Counselling could have helped avert tragic end, rue locals

KOLKATA: Police on Wednesday rescued 30-year-old Anirban Bose, who had refused to part with the decomposed body of his 67-year-old mother till the stench alerted locals the day before. Meera Bose’s body was so decomposed that, prima facie, police suspect Anirban could have been with the body for days. Though the incident brought back memories of the

Robinson Street

case, for those close to the Bose family, the differences were more striking than the parallels.

Residents said Anirban, known locally as Babu or Babu da, was a bright student of political science from St Xavier’s College and a talented photographer, who was misunderstood and required professional help. Some months back, cartoonist Chandi Lahiri’s daughter Trina had bumped into her ‘Meera kakima’. “She looked at me and said: ‘Aren’t you Tuli? Your mother has also aged. Her hair has turned grey. Do you also beat up your mother?”

By then Trina and her mother Tapati had understood there was something wrong in the Bose family and both mother and son needed medical help. But no one could convince them to do that. Some said Anirban’s life changed for the worse after he lost his father, photo journalist Shyamal Bose, and was subsequently taken ill on the day he was to appear for a job interview. The family fell on hard times and the relationship between mother and son turned complex.

On Tuesday night, Meera’s decomposed body was recovered after neighbours alerted the police of stench coming from the ground-floor flat. “But don’t confuse it with the Robinson Street case. Cracks had developed between Babu and his mother when she bought this flat by using the money that was saved as fixed deposits. The insecurity of not being financially solvent took a toll on Babu’s mental health. Meera di would also beg for alms,” said a neighbour, Tapati Dutta Gupta.

Anirban’s next-door neighbour R K Sharma would collect money for them. “The flat was extremely unhygienic. Who would want to enter a flat where the floor was littered with human faeces? We got it cleaned. They even lived without electricity,” Sharma said, adding he had tried to approach NGOs to help rescue the family.

Chandi Lahiri, who was friends with Anirban’s father, said: “Shyamal had suffered from a rare bone marrow disease. I was told his son had inherited that. Meera, who had a superiority complex, was suspicious of everyone. As far as I remember, Shyamal also had a flat elsewhere where they had rented out a room. I don’t know how she fell on such hard days.”

“Babu would come to the balcony in the nude and when we told Meera di he needed

counselling

, she didn’t accept it. Once he pushed his mother and she fell and broke her hip. Thrice he threw down a lit cigarette inside the room,” Dutta Gupta said. Scared the flat would burn down, the neighbours wrote to Tala police station seeking help to address Anirban’s issues. “The cops had come, but Meera di refused to send Babu to a mental hospital. Had she not been in denial, we could have saved them both,” Dutta Gupta said.

Police on Wednesday sought help from NGO Calcutta Rescue to provide psychiatric and medical help to Anirban.