West Bengal: Five days after daughter’s gang-rape, mother dies in shelter home

KOLKATA: The 36-year-old epilepsy patient, who was gang-raped after being picked up in a car metres from the home she was staying at, has now lost her ailing mother to prolonged illness. The elderly woman, who had moved into a Panchasayar shelter home on October 30, passed away around 10.30pm on Thursday, minutes after she begun vomiting blood.
“My mother’s death could not have come at a worse time.But I have been able to spend some time alone ever since returning from the burning ghat. My sister, the survivor, will undergo some important tests on Friday and I have come to support her. She has not taken the death well and keeps demanding that I take her home. But I am under financial strain. It is not possible for me to look after my own son, so how can I look after her?” said the survivor’s elder sister, adding, “I am reacting mechanically to events around me.”

Sources said the family depended on their father’s pension for survival. “Now that this amount will no longer be available, the family will need to find a resource soon,” said a relative.

The elderly woman had been informed that her daughter had “left abruptly at night on Monday”. Ironically, it was the survivor who was the first from the family to see the body. “The survivor had been sent to another home owned by Hare Krishna Mondal after being released from NRS. She was brought back to this home so she could see her mother’s body.
“She is still having difficulty sleeping and the trauma is still to sink in. She is on medicine, including three sedatives a day,” said a doctor attending to the survivor.
“After my father died, my husband and I returned from Delhi and settled in Behala. I took over my family’s responsibility and sent my sister to a care home in Kasba, where she responded well. But three months ago, my mother suffered multiple fractures in her leg and we had to keep shuttling between one government hospital and another. SSKM almost became a second home. At the end, I had to look for a cheaper option for my sister and mother,” the sister said.
The survivor’s mother had spoken to TOI, saying she was “too unwell and weak to help her daughters”.
“My elder daughter is trying to take care of everything. My younger daughter has always been with me. Only recently, we were forced to stay apart,” she had said after learing of the tragedy her younger daughter went through.