“Throw my body in the gutter,” were the words that kept on throbbing inside Kabir’s head as he stared at the lifeless body of his father. The room was not that small, yet it seemed impossibly claustrophobic considering the hundreds of people who had gathered there to pay their last respects to Shomoresh. The ceiling fan turned with a tired clatter above them, stirring the smell of incense, sandalwood, damp cotton, old books and human grief. Men stood shoulder to shoulder in the corridor, women whispered behind half-closed doors, and from somewhere in the courtyard came the occasional cry of a tea seller, incongruously alive. At the centre of it all lay Shomoresh, six feet of formidable stillness, his great beard combed neatly, his hands folded loosely over his chest. In death, the man who had frightened bullies, confounded priests and made hardened criminals listen to him looked almost peaceful. Almost. Kabir knew better. His father had left him one final argument, and it was lying there, heavier than the corpse itself.

He had said it so many times that Kabir could no longer remember the first occasion. “When I die, do not burn me. Do not bury me. Do not bury my ash. Do not give my carcass to any religion. Throw my body in the gutter.” Sometimes he said it with a straight face, sometimes with a mischievous glint beneath his formidable eyebrows. Once, while they were walking beside the Hooghly and the evening bells of a temple mingled with the muezzin’s call from a distant mosque, Shomoresh had stopped beneath a rain tree and looked at his son. “Remember, Kabir, a dead man has no religion. He has no wish. He has no voice. He is entirely at the mercy of the living. I know you understand what I am asking. I also know you will probably not have the courage to do it.” Kabir had laughed then. Now the memory was an accusation.

Shomoresh had been born in Colonial Calcutta in the 1930s, when tram bells rang through streets blackened by coal smoke, when hand-pulled rickshaws moved like stubborn insects through the monsoon mud, and the city carried the smells of horse dung, frying telebhaja, wet earth, river water and coal fires. Born a Hindu Brahmin and recorded as one in every official document, he grew up with an appetite for books that seemed almost indecent. He read Swami Vivekananda, then the Vedas and Upanishads, the Bible, the Quran, the Dhammapada, the Guru Granth Sahib and the teachings of the Zoroastrians. He peregrinated through ideas as freely as he later travelled through countries. Religion fascinated him, but religious certainty irritated him. He would sit for hours with a priest, imam, monk or pastor and politely dismantle an argument until the unfortunate man began looking for an escape route. “Truth cannot be the private property of a temple,” he would say. “Nor of a mosque, church, monastery or synagogue. The moment God needs a boundary wall, mankind has made Him smaller.”

He was six feet tall, broad shouldered and possessed of a physiognomy that made strangers reconsider foolishness. His beard became legendary. In his younger days he could enter a room and silence it without uttering a word. He became a Navy deep sea diver, descending into dark water where sunlight disappeared and pressure pressed against the body like an invisible fist. Later he became a social worker, spending his life among people whom respectable society preferred not to notice. Criminals knew him. Saints knew him. Drunkards, priests, pavement dwellers and politicians knew him. Some feared him, some loved him, and most respected him. He had taken down bad men with his bare hands, then sat with the same men over tea and reconciled them with those they had wronged. His honesty was almost inconvenient. He had no patience for the obfuscation with which clever men conceal selfishness. “Doing good,” he once told Kabir, “is the only religion that survives scrutiny.”

He had intended never to marry and told everyone that he would eventually become a sage. Then, late in life, he married a Christian widow who already had a nine-year-old daughter. To everyone’s surprise, he became a family man. When Kabir was born, his joy was so ebullient that friends claimed they had never seen him smile so often. Yet he had Kabir baptised and brought him up as a Christian because, he explained, the child should follow the mother’s faith. “A father gives a child many things,” he said. “The mother gives the first language, the first tenderness, the first idea of the world. Let the child inherit from her.” It was an audacious decision for a Brahmin by birth, but Shomoresh had never been interested in making himself convenient to convention. Now convention had arrived in full force to claim from a dead man.

By noon, the house had become an assembly of competing certainties. His father’s relatives demanded cremation. “He was born a Hindu,” an uncle declared, with the stentorian authority of a man who had suddenly been appointed spokesman for eternity. Kabir reminded him that his father had rejected every such claim. The uncle replied that the dead could not argue. His mother, pale with grief, held Kabir’s wrist and whispered, “Bury him, my son. He lived more like a Christian than a Hindu.” Her relatives nodded vigorously. A senior church leader arrived and said Shomoresh had advised him on matters of faith for twenty years. “He belongs with us,” he said. “He must be buried properly.” Kabir almost smiled. The man had come to claim a philosopher who had spent half his life warning people about the word properly.

Then came the imam from the neighbourhood mosque. He stood beside the body and said softly, “He was a good Muslim, Kabir. Perhaps not by the book, but by the heart.” Behind him came two Buddhist scholars from the Maha Bodhi Society, reminding everyone that Shomoresh had been a regular member and had spent long afternoons discussing the Buddha’s teachings. A Parsi gentleman arrived with memories of his work among their community. Then came a Jain scholar, a Sikh granthi, a Jewish professor from an interfaith circle, and a Hindu monk who said Shomoresh had once called the Upanishads mankind’s finest attempt to describe the ineffable. Kabir looked at them all and thought, with a bitterness that surprised him, that his father had somehow managed to become a religious dispute without moving a muscle.

The arguments grew more elaborate. There were discussions about scripture, precedent, custom, law and municipal regulations. Someone produced a rulebook. A lawyer explained that disposing of a body in a gutter was illegal. Kabir asked whether the law had a clause for philosophers. The lawyer did not appreciate the question. His mother wept, his relatives shouted, and friends pleaded with Kabir to honour the man by doing what society considered honourable. “But he told me exactly what to do,” Kabir protested. Nobody answered. Instead, they told him that the dead had to be treated with dignity. Kabir knew his father would have laughed at the word. Dignity, Shomoresh had once said, was often merely vanity wearing clean clothes.

Someone had informed the police, and they had the final say, he was to be cremated. By evening, the body was placed on a wooden bier while everyone prepared for a procession. Kabir stood beside it, exhausted, feeling as though he had been fighting an army armed with scriptures. He remembered another conversation from years ago. “You will not throw me into the gutter,” Shomoresh had said. “Not because you do not understand, but because you will be afraid. You will fear what people will say. You will fear the police, the law, your mother, your relatives, the priests. You will fear becoming the son who dishonoured his father.” Kabir had asked him why, then, he made the request. Shomoresh had smiled. “Because one day you must learn that even a man who believes himself free can be imprisoned by the wishes of others.”

The bier was lifted. Someone began chanting; another voice objected. The imam murmured a prayer, a priest argued with a relative, and a monk tried to restore calm. The procession moved through the lane like a strange carnival of grief, every faith trying to pull the dead philosopher towards itself. Outside, Calcutta was sinking into evening. Tram wires trembled overhead, the air smelled of rain and frying fish, and rickshaw bells tinkled beneath the groan of a passing bus. Kabir walked behind his father and wondered whether Shomoresh was somewhere above them, laughing at the spectacle. Then the rain came.

It arrived with the sudden ferocity of a Bengali monsoon, flattening umbrellas and turning the road into a shining brown ribbon. People shouted. The bier tilted as several men struggled to keep their footing. Someone slipped. Someone else grabbed the wrong handle. The wooden platform lurched towards the open roadside drain, an ugly, water-filled gutter swollen by the storm. Kabir lunged forward, but another man collided with him. For one suspended, absurd second, Shomoresh seemed to sit upright as the bier tipped. Then the rope snapped. The body slid.

There was a collective gasp, followed by screams, prayers and instructions shouted in at least six languages. Men jumped towards the drain. A policeman tried to do something. Someone fetched a bamboo pole. The imam shouted directions. The priest removed his shoes. The monk stood utterly still. Kabir dropped to his knees beside the gutter and stared into the churning brown water. They searched for hours.

As the torrent calmed and the lashing shower turned to an irritating trickle, they opened the nearby drains. They sent ropes beneath culverts. They called the municipal authorities. They brought torches and hooks. The rain kept falling, washing flowers, incense, mud and human footprints into the same dark current. Nothing was found. By midnight, the police declared the body unrecoverable.

The relatives were devastated. The religious leaders were bewildered. Kabir sat alone beneath the dripping awning of a closed shop, listening to the rain strike the corrugated tin above him. And then, despite the grief, despite the absurdity, despite the terrible finality of it all, he began to laugh. Not loudly. Not cruelly. It was the helpless laughter of a son who had just watched his father win an argument after death.

Shomoresh had been right. The dead man had no voice. No wish. No religion. No legal opinion. He had become, at last, beyond the reach of every claimant who had gathered around his body. Hindu relatives could not cremate him. Christian relatives could not bury him. The imam could not give him Muslim rites. The monks could not consign him to Buddhist ritual. The Parsis could not claim him. The law could not regulate what it could not retrieve. The gutter had accepted him without asking what he believed.

Kabir rose slowly and looked at the swollen drain. All his life his father had insisted that mankind was greater than the labels it invented, that goodness was more sacred than ritual, and that truth became ridiculous when people fought over ownership of it. In the end, Shomoresh had achieved the one thing he had asked for. Not through courage, not through rebellion, but through an accident so perfectly timed that it seemed almost like the final joke of a lifelong philosopher.

Kabir wiped the rain from his face. Somewhere in the distance, a temple bell rang. A church bell answered. Then came the muezzin’s voice, floating over the wet roofs, and beneath them all the city breathed its ancient, indifferent breath. For the first time since his father died, Kabir felt peaceful. “Rest well, Baba,” he whispered. “You finally escaped all of us.” 

The gutter rushed on, carrying flowers, mud, ashes, leaves and the remnants of a hundred human rituals towards the river. And Kabir understood what Shomoresh had spent a lifetime trying to teach him: perhaps the holiest thing about a human being was not the religion he died in, but the good he left behind in the living.

Author’s Note

This story is inspired by the life and work of my father, Swapan Dasgupta. The man you meet in these pages is, in many ways, the man I knew in life. The philosophy, the irreverence towards organised religion, the belief in the essential goodness of human beings, and even the peculiar request to throw his body in the gutter after he died were all his.

My father suffered a heart attack on the streets of Kolkata, just a few hundred metres from our home, following a severe argument with his elder brother, who was a renowned heart surgeon, over a property matter. He had wanted everyone to benefit from the property, but his elder brother would not agree. Those who found him lying on the street took him to the Government Medical College. By the time we came to know that he had suffered a heart attack, he was already lying on a general ward. For more than eight hours, he fought through the heart attack without receiving serious medical attention inside Kolkata’s largest government hospital. He died there. We eventually took him to Nimtola Ghat and cremated him, as is customary in our father’s side of Hindu family.

Nothing dramatic happened as it does in this story. No bier slipped into a flooded gutter. Though many a great assembly of religious leaders came, they only came to pay their respects and not to claim him. And of course I could not honour his final wish.

But with the distance that time gives us, I have come to understand that perhaps the real inheritance he left me was not the fulfilment of that strange last request. It was everything he taught me while he was alive. Much of the religious, moral and philosophical structure of my mind today was shaped by conversations with him, by watching him live, by questioning him, and sometimes by disagreeing with him. He taught me to look beyond labels, to question inherited certainties, and to believe that doing good to another human being was perhaps the simplest and most difficult form of religion.

So, in a way, this story is not about how I failed to fulfil my father’s last wish. It is about the wisdom a father quietly passes on to his son, often without either of them realising its worth at the time. I could not throw my father’s body in the gutter. But I have carried his thoughts with me all my life. This story is my way of honouring that memory.

Copyright © 2026 TRISHIKH DASGUPTA

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trishikh Dasgupta

Adventurer, philosopher, writer, painter, photographer, craftsman, innovator, or just a momentary speck in the universe flickering to leave behind a footprint on the sands of time... READ MORE

This story is Free, and if you have found something here that stayed with you, some of my other books (collection of short stories, novels, and more) are available in print and digital editions. They gather many unique journeys, quieter questions, grand adventures, hair-raising anticipation, and stories that continue beyond this page.