The River Ganges will rinse the ashes from her body but she won't come out clean. Ma Ganga absorbs back into her all that she has birthed. An entire civilization's prayers filth hope tears -- ashes and charred remains of babies old people young husbands early widows burned alive.
They say that cholera microbes live in distilled water for 24 hours but only 3 in Ganges water, even though it flows with human and animal shit, sweat beaten from dirty bodies and clothes, corpses of men beasts gods all. The river washes it away but we none of us come out clean.

Rocking in the chair where she had nursed him, Richard's mother told me that her parents had burned their love letters before they died.
"I came home to find Mother and Daddy stoking a fire in the back yard, feeding letters from shoeboxes into the blaze. Their faces glowed and the paper curled. I was so angry I could have spit. They were calm, 'Those are ours and you can't have them when we die.' "
She sipped her bourbon and steadied her voice: "Some things you can't have no matter how much you want them or think you deserve them."

On the third night exhaustion wins gravelly thin sleep claims me and I dream of Richard, who at 18 loved me in secret until he died -- too tired to drive all night from Nashville somewhere near Ozark Alabama -- and his mother called me.
When you die, your secrets belong to everyone.
"He said you were the kindest person he'd ever known. Remember that, child." I drove two days to find the place where his car had gone off the road but the kudzu guarded it jealously no place more holy than another. No torn sod no scraped trunks sparkle of glass twisted chrome no glimpse of the shade that made me widow. I pulled over blinking hot tears onto frayed cutoffs. A man straddling a Harley called me Cherry as I scrubbed bugs from my windshield at the next gas station.
"Hey darlin' I like your tattoo. Your boyfriend kiss you there?"

I don't know if she'll burn the letters or bear them home with us -- 36 hours on the train one night in Bangkok (I laugh while she dances and memory's gravity works on time like a black hole -- the last ten years bend so fast I feel dizzy -- she shimmies leans close to my face coos, "Sunshine," winks) a stopover in Los Angeles. I've known her since we were children but even she doesn't know what she will do. I would keep them white-knuckled nails digging in until I had worn the print from the pages and the features from David's face.

The Larium has disturbed us both. You whimper his name in your sleep but I don't dream. I barely sleep. I lie grinding my molars in the hot night air watching mosquitoes on the bednetting. In Uganda poor brides use the UN-supplied nets for making veils and virginal dresses, then burn with fever delirious wondering what possession what curse has taken them.
My predecessors fought natives cholera unimaginable heat for this place. For something holy? Glory? Riches? To sit on verandas sipping gin and quinine tonics watching their bony, tough memsahibs order about ayahs who chase half-wild Indian-born English children. Sunburnt children who play with snakes and flow between languages like scrawny dogs slipping in and out of shadows. Children with grave eyes and yellow-stained fingers from spreading marigold petals on Baba's shrine. Hands scrubbed clean secrets kept from mummy.