When Suresh was brought home on bail midday that day, Gautam felt as though he was himself on trial. Seeing him enter with a sense of shame, immobilized as he was by guilt, Gautam could make no move himself. With his troubled conscience, as Suresh dragged his feet to his mother’s body confusedly, overwhelmed by remorse, Gautam looked at him endearingly. But, Suresh stared at Sneha’s body vacantly and felt she had closed her eyes as though to save them both the embarrassment of reunion. While the son found himself staring at his mother’s body thus, the father was too embarrassed to even look at him.
Nevertheless, the irony of the moment opened Gautam’s eyes to the collapse of his ivory tower. As though he had a revelation all of a sudden, shedding all his inhibitions, he went up to his son and showed him the damning letter. When tears blurred Suresh’s vision, Gautam wiped them for him to see his mother in the dead woman.
When Suresh fell at his mother’s feet in penitence, Gautam stared at his dead wife in repentance. While the son in Suresh wept silently, to solace his own embittered soul, the father in Gautam embraced him to console himself. In a way, their tragedy seemed to have induced a mutual empathy for each other that transcended the barriers of their grief. In their state of mutual reconciliation, insensibly they both felt sympathy for the departed soul.
When came time for Sneha’s last journey, as though to stress that they shared the blame for her fall, Suresh insisted on being a pallbearer aside his father. But seeing his mother in all her nakedness on the funeral pyre, he saw the paradox of their relationship.
‘What an irony that all along I was coveting the very body that I was destined to consign to the ritualistic fire!’ thought the son melancholically. ‘It’s as though in death she assigned it to me, as it was unthinkable for her to entrust it to me when alive.’
As the purohitnudged him to do the needful, Suresh performed his duty in a caressing way as though to save her of pain to the extent possible. When her body was engulfed in flames, he prayed for her soul and vowed to fulfill her last wish were he to live. At that, he was surprised to realize that he neither feared death nor coveted life anymore. Though, the purohit signaled the end of the rituals for the day and that the ashes could be gathered on the morrow, the father and son were averse to leaving the place till the very end of Sneha's earthly existence. And, in time, as the sun sank into the horizon, the embers of the funeral pyre began to subside, bringing her ashes to the fore. As though to atone for their role in her death by ordeal of fire, they both braved the heat to gather her ashes from the remnants of the funeral pyre to the last molecule.