The ashes -- where do they go? The problem of mourning.

We came home late in the afternoon. Energy had been sapped out of most of the people who came back with us. The sun was hot and the air was as sticky as it always is in Mumbai. We had a box of ashes and a garland of flowers. Relatives wanted me to do something with the flowers. Something suitably ceremonial. Appropos of nothing, someone suggested that it should be immersed in the holy waters of the Arabian sea. I thought about it.
Did my cremated father have any opinion here? Would he countenance the further pollution of the already polluted sea? Did the custom offer anything for me in terms of resolution or finality or peace? It certainly did offer something to my relatives and mom but I couldn't care less about a meaningless custom that didn't really fit modern Mumbai.
So, I did something that I wonder if I should regret but I don't. I took the garlands and quietly put them in the trash bin down the street from the crematorium when no one was looking.
My mom later asked whether I had immersed them in the sea. I said "Un huh" and left it with that white lie.
I did take the ashes eventually and put them in the Arabian Sea. A friend of my dad (the same person who had no problems using my dead father's clothes because he had rushed to Mumbai in a hurry) took the remaining ashes with him to some Hindu holy spot and immersed them in the Ganges. Perhaps my dad would have liked that given his Hindu beliefs. I picked off some of my dad's clothes too. I still have a few lying around.

Well wishers streamed in all day and into the night.
Some people go to great lengths to tell you how they found out. It doesn't really matter.
Some people who you hardly know cry in front of you and I wonder if I should be consoling them. Are they crying with relief that they were not impacted in such a way?
A lot of kids from the school where my mom taught for decades came to express their condolences.
A school kid had been blown up as well. A promising cricketer.
A neighbor who had been told by an astrologer that he would die by the sea (and spent his hours in fear of this prediction - so I was reliably told) carefully avoided expressing anything as I passed him by downstairs on my way to the local store. There's the evil eye from the cursed that he was trying to avoid perhaps? Or was it my imagination. Mumbai is such a melting pot of cultures that it hurts the head to track all the possible quirky superstitions that people bring with them from their "native place".
Sometimes a couple of dozen people showed up at the same time. I kept up visits to the local store to buy juice cartons all the time. I think I bought ice creams some times as well. And bananas. I also picked up a cigarette or two. It almost felt like a party. In time, mom seemed to have reached some kind of temporary equilibrium. We got an hour or two at home by ourselves and could stand on the balcony looking out at the sea. I began to reconnect with some of my old girlfriends. Sometimes I opened the closet where my dad's clothes were stored and smelled him. How long would his faint smells last I wondered? I picked off the clothes that I thought he had worn most recently and stuffed them into a suitcase.

The days rolled by and it was almost a week since I had returned. It was time to get my visa so I could go back. I decided to go to US embassy at 4 AM the next day. I had to deal with my Visa problem.