They took her to Pandharpur, because there was never any question of taking her anywhere else.
It is what the Vārkarī do. The body is given back to the Chandrabhāgā — the river that bends like a crescent moon around the town, the river Aaji had walked to forty times on her own two living feet, in the heat and the rain, with her bad knees and her thin grey-green sari and her tin trunk of provisions on her head. She had spent her whole life walking toward Pandharpur. Now Pandharpur was the one direction left to walk her.
Meera drove down with her mother and her uncle on the third day, the small earthen pot wrapped in clean white cloth on her mother's lap. Nobody spoke much. There wasn't a great deal to say that the road wasn't already saying — the same road south, past Sangli, the same fields going from green to gold to the dry red of the Solapur belt, the land flattening and opening the way the land does as you come down toward the Bhīmā.
She had braced herself for Pandharpur to be sad. It was the opposite of sad. It was loud.
🌊 The Town That Says One Word
You hear it before you see it.
Even now, weeks short of the great Āṣāḍhī walk, the town was thick with pilgrims — old men in white Gandhi caps, women with tulsi pots balanced on their heads, whole village dindīs moving through the lanes behind a saffron flag and a small portable shrine, and over all of it, under all of it, in all of it, the one word, said and sung and shouted and breathed by ten thousand mouths at once until it stopped being a word and became the air itself.
Viṭṭhal. Viṭṭhal. Pāṇḍuraṅga. Jai Hari Viṭṭhal.
Meera walked into it the way you walk into the sea — bracing, then giving up the brace, because there was no holding yourself separate from it. The lanes narrowed toward the temple. The crowd thickened. Someone pressed a flower into her hand and was gone. A boy ran past with a brass pot. An ancient woman, smaller even than Aaji had been, gripped Meera's forearm with surprising strength, looked up into her face with milky eyes, said "Māuli" — the word the Vārkarī use for everyone, the word that means mother, the word that means you are Viṭṭhal too — and released her and was swallowed by the press.
And Meera, who had come here braced to be alone in her grief, felt the first crack in a thing she had not known she was holding.
Because she had been carrying Aaji's death as hers. Her loss. Her grandmother. Her cloth that smelled of sandal and old cotton, gone from her world. She had driven down the highway three days ago alone inside that her. And here was a town full of strangers saying the only Name Aaji had ever wanted said, none of them knowing that an old woman from Sangli had died with that exact word on her lips at half past three in the morning — and somehow all of them knowing, because it was the same word, because they were all walking the same wārī, because the grief Meera thought was hers turned out to be a single drop in a river that had been running for eight hundred years.
She was not carrying Aaji alone. She had never been carrying her alone.
The Brick
She went into the temple before the river. The line moved her along, slow and patient and ungovernable, the way the line at Pandharpur has moved pilgrims for centuries, and then suddenly she was through the low dark doorway and there He was.
She had expected to feel nothing. She was an engineer from Baner; she had spent her childhood being polite to deities and her twenties ignoring them; she had no equipment for this. But she had not expected the brick.
Viṭṭhal stands on a brick. That is the whole strange tender heart of the Pandharpur story — that the devotee Puṇḍalik was so absorbed in serving his aged parents that when the Lord Himself arrived, Puṇḍalik tossed Him a brick to stand on and asked Him to wait. And the Lord, charmed, waited. He is still waiting. Eight hundred years, on a brick, hands on His hips, a small dark smiling figure who came when He was called and then simply stayed — for the cowherds, for the poets, for the lepers and the kings, for forty years of one grandmother's bad knees, and now, apparently, for a frightened software engineer who did not believe in any of this and was crying anyway.
You came, she thought, with no idea who she was thinking it to. You're still here. You waited.
The line pushed her on. She was out in the light again before she had finished the thought, blinking, her face wet, holding her crushed flower.
The Water
They did the rite at the ghāṭ in the late afternoon, when the heat had gone soft and gold and the river took the color of the sky.
A pandit guided them — quiet, kind, unhurried, a man who had stood at this water saying these words over other people's grandmothers more times than he could count and had not let it go cold in him. Her uncle did the offerings with the rice and the water and the dark sesame. Her mother could not stop her hands shaking. And then the pandit looked at Meera, because someone had told him, because the family had decided, and he said gently, "You will give her to the river. You were the one who was with her at the end. It should be your hands."
So it was Meera's hands that took the small earthen pot.
She carried it down the worn steps — the steps Namdev had sat on, the steps where the poet-saint had asked to be buried so that the dust of every pilgrim's feet would fall on him forever — down to where the Chandrabhāgā moved slow and brown and enormous, bending its great crescent around the town, and she waded out to her knees into the cool of it, the current pulling gently at her, and she stood there for a moment with the pot in her two hands and could not, for one last second, let go.
Because this was the cloth. This was the last of the cloth. The smell was already gone from the world; now the last weight of it was about to go too, into the water, and there would be nothing left to hold.
And then — she would tell Arjun later that she could not explain it, that it was not a thought, that it arrived the way the quiet had arrived on the temple kitchen floor — she understood that she had been trying to hold the wrong thing the entire time. She had been holding the pot as if Aaji were in the pot. As if love were a substance that lived in ash and cloth and had to be physically retained or it would be lost. But the whole town behind her was shouting the proof that this was not so. Aaji was not in the pot. Aaji was in the Name — the Name was where she had poured herself for sixty years, the Name was the boat she had been building plank by plank her whole life precisely so that this moment, the moment of letting go of the cloth, would not be a drowning but an embarkation.
Meera did not have to carry her grandmother across the ocean. She never had. There was Someone whose entire promise was that He would do the carrying — swiftly, surely, for anyone who had given themselves to Him the way that small fierce woman had given herself, one wārī at a time, for forty years.
She let go.
The pot tipped. The river took it — the ash, the cloth, the last weight — and turned it instantly into nothing more than river, and the brown water closed over it and moved on, indifferent and merciful, toward the sea it had always been going to. And Meera stood knee-deep in the Chandrabhāgā with her empty hands open at her sides and felt the strangest thing rise in her where the grief had been:
Not the end of love. The safety of it. The bottomless relief of a thing finally set down into hands stronger than her own.
What She Read
That night, in a cheap clean lodge near the temple, with the Name still leaking through the walls from a bhajan that apparently never stopped, Meera opened the yellow book.
She found the twelfth chapter, the chapter on devotion, the chapter she had skimmed a year ago and not been ready for, and she read Krishna's promise to those who do exactly what Aaji had done — who give up their grasping, who fix the heart on Him, who worship Him not as a concept but as a Person they love:
For those who worship Me, surrendering all their actions to Me, regarding Me as the supreme goal and meditating on Me with undeviating devotion — for them I become the swift deliverer from the ocean of birth and death. — Bhagavad-gītā 12.6–7
The swift deliverer. Samuddhartā. The one who lifts you up and out.
She had watched it that afternoon, knee-deep in the river. She had felt the moment of letting go turn from a drowning into a rescue. She had not delivered Aaji across anything. She had simply opened her hands, and the current — the real current, the One the brown water was only a picture of — had been there the whole time, waiting on a brick, hands on His hips, for the cloth to finally be set down so that He could carry home the one who had been walking toward Him her entire life.
And underneath that, quieter, a thought about herself that she was almost afraid to look at directly: I have been trying to carry myself this whole year too. The debugging table. The burndown chart. The grim engineer's project of fixing her own soul through better practice, harder discipline, more correct understanding. As if liberation were a ticket she had to close. But the verse did not say cross the ocean by your own strength. It said give yourself to Me, and I will carry you. Aaji had never once tried to save herself. She had just kept saying the Name and walking toward the river. And the river had done the rest.
Meera closed the book. She did not feel finished. She felt, for the first time, that she did not have to be the one finishing it.
🪔 Reflection — How do I stay?
The question has turned four times this year, and tonight it turns once more — the deepest turn, the one that undoes the question itself.
I stay by sitting back down. (Ch 23) I stay by sitting in the circle. (Ch 24) I stay by giving. (Ch 25) I stay because the one I love did not end. (Ch 26)
And now:
I stay by letting myself be carried. For a whole year I thought staying was something I did — a grip I had to maintain, a practice I had to enforce, a soul I had to ferry across the water by the strength of my own tired arms. Aaji never gripped anything. She gave herself away, one Name at a time, for forty years, and when the river came she simply opened her hands and let the One she had loved do the carrying. That is the secret the whole loud town has been shouting all along. I do not stay by holding on harder. I stay by finally letting go into Him — because He is the swift deliverer, and He has been standing on the brick this entire time, hands on His hips, waiting for me to set the pot down.