Minutes before the body of 70-year-old Pijush Kanti Sengupta was to be cremated, a police jeep came to a screeching halt in front of the Kashi Mitra burning ghat, in Sovabazar.

Three officers got off and approached the family members surrounding the body.

?Sorry, you cannot perform the last rites today,? one of the officers told the bereaved family. ?Sengupta died in a road accident and we have booked the case as an unnatural death. A post-mortem will have to be conducted first,? he explained.

Timely intervention by the police pre-empted an unfortunate chain of events that could even have landed the Senguptas in custody. For, post-mortem is a must in a case of unnatural death.

?Had the body been cremated without a post-mortem, the family would have been in trouble. So would the doctor who had issued the death certificate,? said an officer of Maniktala police station.

Sengupta?s son Indranil, however, claimed: ?We had no idea about the legal formalities. The nursing home authorities should have looked into them before handing over the body to us.?

Sengupta, a resident of Bidhannagar Road, was critically injured after being knocked down by a private bus on the thoroughfare on April 9.

?We admitted him to NRS Medical College and Hospital, where he was under treatment till April 13. A preliminary report revealed that he had an internal haemorrhage. Dissatisfied with the ambience of the hospital, we shifted him to a nursing home in Lake Town,? Indranil told Metro.

At the nursing home, Sengupta was under the treatment of S.K. Mandal.

?He was admitted to the intensive care unit and then put on a ventilator. But the efforts proved futile and my father died early on April 19,? Indranil added.

The death certificate was issued by Kalyan Das. ?The nursing home charged us Rs 22,000. We were handed over the body as soon as we paid the money,? Indranil recalled.

According to him, the death certificate attributed the death to a ?cardio respiratory failure due to acute left ventricular failure, associated with myocardial infraction, complete heart block?.

Physician Mandal admitted to the lapse by the nursing home authorities, but still blamed the Senguptas for not getting the post-mortem done.

An officer of the traffic department?s fatality squad informed Maniktala police station that the Senguptas were preparing to cremate the body.

?We rushed to the burning ghat and found the body was to be cremated. We immediately sent it for post-mortem,? said an officer.

The family got back the body for cremation on April 20.