Ahmedabad, Aug. 14: An IIM Ahmedabad faculty member’s husband, whom colleagues described as an “introvert”, killed himself in the campus flat allotted to his wife while she was away in the US on a month-long official trip.

Friends of Laxman Mohanty, a visiting professor at Pandit Deendayal Institute of Petroleum Technology, Gandhinagar, entered the flat on Tuesday to find him hanging from the ceiling after the “soft-spoken” 43-year-old didn’t turn up for a dinner the night before.

A suicide note found near his body said marital discord was not a reason for ending his life but didn’t mention why he took the extreme step.

Police, who registered a case of “accidental death”, said they would question his wife Neharika Vohra tomorrow.

Vohra, a member of the faculty of organisational behaviour and also a visiting professor at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, reached the city this afternoon.

The couple, who had no children, had moved into the IIMA campus 10 years ago.

Police sources said Mohanty, from Bhadrak in Orissa, may have been suffering from acute depression and loneliness but his friends and colleagues claimed he had no such personality traits though he kept a low profile.

Vinay Mahajan, one of Mohanty’s friends, said he called him on Monday night after he skipped a dinner they had planned the day before, but Mohanty didn’t pick up the phone.

When Mahajan called the Deendayal institute the next morning, he was told that Mohanty had not turned up. He then contacted Mohanty’s neighbours and entered his flat with a duplicate key to find the professor hanging by a nylon rope in the bedroom.

“He was a wonderful person, (and had) no symptom of depression. The extreme step he has taken is absolutely unbelievable and shocking,” Mahajan said.

An IIMA official, who once met Mohanty at a get-together, said “he was a socially concerned person, one who would love to give back to society”.

A friend of Mohanty said he had wanted to open a school in Bhubaneswar, but the plan was “apparently not materialising”. Mohanty had also co-authored a book for schoolchildren with his wife and was the man behind setting up Orissa’s first information technology company, ORICAM.