Father-of-four spent his last years in a Bhopal shelter home; his body waited two days before his children finally refused to attend the cremation.
Father Ghanshyam spent his life building a small tyre and tube business in Indore and raising four children. He worked hard for years, gave his children whatever he earned, and expected nothing back.
When he grew old and needed support, his own family sent him away. He spent his final four years at Apna Ghar old age home in Bhopal, far from the city and the children he had raised.
Father Died Waiting for his kids
Ghanshyam, 70, died on August 4, 2026. The shelter’s management immediately reached out to his family in Indore, expecting someone to come for the last rites. Nobody did. For two days, the staff kept his body at the shelter, hoping a son or daughter would arrive. Instead, the family kept making excuses — a train ticket unavailable one day, no seat on the bus the next.
With no family member willing to travel, the shelter finally approached the local police for help. Officers assisted the staff in completing the cremation, two days after Ghanshyam’s death, without a single family member present.
What the children said
According to Madhuri Mishra, who runs the shelter, Ghanshyam’s daughter told the staff she saw no reason to attend since her father had already given his property to his sons. She said she got nothing from his estate, so she felt no obligation to come. His sons were equally direct. They told the shelter, “What did he ever do for us?”
Even after refusing to attend the funeral, the family later asked the shelter to arrange Ghanshyam’s death certificate. Mishra refused, saying a family that skipped the cremation could not expect the shelter to handle its paperwork too.
A pattern the shelter has seen before
Mishra, who has worked with elderly residents for nearly 30 years, said Ghanshyam’s case is not unusual. Families often drop off ageing parents at the shelter and never check on them again. In many cases, children hold on to their parents’ Aadhaar cards and other identity documents, making it hard for shelters to trace the family at all.
Before he came to Apna Ghar, Ghanshyam was left behind by a relative somewhere in Bhopal. With nowhere to go, he begged for a living near Rani Kamlapati railway station for several days. Local social workers eventually found him and brought him to the shelter, where he lived for close to four years.
Mishra said such cases point to a larger problem — ageing parents being valued only for what they can still offer, not for what they gave earlier in life. She recalled another case at the same shelter, where an elderly woman was assaulted by her own daughters, who also took away her jewellery, before she found refuge there.
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