No claimant for the last member Kolkata house of horror

KOLKATA: For most of his 46-years, he lived with his parents and sister, but loneliness was the leitmotif of his life.

He rarely spoke to his parents and sister to whom he was deeply attached. After they died, the walls of his room, and a few books, gave him company.

Even two days after he chose to end the pain of loneliness with a bottle of petrol and a matchbox inside a toilet in the 11th floor of a city apartment, the body of Partha De lay unclaimed in the cold steel confines of a tray in a police morgue.

It became clear on Thursday, a good 48 hours after his suicide, that even death could not rescue Partha De from the terrible loneliness that dogged him throughout life.

The police have been trying to contact relatives, but none was interested in taking the body for the last rites. “We contacted some relatives, but they turned the other way,” said Sudhir Sarkar, deputy commissioner, port division, Kolkata Police.

The cops will wait for seven days, the officer said, before they cremate the body of the software engineer, who once worked with Infosys.

Those who came in contact with De described him as a sensitive soul, who would sing Tagore songs. In the apartment where he set himself on fire, the police found a book ‘You Can, You will’ written by motivational speaker Joel Osteen, perhaps an indicator that he was trying to regain confidence in himself.

The spacious house on Robinson Street — it’s a posh area off Loudon Street — is easily worth crores. There are whispers that he has sold it off to a real estate promoter for more than ₹40 crore, and bought the Watgunge apartment — where he moved in about 10 months ago and killed himself on Tuesday — with the proceeds.

The rest of the cash, it is speculated, is in De’s bank accounts.

The house on 23 cottah now stands lonely and forlorn, a poignant relic of the apparently happy family of Arobindo De, who had the perfect ingredients for a happy family — a wife, a son and a daughter and a big house in a posh locality.

But instead four members together scripted a tale that will forever remain a horror story in the country. After his wife died in 2005, his daughter took to the spiritual path and gradually renounced earthly pleasures.

She starved herself to death in 2015 virtually before her brother and father, who kept it a secret and lived for six months with the decomposing body and then the skeleton.

In June 2015, Arobindo set himself on fire, perhaps unable to come to terms with the macabre situatuation. On Tuesday, February 21, his son Partha snuffed out the last vestige of the troubled family, in the bathroom of his flat.

IRONICALLY, EVEN WHEN DE’S BODY LIES UNCLAIMED, PEOPLE ARE DISCUSSING THE FATE OF HIS PROPERTY.