(From top) Nirmal Chakraborty and his daughter when she was younger; the trader’s wife Arpita; and the pond where Arpita’s body was found on Sunday morning. Pictures by Aranya Sen

A garments manufacturer and his five-year-old daughter were found dead in their Jadavpur home on Sunday with signs of poisoning and a suicide note. Just when police and neighbours were wondering about the man’s missing wife, she was found, too — floating in a nearby pond.

“Ami jibon judhhe here gelam. Amader mrityur jonyo keu dayi noi (I have lost the battle of life. None is responsible for our death),” 43-year-old Nirmal Chakraborty, who used to supply garments to small traders, wrote.

What he didn’t say in the note, his close friend Balaram Mukherjee tried to explain.

He said Nirmal, alias Babu, possibly chose death over debt and entered into a suicide pact with his family of wife Arpita and daughter Shristi, a Class I student at Kamala Girls’ High School. His 82-year-old infirm mother was the only one left out of it.

While Nirmal was executing the plan, she was in the next room unaware of the tragedy unfolding so close to her.

“He had taken a huge bank loan and would often complain that he was unable to pay the EMIs… He also used to complain that his cash flow was poor because the shop owners he was doing business with weren’t paying him regularly,” Balaram said.

The police said they had no reason to suspect the deaths weren’t the result of a debt-driven suicide pact, something several Calcutta families have taken recourse to in recent years.

“We have not received any complaint as of now and are not considering foul play,” said Ajey Ranade, the police superintendent of South 24-Parganas.

A person who had visited 3/93 Viveknagar, the Chakrabortys’ two-storied house, around 10am to collect a Puja donation was the first to notice the bodies of Nirmal and Arpita. He looked through an open window when nobody answered his knocks on the main door and saw the garments trader sprawled on the floor and his daughter on a bed. The suicide note was on a table.

Arpita’s body was found at least one-and-a-half hours later in a rarely used community pond around 50 metres from the house.“It seems the trio died around midnight, though we aren’t sure whether the woman consumed poison before drowning,” an officer at Kasba police station said.

Nirmal, the youngest of seven siblings, used to live on the ground floor of the house. The upper floor belongs to his elder brother Ranatosh. Two other brothers do not live in the city. “Although his business never took off, he earned enough to feed his family till a couple of years ago,” said Tapan Bhowmik, a relative. “He would buy denim from Burrabazar, get garments stitched by two tailors he employed and supply them to stores in Jadavpur and Gariahat.”

In February, a cash-strapped family of three was found hanging from the ceiling of their Howrah home. A month later, a debt-ridden family of three travelled over 600km from their home in Hooghly to Lava, near Kalimpong, to commit suicide. The mother died, but her two children survived.

In 2006, three members of a family from Ballygunge checked into a central Calcutta hotel and consumed poison to escape a debt trap.