The Ganges is central to the story of Asima’s ashes: it was the river she had wished to be scattered on, but the first journey there carried only a substitute. Bernard Cottle’s grief led him to keep her real ashes, and the later reunion of their remains gave the river a second, more intimate place in the story of her farewell.

Asima’s wish and the first journey

In Bernard’s letter, he explains that Asima had expressed a wish many years earlier to have her ashes scattered on the Ganges. Their daughter Sufi had grown up hearing about that wish. Two days after Asima’s funeral, Sufi and her husband, Majid, flew to Varanasi and scattered what they believed to be Asima’s ashes in the river.

Bernard reveals that the ashes in the urn were not hers. The night after the funeral, he transferred Asima’s ashes into a tiger-shaped tea caddy, a keepsake associated with a private joke and an exchange of Christmas presents between the couple. He then filled the urn with sawdust and bonemeal, sealed it, and left it for Sufi and Majid to take to India. The Ganges received what they thought was Asima, while the real ashes remained with Bernard.

Grief kept close

Bernard describes his act as arising from an inability to comprehend Asima’s departure so soon after her death. He was not ready for her to be placed in hand luggage and carried away; in his grief, he wanted to prevent her from floating away. He also acknowledges the cost of that decision: Asima was Sufi’s mother as well as his wife, and withholding the ashes betrayed his daughter’s trust.

The caddy gave Bernard a way to keep Asima near without making the concealment visible. The day after hiding her ashes, he buried the tin beneath the turf under a bench and returned there to sit. He spoke to Asima when nobody else was nearby. In his account, the Ganges is thus both the destination of her stated wish and the place from which Bernard’s secret kept her, for a time, at a distance.

A changed farewell

Bernard’s final letter asks for his own ashes to be scattered off the pier at Fairhaven and links that request to Asima’s. Joyce understands his postscript as an instruction: she arranges for his ashes to be combined with the ashes Bernard had hidden in the caddy. The tin is reburied beneath the bench, while the urn containing the mixed ashes is taken to Fairhaven by Sufi and Majid, who are not told what it contains.

The final scattering therefore does not take place on the Ganges. Instead, Asima’s ashes reach the water at Fairhaven together with half of Bernard’s, allowing her to be set free while remaining, in the story’s terms, in the embrace of the man she loved. The contrast between the first journey to Varanasi and the later scattering at Fairhaven makes the river’s significance more than a matter of geography: it is the destination Asima chose, and the image Bernard could not accept until his own ashes could accompany hers.