HOWRAH: In a near-rerun of the
Robinson Street incident
, a 49-year-old man was found living with the
rotting corpse
of his 78-year-old mother for more than 48 hours at their flat in Howrah's Shibpur till the stench alerted neighbours, who forced their way into the flat on Saturday morning. The man kept on feeding the corpse till Saturday morning before police sent the body for post mortem.
Apurba Banerjee shifted to the flat in 2007 with his mother Sandhyarani. The Banerjees were into coal business and Apurba's elder brother used to look after it after their father's death. Though Apurba and his mother moved to Shibpur, the rest of the family members continued to live at their Tollygunge residence. Apurba, locals said, spent most of the time inside the flat. On Saturday morning, a stench from the ground-floor flat alerted other residents of the apartment.
“Banerjee's flat was locked from inside but we could figure out that the stench was coming from there and knocked on his doors. When Apurba opened the door, we entered the flat,“ said Gouri Bhattacharya, a neighbour.Soon, they spotted a body wrapped in a blanket lying on the bed. When they tried to find out whose body it was, Banerjee asked them not to disturb his mother.
“When we removed the blanket we found it was his mother's body . When we told him about her death he refused to accept it,“ said Bhattacharya. Apurba kept on insisting that his mother was alive and that he had been feeding her since Thursday . Police suspect the woman died around 48 hours ago. Apurba later claimed to have taken his mother to a doctor on Thursday who had advised to get her admitted to a hospital.But she reportedly refused to leave her flat. Apurba's sisterin-law later took him to her Tollygunge home.