The pale white sack is made of rough, thickly woven cotton. It is tied with string at the top and bunched at the bottom. It dangles from my hand, almost touching the ground, its dense contents weighing around five kilos. I hesitate at the door of the SUV, wondering where to place it before we start the journey.

I consider placing it on the floor of the vehicle. But that would mean putting it near my feet. I cannot bring myself to do that; it strikes me as utterly disrespectful. I feel guilty for even having the thought.

I think about placing the heavy wet sack on my lap. That is not an attractive prospect, as I imagine sitting still for hours, my legs cramping under its weight, my damp trousers sticking to my thighs, the slight smell of sick from the sack too close to ignore.

While I hesitate, my brother- and sister-in-law, my son, and the driver have all settled in the car. Finally, I decide to stow the sack in the luggage compartment. I place it on the light gray matting in the company of a spare tire, a bottle of IndianOil Servo XEE engine oil, a grease-stained tool bag, and a battered metal first aid kit.

Once I shut the luggage compartment, I pause, plagued by doubt. Should I have kept it with me in the cabin?

The cloth sack contains my father’s bones.

We are on our way from New Delhi to Haridwar, 150 miles away, to immerse the bones in the holy river Ganges. In the Punjabi language, the mortal remains after cremation are described as phul, or flowers.

There is an air of normalcy inside the vehicle. This could be any car ride. In the cabin are four passengers, the driver, a case of bottled Himalayan mineral water, a pack of almost-certainly soggy tomato sandwiches, and a bunch of too-ripe bananas, on the cusp between barely edible and unacceptably mushy. A lunch in progressive decay, which my mother insisted we carry.

I wish our family were all making this journey together. In not coming with us to Haridwar, my mother has chosen to follow an old tradition, now largely abandoned, in which women left the funeral rites to the men in the family. My wife and daughter have stayed behind to keep her company.

Seated above the wheels in the last of three rows of seats, I am experiencing every little movement of the uneven ride. Behind me is the luggage compartment, and in it is my father. I think of the sack, which has a garland of marigolds wrapped around it, bouncing around back there, without even the restraint of a seat belt to hold it in place.

I picture the frail man who for the last few months of his life was fed through a plastic PEG tube, fitted directly into his stomach, delivering food reduced to its barest essentials. Food without texture, without flavor, without fragrance — joyless sustenance.

It must hurt him to be knocked around in the luggage compartment of the car. But I suppose it’s not really him in the sack. It’s his bones, calcium and phosphorus, tempered by the heat of the funeral pyre.

At the cremation ground, two days before our drive to Haridwar, my brother, my son, our close male relatives, and I carried my father’s enshrouded and marigold-bedecked body on a bamboo bier. As our family and friends watched, we laid the body to rest on a pile of logs. We covered it with fragrant sandalwood and then with more logs until he was no longer visible. And then, as the eldest son leading the ritual, I lit the ghee-soaked kindling below my father’s head.

From a doubtful smoky beginning, the pyre quickly transformed into a roaring inferno. The flames leapt up toward the stilt-supported roof of the open-sided cremation building. I was disturbed by a recurring thought: I helped place these crushingly heavy logs on my father’s body, and then it was I who set fire to it. In a daze, I imagined him suffering under the weight in the extreme heat.

We returned the next day with a different task: to sift the bones from the ash of the pyre.

We descended the four steps into the kund, the pit within which the fire was lit, and moved toward the thick, uneven bed of ash that remained. We took turns cupping our hands to lift water from a bucket and sprinkle it on the ashes, cooling and settling them in preparation for our search. “Watch me do it,” said the cremation ground employee who was assisting us. “Sprinkle just a little bit of water, or it will be an impossible slushy mess.” Smoke rose from the damp ashes as they settled. It hurt my eyes. A sob rose in my throat.

The early morning summer sun was already harsh. Working in a section of the ash bed, I collected the larger bones, which were easily visible. In the extreme heat of the pyre, many of them had broken into smaller pieces. In fragments, with ash sticking to them, they did not look anything like the sketches I remembered from my school anatomy textbook; it was hard to identify which part of the body they belonged to. I sifted the ash between my fingers. Some little pieces were hard to identify for certain as bone; they might have been lumps of wood or ash or even very small pebbles. I pressed one of the lumps between my right forefingers and thumb to check. Some ash fell away, but I was no surer of the lump’s identity than I was before.

The image of the man these pieces of bone had been a part of, only three days ago, returned to my mind: his thick-rimmed glasses, his always serious expression accentuated by prominent nasolabial folds, his gentle smile that arrived to lighten his look in animated conversation.

I continued my work in the ash bed. My hands touched something bigger and more rounded than the other pieces I had handled: a piece of my father’s skull. I sat down and ran my fingertips over it. There was almost no ash sticking to it. It was thinner than I imagined a skull to be, and less smooth than it looked. I held it in my left hand and placed my right palm over the rounded top, thinking of when this bone was covered with shiny skin: very bald, very oily, and very soft, with a few straggly gray hairs lower down the pate.

Having worked our way through the ash bed, we transferred all the bones to the bucket of water. Sitting on our haunches around the bucket, we took turns reaching in and picking up a few bones at a time from the bottom where they had sunk. We eased off the ash where it was still sticking. The cremation ground employee stood nearby holding open a cloth sack, and we placed the cleaned, wet bones inside it.

When we finished, I carried the dripping sack into the offices of the cremation ground, cupping it carefully from below. An official took the sack for safekeeping in a locker room overnight. He issued me a receipt.

We would return early the next morning to collect my father’s bones for the journey to Haridwar.

We continue our journey on National Highway 58. The road is busy with overloaded lorries listing dangerously. Slow tractors hold back traffic as they draw trailers laden with bags of recently harvested wheat or, occasionally, colorfully dressed wedding parties: the women a splash of mustard yellow, bright orange, magenta, and gold. Stray cattle walk nonchalantly along the road.

We turn into Cheetal Grand, the rest and refreshment stop that marks a halfway point. After we finally find an empty parking space to squeeze into, the others get out of the vehicle. As I disembark, I hesitate. Should we take my father’s remains with us? Or should we take turns going to the loo and having a cup of tea so that he isn’t left alone in the car?

We leave the sack by itself in the luggage compartment.

We walk into a large, soulless café and buy cups of masala tea. The tea is rich with milk and far too much sugar. As we drink it, we reminisce about my father. With amusement, we recall his exaggerated reaction to a lack of hygiene. His unhappiness showed in his expression when he was in a less than pristinely clean environment. He would have found it impossible to drink tea in this café while waving flies off the sticky rim of the cup. We talk about the prayer meeting for which we must find a venue on our return to New Delhi. Sitting next to me, my son places his hand lightly on my knee.

When my mother called me in London and told me my father was very ill, I rushed to board a flight. Over nine hours in the air, I was afraid I might be too late to say goodbye. I arrived in New Delhi after midnight and headed straight to my father’s bedside.

His eyes were closed, an IV drip attached to his right arm, a cannula in his nostrils supplementing the oxygen going to his lungs. The nurse’s expression conveyed the gravity of the situation. My mother, sitting in a chair next to my father’s bed, looked at me and forced a half smile of welcome. We hugged for what felt like a long time, her face buried in my chest. I could feel her sobs somewhere deep inside my shoulder.

My 92-year-old father was still alive but sinking. He opened his eyes. “You took so long,” he said softly. “I came as fast as I could,” I said.

I kissed him on the head. I wanted to feel every moment of his presence, to hold it in my memory — the intimacy of the gesture, the feel of my father’s cold face, his bald head out of focus as I looked at it from up close. Pulling away to stand by his bedside, my right hand placed lightly on his head, I saw his bushy, unkempt eyebrows, individual rogue hairs curling away from others, his glassy gray eyes staring straight at me. He was smiling shyly, as he always did, when I kissed him on the head. I touched his left hand, and he clasped mine back with a strength I did not know he still possessed. His palm was damp with sweat, as always. I suspect mine was too. It’s in the genes.

My mother and I sat by my father, taking turns holding his hand and softly singing his favorite chant, “Om namah shivaya, Om namah shivaya.” His hands became darker, colder. The nurse checked his blood pressure; it was too low and not registering properly. The monitor recorded a pulse of thirty-two.

When I arrived at midnight, his abdomen had moved with each breath. Now that rhythmic movement was barely visible, even at his upper chest. He seemed to look without seeing.

I gazed at his throat. At the top of his Adam’s apple, a single gray hair moving with each breath told me he was still alive. I looked intently, waiting for another breath. There was another. Then another.

My father continued like this for another two and a half hours, suspended in the space between the barely living and the not yet dead — all the while, moving slowly but inexorably into death.

When I was a child, bedtime stories were my father’s department. During his telling of the epic Ramayana, upon King Dasaratha’s passing, I asked, “What happened to him when he died?” My father said, “Nothing much, really. When the body is old and tired, the soul discards it like an old shirt.”

Soon the single hair on his Adam’s apple had stopped moving. My father had no breath. He had no pulse. It wasn’t my father as I knew him. It was his dead body lying there. It was the discarded shirt.

When we reach Haridwar, we park the car and begin the journey to the immersion site on foot. Outside the air-conditioned vehicle, the glare and heat feel almost unbearable. In silence, we head for the pedestrian bridge over the Ganges. The breeze from the river is damp and cool. We climb the stairs onto the bridge. My attention is on the sack in my hands, on my breath and on every step.

I look at the fast-flowing current of the Ganges below. Upstream in the distance, through the summer haze, are the purple mountains of the lower Himalayas; above them is a vast blue sky. Thirty years earlier, my father and his brothers made this same journey to Haridwar with my grandfather’s remains. They must have encountered this same view.

At the end of the bridge, we climb down the steps and arrive at Har Ki Pauri, the tile-paved riverside location for rituals. It is crowded and noisy. A number of small groups sit in clusters around priests conducting ceremonies.

Two waiting priests greet us with palms held together in the traditional namaste. One of them holds a large thali, a steel platter, upon which I place the sack of bones. We all sit down on low wooden stools in a semicircle open to the riverfront. The thali with the sack of bones and the ritual samagri — incense, flowers, turmeric, red kumkum powder, and other worship essentials — are before us. I sit with one of the priests at the water’s edge.

The priest reaches into the sack and takes out a few bones at a time. He places the bones along with marigolds in my cupped palms. He guides us to recite a mantra, each time chanting it himself and then having us accompany him when he repeats it. With each round of recitation, he asks me to place a few bones in the Ganges.

I slope my cupped hands, my fingers dipping in the cold snowmelt. The bones roll into the water, each one swept away in the fast-flowing current. At first they float, then sink in the distance. The marigolds are visible for a while longer on the water’s surface, and then they, too, disappear. I let the bones slide into the water with a repetitive prayerful motion. I lose track of time. My awareness seems to contract and expand like a wave. Sometimes it’s just me, the bones, the flowers, and the river. Then, like a bellows, my awareness expands to include our surroundings: the temple bells, my family sitting next to me, the priest, and our ancestors.

After about an hour, the priest stands up and begins to collect his things. As if under a spell, I continue to sit, watching the river flow past this place where countless such ceremonies have been performed over millennia.

A silence engulfs me. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, a feeling of being blessed bubbles up. I was with my father at the moment of his passing. I held his mortal remains in my hands. And then, with love and prayer, I committed them to the Ganges.