Goutami Das. Picture by Soumen Bhattacharjee

Driven out of home by her son, 65-year-old Goutami Das complained to the local police several times and wrote to senior officers but received no help.

“I lodged at least three complaints with the (Ghola) police station and wrote to all the authorities concerned but no action was taken,” she said.

For the past seven months, Das and her divorced daughter Chandipriya and granddaughter Mousami, who used to stay with her in the same house at Belghoria, on the northern outskirts, have been living with various relatives, and often not even together.

Goutami said her elder son Bapi threw her out of the house she built with money she had saved as she had refused to transfer the one-cottah plot and the small house on it to his name. She had earlier cut off all connections with Bapi because she suspected him of links with criminals after catching him with firearms.

When she complained to Ghola police station, they told her it was a legal issue and she should instead go to court. “All the senior officials (she wrote to) ask Ghola police station to look into the matter but they sit on it. They are advising me to strike a compromise with Bapi. But the entire property is mine and only I can decide what to do with it,” she said.

Denied help, but refusing to give up, the frail elderly woman took her battle to the inspector-general of police (South Bengal), Surajit Kar Purakayastha, last week. “He promised me help and even issued instructions to the officer-in-charge of Ghola police station over the phone. But I am yet to return to my home,” she said.

Goutami, a mother of three, used to work as an attendant at medical centres and had put away some money to build a home at Azad Hind Nagar. Last November, three rooms came up on the land for her and her daughter and granddaughter, who is in her first year in college.

Soon after the construction was over, Bapi came to the house with his wife with the request to allow them to spend a few days there. “He had never bothered to look after me,” Goutami said, but still she permitted them into her house.

Within days, Bapi allegedly started torturing his mother by locking the bathroom, not allowing her to fetch drinking water and breaking the utensils.

“His objective was to drive me, my daughter and my granddaughter from my home. My daughter is a divorcee, where will she go?” Goutami asked.

Soon after, she filed a complaint with Ghola police station but alleged that the police took no cognisance.

The officer-in-charge of Ghola police station, Samiran Roy, said the cops tried to broker a settlement between Goutami and her son but neither was willing. “We are fed up.”