We reach Allahabad later on the morning of May 28 and are driven to Rajiv’s ancestral home. We place the urn on the platform where the ashes of his grandfather, his brother, and his mother had been placed before. In the afternoon we are taken by boat to the sacred Sangam for the immersion.
Two decades earlier, on a pearly dawn, we had set off—Rajiv, his brother Sanjay, and I—on a boat ride to the Sangam at my mother-in-law’s request. Rajiv had pointed out the different colors of the water, the mood of the two rivers, one almost resisting merging with the other. He had explained the religious belief in a third river, the invisible Saraswati flowing below the mighty Ganga and the Yamuna. Finally he had guided me through the meaning of the ritual that we were then to perform.
On this day we are taken on a boat towards the Sangam—Rahul, Priyanka, and I. Crowds on other boats encircle us, chanting Rajiv’s name. We reach a platform raised over the water. We clamber onto it with others, amidst Vedic chanting. Rahul, with the priest by his side, empties his father’s ashes into the river. Priyanka holds me tenderly as my tears blind me to the scene. A military band plays “Abide with Me,” one of Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite hymns. We are taken to the shore and then back to Swaraj Bhawan.
I find Rajiv’s travel bag—someone had brought it back. He had always packed his own bags, whether for official or personal tours—as his mother had brought him up to do things on his own. My heart racing, I open it: two khadi kurta sets, handkerchiefs, a shawl, his underclothes neatly folded. His little toilet bag, toothbrush and shaver, his hairbrush, dark glasses, and a portable radio. In an inside zippered compartment, the portable array of family photographs he always carried with him—the first picture he took of me in Cambridge, and later ones. I look at them one by one: the children at different stages of their growing up, his mother and brother. A separate bag has the clothes he had changed out of. I bend over it, seeking to inhale the elusive scent of my beloved, gone forever.
