of his attempt to hold on: the private comfort of preserving Asima’s ashes depended on deceiving the daughter who had carried out her mother’s stated wish.

As Joyce reads the letter to Ron and Ibrahim, Ibrahim reflects that some people love their children more than their partners, while others love their partners more than their children, and that no one can admit to either choice. His observation brings the family conflict into focus without resolving it. Joyce nods and begins a new page; Bernard’s account remains both an explanation for his actions and an admission of the harm they caused.