Children’s songbooks laid scattered in the sand as a chorus of cousins gathered around a glowing orange campfire. The smell of boiled corn and peanuts lingered in the salty air.
Vasanti Doshi’s heart beat fast.
The seven-year-old was thrilled to camp out with her family under starry skies, but terrified they’d be discovered. This beach, one of the many segregated spaces of 1950’s South Africa, was off-limits to Indian families like hers.
It was a warm December night on the beach. The guards who typically policed these grounds were at home with their families for Christmas, but Vasanti still worried.
If one of the patrolmen returned for a forgotten cap or an impromptu check and discovered the family’s festivities, they might throw sand in her eyes or strike her with a baton.
Vasanti comforted herself by watching dark waves wash over the sand and imagining they belonged to waters out of Apartheid’s reach. She took a deep breath and began:
Way down upon the Suwannee River,
Far, far away,
There's where my heart is turning ever,
There's where the old folks stay.
Parents, siblings, grandparents and cousins –more than 40 of them– joined in. Every time the family gathered, Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” rang out into the night.
“Somehow we just all wanted that song first,” recalled Vasanti, now 83. “That’s a very sad song, but with the sadness comes this hope that things will get better.”
The song, written for a minstrel show and widely criticized for its racist dialect, wasn’t a perfect metaphor. But Vasanti didn’t know any of that as a child. She just felt drawn to the wild, nostalgic Suwannee River it described.
Vasanti hoped that Apartheid would end, that her brother-in-laws wouldn’t have to patrol the beach in trench coats in case officers spotted the campfire’s smoke.
She stashed those hopes in the image of the Suwannee, never imagining she’d see its historic waters, much less watch them every day from her home halfway across the world.
Long before moving to Florida, Vasanti attributed a sacredness to the Suwannee River, likening it to the Ganga or Ganges River in her ancestral India. To reflect, to celebrate, to mourn and to pray, Vasanti eases down the creaky steps of her backyard dock.
Today, she uses the Suwannee’s waters in funeral rites for community members who’ve passed, turning the dock into a gathering place for local Indian families.
“The Suwannee River has become our Ganga,” said her daughter, Supna. “We don't have to go anywhere. We are already home.”
The auction
Vasanti’s journey to the Suwannee River began in the 1960s, with a man on horseback.
Paresh Doshi was a dark-haired, bright-eyed Tanzania native introduced to cowboy culture through visits from the U.S. Navy. He chewed Wrigley gum and hung posters of Buck Jones and John Wayne in his room. He dreamed of running a ranch in the American West and rode around his college in India on horseback to prove it.
When Vasanti spotted him, she was hooked.
The couple married in 1970 and moved to the U.S. two years later. Paresh traded his idealistic dream of running a ranch for a more realistic one of running a motel.
He bought the Carriage Inn motel in Cross City in 1978 because of its western name.
Supna, a toddler at the time, grew up leaning on its red, wrought iron railings and sharing breakfast with former Cross City Mayor Perry Hill in the motel’s restaurant before school.
Paresh’s parents moved in with the family, bringing a piece of home to North Central Florida.
When they died, Vasanti felt drawn to the Suwannee. An employee at the motel offered their riverfront property so the family could scatter the ashes in the brown current and conduct the kind of sendoff typically done on the Ganges.
“That’s how this started,” Vasanti said, referring to her role in leading mourning prayers on the riverbank.
She never imagined how much it’d grow.
The motel
The couple sold the Carriage Inn in 1990 and Vasanti vowed never to fold another fitted sheet.
So, when Paresh announced he was heading to a motel auction on a muggy afternoon not even a year later, Vasanti gave him one rule: don’t buy anything.
He came back with the keys to the Suwannee Gables Motel and Marina
The rooms were full of dust, Paresh admitted, the bathtubs were stained and the gas heaters needed to be removed. But his banker had given him an open line of credit, he insisted, plus the yard had something he knew Vasanti would love.
“He said, ‘just come today and then you decide what you want to do,’” Vasanti recalled. “I said, Paresh, I know you are a born-again American, you take chances on money and everything.”
Paresh insisted and Vasanti gave in. She followed his lead across the parking lot and through the overgrown brush between buildings.
Then she saw it: the near-mythical river of her childhood songs, her Ganga.
“What God does for us, we have no idea,” she said, holding back tears. “God gave me my own river.”
Built in the early 1950s, the Suwannee Gables is the only motel along the length of the river. It sits on an S-shaped curve at the river’s widest point, just west of Fanning Springs.
Out front, a bright blue sign beckons travelers speeding along U.S. Highway-19 with promises of balcony rooms and wifi.
Most of the motel’s 22 rooms stand side-by-side in two single-story buildings just off the parking lot. A short, stone Buddha statue sits in a flower bed by the lobby’s door. Out back, three deck-lined cabins accommodate larger groups or longer stays.
All rooms look out on the river.
The Suwannee is the motel’s lifeblood. Guests rent pontoon boats and kayaks to explore the sunken steamboat a mile and a half upstream. A parade of boats decked out in twinkling lights sails by each Christmas.
The final rites
In the Hindu tradition, bodies are typically cremated and their ashes scattered in the Ganges River in the holy city of Varanasi, India. Believers say the act grants moksha, the liberation of the soul from the body.
“The funeral homes actually know. If it's a Hindu, they ask, ‘do you want to divide it into small pieces to take back to India?’” said Vasudha Narayanan, director of the Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions at the University of Florida. “They'll give it to you with their stamp on it and a letter so it can go through security and customs.”
If reaching the Ganges isn’t an option, others scatter ashes in local rivers or oceans.
Nalini Rao, a professor of world art at Soka University in California, scattered a portion of her late husband’s ashes off the coast of Laguna Beach. Friends in Cincinnati did the same for their loved ones in the Ohio River.
“You are born from the earth, you have to get dissolved in the earth,” she said.
“People have always tended to use a template of the geography of the old homelands on the new homelands,” Narayanan said. While believers recognize their local rivers as distinct from the Ganges, “they do think it is infused with the sacrality of the Mother of All Rivers, which is the river Ganga from India.”
When her father died, Vasanti invited about a dozen area Indian families to the motel for food and prayer and repeated her river rituals on the floating dock.
“They were stunned,” she said. “Then started calling me: ‘We can't go to India, we can't go to the Ganges. Can we come? Can you do the prayer?’”
About 17 families have come from Florida and Georgia to the Suwannee Gables Motel, seeking Vasanti and her river send-offs. She has commemorated people who died of old age, of accidents and of illness, leading prayers in English, Hindi and Gujarati. Most families who’ve come are Hindu, but some are Christian, too.
On the day of a ceremony, mourners line the tile floors of the blue-walled entryway of the motel, standing next to a sign proclaiming “no wet suits inside.” Vasanti welcomes them in, then leads them through the grassy yard, down red wooden steps and onto the dock by the Suwannee’s dark waters.
She carries a tray of flowers and graph-paper boats.
The boats are inscribed with five hand-drawn Om symbols, one for each of the five elements of nature: earth, water, fire, air and space.
“Similar to the power of the cross, the Om is our strength, our energy,” Vasanti said.
Supna remembers filling entire sheets of graph paper, front and back, with the symbol as a child during the 13-day mourning period following her grandparents’ passing.
The paper boats carry flower petals, red powder and a tiny bit of wax to light, all biodegradable. The flowers are to make the journey after death more pleasant, Vasanti explained, the powder to show her heart is with the family and the light to guide the deceased.
Standing on the dock, Vasanti recites a prayer, then guides the family to kneel to send off the boat. If the family chooses to sprinkle any of their loved ones’ ashes, those go into the river first, followed by the boat and more fresh flowers.
“This part of the ceremony is part of the grieving process, and while it does come with a lot of gratitude and joy, it also comes with a lot of sorrow for having to say goodbye to the person that you love so much,” Supna said.
The sacred waters
Floridians of other faiths, too, flock to nature to memorialize their loved ones.
Boat charters in St. Petersburg, Destin, Islamorada and many other seaside towns offer ash-scattering voyages, three nautical miles from land to comply with Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Florida State Parks allow families to scatter ashes on park property as long as it doesn’t impact natural or cultural resources.
“There are no state-level environmental regulations governing the scattering of properly cremated individual remains in rivers or other inland waters,” wrote a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, “however, it is always best to check with local authorities for any site-specific restrictions.”
Water is sacred, symbolic or otherwise significant in many faiths, Narayanan said. Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, often dip cloths or funeral shrouds in the waters of Zamzam, a well said to have appeared miraculously to save the Prophet Ibrahim’s wife and son from thirst.
In the Old Testament, God instructs Moses to strike a rock in Horeb to supply the Israelites with water during their journey to Mount Sinai.
Christian believers in North Central Florida have long performed baptisms in the region’s rivers and springs. Pastor Chip Parker of Orchard Community Church led 26 baptisms in the Suwannee in August, just three miles up river from the motel.
“For us, it’s the symbolic significance that’s so important,” he said.
The river’s waters don’t wash away sin, Parker joked, otherwise he wouldn’t fish in the Suwannee. “We don't believe that baptism makes you a believer. It doesn't make you a Christian,” he said. “It just shows the inward reality that's happened in your heart.”
Earlier this year, a family came to the Suwannee Gables Motel for the anniversary of the passing of their would-be daughter in law, who died in an accident. Vasanti comforted them as they sat cross-legged on the dock, their white clothes a stark contrast to peeling wood.
“When they got up, they said ‘this, my dear child, is the Ganges River. We haven’t gone to India and no regrets, zero,’” Vasanti remembered.
“It's the river that brought me from such a young age,” she told them, recalling the late-night Suwannee songs from her childhood:
Oh, take me to my kind old mother,
There let me live and die.
