Jan. 9: Saswati Pal may or may not have had an affair, but a whiff of it could have ruined her marriage prospects.

Mahadeb Karak, who had finalised his son Anjan’s wedding with the Visva-Bharati MA student, today said he wouldn’t have gone ahead had he known about “her relationship with another boy”.

Saswati’s Sangit Bhavan classmate Sriparna Haldar, however, said she was not in love with “another boy” Amaresh Kundu, who shot her dead in her Santiniketan hostel on Sunday.

At Ghatal in West Midna- pore, Mahadeb said: “If we knew about an affair between Amaresh and Saswati, we would not have gone ahead with the matchmaking for our only son.”

Mahadeb is a deed writer at the block land and land reforms office at Daspur in Ghatal, 130km from Calcutta, where Saswati’s father Shyamal is an upper division clerk.

Mahadeb said Shyamal, his classmate at the local Rabindra Shatabarshiki College, had approached him with the marriage proposal last month. “We knew each other for a long time. When Shyamal told me about his proposal, I suggested that the boy and the girl speak to each other first,” he said.

Anjan and Saswati were in regular touch since then, but Mahadeb said he was not aware of it. “I had only told my son I was negotiating his marriage with Saswati. But I don’t know what transpired later and whether they had already developed a relationship.”

Anjan, a field officer with a pharmaceutical company in Maharashtra, had studied in the same school in Ghatal as Amaresh, a cook at the Tollygunge police station who shot himself after killing Saswati.

Sriparna, in whose room Saswati was shot, said her friend never regarded Amaresh as a lover. “I was not there on the day of the shooting as I had left home for the weekend. But Saswati was a very good friend of mine and she told me that she had never thought of marrying Amaresh.”

Amaresh wanted to marry Saswati, though. Sriparna said: “I myself spoke to him twice over the phone to talk him out of the relationship.”

Amaresh was “adamant” and had repeatedly told Sriparna that he loved Saswati.

Sriparna said she was not aware of the existence of Anjan. “Saswati didn’t tell me anything about him.”

A senior Birbhum officer said police would like to question Anjan and Tanya Chakraborty, the Sangit Bhavan student who was in the hostel room where Saswati was shot.