On Vijayan’s ashes, a simmering row

Teresa had authorised a publisher-friend to collect a portion of the ashes from Ravi Shankar but the latter refused. ‘‘He said I am a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and have no right to touch a Hindu’s ashes. My son is now talking to lawyers in New Delhi to assert our rights,’’ Teresa said.

‘‘If Vijayan could marry and live with a Christian, feel at home in mosques and gurudwaras, kneel and pray his heart out even in a World War-2 concentration camp site in Berlin, encourage Christian prayer service at our own home in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri every month, how will my touch defile his ashes?’’ asks Teresa.

Ravi Shankar told Express that he had sent an SMS to Vijayan’s son, saying he can have the ashes, on one condition: all of it will be ritually immersed in the Ganga. ‘‘Hindu practices say that the ashes of a dead man can’t be kept for anything other than immersion,’’ he says.

The nephew says he decided to take the initiative since Vijayan’s son had stated he was not interested in Hindu religious rituals, and had even stayed away from the funeral. Vijayan’s wife and son could join the mourners doing the immersion at Haridwar, if they wished, says Ravi Shankar.

But according to Teresa, her husband was mortally afraid of anything even suggestive of physical violence, and once sounded horrified talking to her about bodies turning to ashes. Besides, burial was a more accepted practice in Vijayan’s own Ezhava community, she says. ‘‘I still did not object to his cremation, even though Vijayan’s own father, uncles and almost all other dead kin, except his sister, were all buried,’’ Teresa says.

According to Teresa, she had asked for her husband’s ashes because the Kerala Government had requested her to provide a small portion of it for preserving at a memorial for Vijayan that it wants to construct in his native Palakkad.

Besides, she says, she thought of quietly immersing a portion of it herself.