Ahmedabad, March 28: A body lying in a hospital cold storage for eight days is keeping alive spiritual leader Asaram Bapu's tattered hopes of bail after 18 months in jail custody in a rape case.

Asaram, 74, wants 30 days' relief to conduct the funeral of nephew Shankar Pagrani, 63, but has been refused so far by a lower Gandhinagar court and then by Gujarat High Court.

His lawyers plan to approach the Supreme Court on Monday in a last-ditch effort. The city civil hospital here says it will not keep Pagrani's body beyond Thursday, when the last extension wangled from the cold storage by Asaram's ashram officials expires.

For the three-odd decades of Pagrani's low-profile existence in the Ahmedabad ashram, hardly anyone knew that he was the son of Asaram's sister. All that changed after he died on March 19.

A plan was hatched, according to the public prosecutor who opposed Asaram's bail, to get the guru out of his Jodhpur prison for the first time since his September 2013 arrest on the charge of raping a minor.

On March 20, Pagrani's body was taken to the cold storage, a facility created three years ago for NRIs so they could travel from abroad to perform their parents' last rites. Storage is allowed for just four days.

But the ashram has already secured two rare extensions - the second quietly wangled from the doctor in charge today, apparently catching the hospital superintendent, Dr M.M. Prabhakar, by surprise.

Dr Prabhakar had yesterday told the police they should hand the body over to the ashram after the first extension expired today.

'Ashram inmates are taking undue advantage of this facility to seek bail for Asaram Bapu,' he said today.

Asaram's lawyer B.M. Gupta had told the courts that Pagrani's 'last wish' was to have Asaram perform his last rites, since his parents were dead.

The 30-day relief was sought because Sindhi funerals continue for a month, ashram spokesperson Uday Sanghani explained.

When public prosecutor R.C. Kodekar cited the absence of any written 'last wish' - or any witness - and asked why Pagrani's brothers Vasudev and Ramesh could not conduct the funeral, an affidavit from the brothers was hurriedly submitted.

The affidavit said the brothers had been estranged from Pagrani for decades and did not wish to conduct his funeral.

The lower Gandhinagar court, approached on March 21, reserved its judgment after two days of hearing and rejected the appeal on March 26. Yesterday, the high court upheld the ruling.

Justice Paresh Upadhyaya said the two brothers, both Asaram devotees, could very well perform the rites. What's the guarantee, he asked, that bail would not be sought again after another relative or follower died with the same 'last wish'?