Varanasi, the Indian city chosen for Asima’s final journey to the Ganges, becomes the destination of a carefully concealed substitution. Sufi and Majid travel there believing they are scattering Asima’s ashes, but Bernard Cottle has kept the real remains and replaced them with sawdust and bonemeal. The later journey of the actual ashes to Fairhaven gives Varanasi a particular significance: it is where a farewell took place, but not the one Bernard could yet bear to make.

The Intended Farewell

Asima had expressed a wish, many years earlier, for her ashes to be scattered on the Ganges. Bernard explains that other rivers might serve in contemporary practice, but that the Ganges retained special importance for a generation with the means to travel there. It was a wish Sufi had grown up hearing, making the journey to Varanasi a fulfillment of a long-known family intention.

Two days after Asima’s funeral, Sufi and Majid flew to Varanasi and scattered the contents of the urn on the Ganges. From their perspective, the journey completed the promised rite. Bernard’s account, however, reveals that the urn did not contain Asima’s ashes.

A Journey Built on Concealment

Unable to accept that Asima’s ashes would be taken away in hand luggage and then dispersed, Bernard kept them at home after the funeral. He poured them into the Tiger-shaped tea caddy associated with a private Christmas memory between the couple, then filled the urn with a convincing mixture of sawdust and bonemeal. Sufi and Majid took that substitute to Varanasi without knowing the exchange had been made.

The deception arose from Bernard’s grief, but he does not present grief as an excuse. He recognizes that he had withheld Asima from their daughter as well as from the journey she had been promised. Varanasi therefore marks both the completion of Sufi’s understanding of her mother’s wish and the consequence of Bernard’s decision to keep the real ashes close.

The Later Destination

The substitution did not settle the question of Asima’s final resting place. Much later, Joyce describes how she combined Asima’s ashes with Bernard’s and arranged for Sufi and Majid to take the mixed remains to Fairhaven. That journey, rather than the earlier one to Varanasi, allowed Asima’s actual ashes to be scattered while remaining joined with the ashes of the man she loved.

The contrast between the two destinations gives Varanasi its narrative force. The Ganges journey initially appears to fulfill Asima’s wish, yet Bernard’s secret makes it an incomplete farewell; the later scattering at Fairhaven brings the real ashes into the journey and companionship he had tried to prevent from ending.