this must be a yarn

little part of a letter Tagore wrote in 1891...

Shahzadpur, February 9, 1891

Some evenings the postmaster comes upstairs to have a chat with me. His office is on the ground floor of our building - very convenient, for we get our letters as soon as they arrive. I enjoy our talks. He tells of the most improbably things in the gravest possible fashion.

Yesterday he informed me of the reverence towards the Ganges shown by the people of the locality. If someone dies, he said, and the relatives do not have the means to take his ashes to the Ganges, they powder a piece of bone from the funeral pyre and keep it until they come across a person who at some time or other has drunk the water of the sacred river. To him they administer some of this powder, hidden in a courteous offering of paan, and are so content to think that their deceased relative has finally made his pilgrimage to the blessed waters - or at least a portion of him has.

I smiled as i remarked: 'This must be a yarn.'

He pondered for quite a while and then admitted: 'Yes, it probably is.'

from 'The Picador Book Of Modern Indian Literature',
edited by Amit Chaudhuri.