This Behala building, on Diamond Harbour Road, has quite a tale to tell.

Unauthorised and certified unsafe, it has stood the test of time — and staved off repeated Calcutta High Court directives — to stand its ground for the past 15 years.

This time, however, things may have become a little too hot to handle. Calcutta High Court, acting on a prod from the Supreme Court, on Monday instructed the seniormost police officer of the state — the director-general — to be present on the spot to ensure that the building was demolished.

The apex court had also directed director-general of police Dinesh Vajpai to appear before Calcutta High Court on March 19. The apex court order stressed that the city’s civic authorities should be entrusted with the task of demolishing the building and police would assist them in the endeavour.

The case, however, did not come up for hearing on the specific date, despite the director-general of police spending the entire day in court.

The case was, instead, heard by the division bench of Chief Justice A.K. Mathur and Justice A.K. Banerjee on Monday.

After hearing out arguments for the state and counter-arguments from the petitioners, the division bench gave the unprecedented order of demolition in the presence of the seniormost police officer of the state, within four weeks.

The entire case dates back to 1989-90, when the building’s owner, Shibatosh Roy, filed a petition with Calcutta High Court, seeking demolition of the building as it was, according to him, “unsafe” and “unauthorised.”

Though Roy was not a resident of the building, it housed a school and two tenants whom Roy had failed to evict.

He first moved the single bench of the high court, seeking a demolition order. The bench asked the Calcutta Municipal Corporation to “ask the tenants to vacate the building” and subsequently get it “demolished”, with help from the state’s law machinery.

Strangely, police did not help the civic authorities carry out the court’s directive. Many years passed and Roy filed a contempt petition that finally came up for hearing before a division bench presided by Justice M.H.S. Ansari, who dismissed the case and asked Roy to file a civil case.

Challenging the order of the division bench, Roy moved the Supreme Court, which expressed surprise that two division benches of the same high court could take two different views of the same issue.