Dev’s ashes will be immersed at Nashik

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Suneil Anand

Film actor-director Dev Anand’s family will return to India with his ashes for the last rites next week. The ashes will be immersed at Nashik in Maharashtra after the memorial in his memory being organised at Mehboob Studios in Mumbai on December 15. “As soon as the cremation is done and the ashes are handed over to me, I will go to India for the last rites,” Dev Anand’s son Suneil Anand said at Washington Hotel in Mayfair on Thursday afternoon. The ashes are normally handed to the family 48 hours after the cremation.
The family, Suneil said, decided to opt for a cremation in London as that was what his father would have wanted. When asked about the long period of waiting for the body to be handed over by the medical authorities, Suneil said, “We have to abide by the rules of the country we are in.”
The funeral, being held at Putney Vale crematorium on Saturday morning, will be open to the public, but with the hall there only able to accommodate 80-90 people, arrangements have been made to make the audio-visual feed to the funeral outside the crematorium. After the cremation, a memorial will be held at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London to allow people to pay their last respects to him.
Emotional Suneil Anand, broke into tears, as he thanked people in India and across the world for outpouring of sympathy after his father’s passing away. “I loved my father very much, I was very close to him and I miss him a lot,” he said in a choked voice, adding that his father was his friend, his mentor and his colleague.
Describing Dev Anand as a workaholic who loved his work, Suneil said he was very happy in the days before he passed away. “He was working on a script for his new film. He was happy to be in London and wanted to have a holiday. We were going to travel together in the UK to scout for the locations of his next film, but it was not to be,” he said.
Dev Anand’s wife Mona, who used the name Kalpana Kartik as an actress, and daughter Devina arrived in London on Wednesday. Describing his uncle as an “incredible family man who was always very loving and caring, Tony Sarin, London-based nephew of Dev Anand, said the family was shocked by the sudden passing away of the Indian film legend.