KOLKATA: In a grisly tale that bears an uncanny resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless flick ‘Psycho’, a 44-year-old engineer Partha De, who is suspected of having had an incestuous relationship with his own sister, slept beside the sibling’s skeleton for six months.
Partha’s father, Aurobinda De, had on Thursday committed suicide by immolating himself inside a bathroom of their house. In fact, the unseemly happenings in De household became known after the Homicide section of the Kolkata Police on Friday seized notes, 12 laptops and six mobile phones from the duo’s residence.
According to Partha’s statement to the police, his 46-year-old sister Debjani, who taught music at Don Bosco School, had died in December. Unable to part with his sister, he had kept her body wrapped in a blanket in his room.
On breaking into the room, the police found the skeletal remains of Debjani and two pet Labradors. The windows of the room were sealed with masking tape to prevent the foul odour of the corpses from alerting the neighbours.
The members of the family turned into recluses after Partha’s mother Arati died of cancer a few years ago.
The Des moved into their ancestral house in one of the most posh localities of the city in 1989 after Arabinda retired from a reputed company and both Debjani and Partha secured B.Tech degrees from Calcutta University.
Post-mortem reports of Debjani’s skeleton and the two dogs on Friday ruled out out murder. The remains have been sent for radiological examination.
Partha, whose statements to the police kept changing, revealed that after the two Labradors died in September, Debjani stopped eating under instructions from a self-styled godman and fasted herself to death in December.
Because of his unstable mental condition, Partha was sent to the Calcutta Pavlov Mental Hospital. The engineer allegedly asked a woman physician who was about to examine him to strip and behaved violently.
He wanted to leave the mental facility and pleaded that he be shifted to Mother House belonging to the Missionaries of Charity, where he was a frequent visitor. Partha, under the delusion that his sister was still alive, demanded that he be allowed to return to her.
“My father looked like a male bouncer type as he was sleeping beside my sister. My sister is becoming more attractive and sexually desirable. My mother is jealous of her. She had forcibly made her strip during our holiday to Digha. My mother thought I was sexually incapable and would send our maid to my room to seduce me,” an entry from Partha’s diary reads. Partha will be interrogated on Saturday.
When asked about the incident, sociologist Abhijit Mitra said, “The entire incident has a profound sexual base.
His noting about love between him and his sister directly points to incest and the mother too seem to have been involved in sexual relationship with the siblings. Incest is the main reason because of which the family remained cutoff.”