An English professor and the embalmed body of his mother that he kept at home in a glass casket for 21 years were laid to rest in twin burials in a southern Indian village, a relative said on Tuesday.

"I fulfilled the last wish of my uncle. He had told us that his mother's body should be buried only after his death,"
said Syed Noor, a nephew of 69-year-old Syed Abdul Ghafoor.

Hundreds of local residents attended the twin burials on Sunday at a mosque in Siddavata, a town 450 kilometers (300 miles) south of Hyderabad.

"Everybody knew that Ghafoor had kept the embalmed body of his mother at home. There were protests and complaints by local people and relatives, but he was adamant not to let it go," said M Prabhakar Reddy, a local administrator.

In 1992, Dinesh Kumar, then joint district collector, asked Ghafoor to bury his mother's body, but he stood firm in his decision. "This is my house and nobody has any right to intervene," Kumar recalled Ghafoor as saying.

In the mid-1980s, Ghafoor taught English literature at a college in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, where he lived with his mother.

He divorced his wife within six months of their marriage because she had a fight with his mother, Noor said.

When his mother died, he brought the embalmed body to his village home in Siddavata and kept it in a glass casket. "He was so eccentric that he would not allow anybody else even to look at the glass casket," Noor said.

Ghafoor consulted his mother even after her death. "Before doing anything important, he would write 'yes' and 'no' on two scraps of paper. Then sitting near the feet of his mother he would draw the lot and act accordingly," Noor said.