Widow killed on Santiniketan visit

Sarkar's house in Santiniketan; (below) the gate where the lock was found broken. Pictures by Soumi Bhattacharya Our Bureau

Santiniketan/Calcutta, Jan. 14: A 78-year-old woman from Calcutta was found murdered in her bed at her Santiniketan home this morning, leaving police groping for a motive because the killers took nothing.

Bhowanipore resident Renu Sarkar, a retired teacher who lost her husband in September, had arrived alone yesterday for a brief visit to her two-storey, two-decade-old house in Simanta Pally. Many Calcuttans have built houses in Santiniketan where they either spend quiet weekends or plan to live after retirement.

"There are no external injury marks. We suspect she was smothered with a pillow, which was on the bed where she was found. She was bleeding from the nose and there was froth around her mouth," an officer said at Bolpur police station.

"The lock on the collapsible gate leading to her first-floor apartment was broken and the door of her bedroom was unlocked."

The officer said the killers had left the victim's gold bangles and the Rs 2,000 in her purse untouched. The police are investigating whether local real estate agents were pressuring the recently widowed Sarkar to sell her house.

"It's a possibility. She was an old lady and they may have thought she would yield to pressure," an officer said.

The police have found half-burnt bidis and cigarette butts on the floor. "This points to there being more than one person in the room at the time of the murder," an officer said.

"Also, it means the killers spent some time there. So, they possibly knew the lady and talked to her for a while before taking her life."

But if the victim knew the killers, why would they break the lock on the collapsible gate? "One possibility is that the killers spent some time with her and left, and returned to kill her later when everyone was asleep," an officer said.

Sarkar's son Prabal, who reached Bolpur this afternoon with sister Aditi, said his mother would regularly come to Santiniketan to collect rent from her two tenants, both of them students. In this university town, many students rent rooms in houses whose owners live in Calcutta.

The ground floor of the Sarkars' Santiniketan house has a small apartment consisting of a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. A schoolgirl and her elder sister live there as tenants. Another woman student lives in a one-room flat on the first floor, opposite Sarkar's own quarters.

Chumki Chowdhury, the Bolpur Girls' School student who lives in the ground-floor apartment, said she had met Sarkar around 7pm yesterday and that no one was with her. "We exchanged a few words and then I returned to my room," Chumki said.

The police are questioning caretaker Ujjwal Tapadar, whose home adjoins the Sarkars' and who found the body around 7am.

"As a local man, he would know whether any local people were pressuring Sarkar to sell the house — or if there was a family dispute," an officer said.

Sarkar's daughter Aditi, a documentary filmmaker, said: "I spoke to her over the phone around nine last night. She sounded normal. She said nothing about expecting anyone or having met people from outside the building. We have no enemies either in Bolpur or in Calcutta. We have no clue what could have led to the murder."

Prabal said: "We too visit the Santiniketan house frequently. Earlier, my mother would come with my father Pratap Sarkar, who was a SAIL general manager before retirement. After his death, she would come alone."

The police brought a sniffer dog from the CISF's Durgapur office to the murder scene. "It came out and started sniffing about the garden but then lost the trail," an officer said.