In a blood-curdling rerun of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the Kolkata Police on Wednesday night discovered a 47-year-old man literally living with the dead; for the past six months to be precise. The dead were his sister, and two pet dogs.
The incident came to light when the police and the Fire Brigade were called late on Wednesday night after the neighbours saw smoke billowing out of the posh Shakespeare Sarani House in British Kolkata.
“Our officers discovered a 77-year-old Arabinda De burning in his bathroom bolted from inside while his middle-aged son Partha De paced up and down the living room” said a police officer.
While the police were breaking open the privy door they heard different voices coming from the interior of the house. As suspicious officers looked for the sources of the sounds they stumbled upon a human cadaver and besides it two skeletons of dogs.
Upon quizzing Partha apparently a psychiatric patient he said that the human carcass belonged to her sister Debjani De and those of two animals were the family’s dead dogs that perished in August 2014.
“Ever since the dogs died whole family was in shock and my sister not only left her job as a music teacher in a big school but also gave up food until she passed away six months ago,” Partha reportedly told the police.
When asked as to why no funeral was done Partho said he and his father never believed that the trio had died and so planchet was practised on the skeletons with the belief that the dead would come every day and have their meals.
The carcasses were even served with dry fruits. lest the neighbours resented foul smell the rooms were packed with special airtight papers. Partha who also left his IT job in shock and tended to the dead arranged latest complicated sound system which chanted his sister’s songs and gave him a feel that she was around. This was the sound that the police heard while recovering his father’s corpse on Wednesday night.
The way the bodies were allowed to rot and change into skeletons was appalling psychiatric R Ram said adding, however, “Such cases are not unusual as some people fail to accept their circumstances and live on with the belief that their dead relatives are still living with them.”
On how no neighbor could come to know about the incident sources said the family members were introvert in character and would seldom share details.
It seemed that the older Dey was also in some kind of psychiatric condition, police consulting the doctors said adding he might have ended his life after failing to bear with his circumstances any more.
“Prima facie it looks like a psychiatric case” a DCP Murli Dhar said adding things would be clear only after autopsy was done. Since then a court order was being sought to transfer an apparently run down Partha to a mental asylum police said.