When a family member dies a natural death, time heals the pain. Even an accidental death can be acceptable after sometime. But a murder…” Kanika Paul’s voice trails off. Sitting on a sofa in the spacious drawing room of her apartment at Singhi Park, the widow of Dr Sushil Paul, who was allegedly killed and his body dumped in a canal outside Calcutta in July 2004, tries to find the right words to describe what it feels like. To live with the knowledge that a loved one was snatched away not by the forces of nature, beyond the control of man, but by man himself.

Twelve men — and one woman — were arrested by the West Bengal police in connection with the murder. And if so far Paul has dealt with the terrible fact of her husband’s unnatural death by numbing herself, she can no longer do so. Last month, after endless logistical delays, the trial for the murder of her husband finally began, rekindling a rush of agonising memories.

“When they showed me his shirt — the one he was wearing when he was killed — I broke down. I vividly recalled that morning. I had taken the shirt, starched and ironed, out of the cupboard before he left for work and helped him put it on, buttoning it up. And now they were taking it out of the plastic bag as evidence, all soiled and mud-stained!”

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Debashis Ray says, “While any death is difficult for a family member to come to terms with, the trauma is much more acute in the case of a murder. This is not just because of the suddenness of the loss which is the characteristic of other types of deaths also. But in a murder, the idea of the violence to which he or she has been subjected becomes psychologically unbearable for the family.”

Experts agree that a murder trial can bring on a similar sense of ‘vicarious visualisation’ of the crime, recreating as it does the sequence of events and returning to the moment of murder over and over again. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a criminal lawyer associated with the Dr Sushil Paul murder case, says, “A murder trial can be like witnessing the crime itself because all the details are discussed and all the tangible evidence brought out and held out for examination and identification. And this can be extremely traumatic for a family member.”

With the trial now on, Kanika Paul is reliving the nightmare of that night when the news arrived that her husband had gone missing. The date was July 2, 2004. Two and a half months earlier, the couple and their two daughters (Shreya, and Sreeja, then 10 and 7, respectively) had moved back to Calcutta from Jalpaiguri, where Dr Paul, a gynaecologist, had had a roaring practice. “We came back because we thought it would be better if the girls were educated in Calcutta,” says Paul. Subsequently Dr Paul got a job as consultant gynaecologist in a hospital in Srirampur, on the outskirts of Calcutta. Recalling those happy days, his wife says, “He left for work around 8.30 in the morning and usually came home the latest by 7 in the evening. If he got late he informed me. That night there were no phone calls.”

The last time she said she spoke to him was when she called him in the afternoon as she usually did to ask if he had lunch. At 5.30 pm she began calling over and over again but his mobile phone was switched off. “I thought that was strange since he never kept it off,” Paul says. Finally, when she called up one of the clinics in Srirampur where he practised, she was informed that Dr Paul’s bag was found in a canal near Calcutta.

Kanika Paul remembers rushing out like a woman possessed. By then the relatives had started pouring in. “My daughters were howling and clinging to me. They kept asking, ‘Where is Bapi?’ I had to find out. I had to go.

“I decided to follow the route he usually took when he travelled by bus or cab to see if he was lying unconscious anywhere or if anyone could give me any information. We drove along the highway looking for clues. We went to the Howrah Station and enquired if there had been an accident. But no one could tell us anything.”

Finally a phone call from the Karaya Police Station late in the night informed them that a body had been found in Sankrail, along with a bag which contained Dr Paul’s identification card.

“The post-mortem report indicated murder,” Paul almost whispers to herself. “There were 33 marks of injury on his body. There was a small cut near the eye,” she pauses for breath, allowing herself to absorb the pain of the words she was uttering.

Her daughters have come out of their room on the pretext of asking something about homework. “They know we are talking about their father,” she continues once they go back to their room. “As you can imagine, the incident has scarred them deeply. They don’t speak about it much and they try very hard to give me emotional support and strength. For almost a year, I had become like a vegetable, just lying in bed and crying. My daughters have almost grown up overnight. They are not like children anymore.” When in a moment of bitterness she told them, “Forget all that your father taught you about being a good human being,” her elder daughter supposedly shot back with, “Don’t ever say that again. We will follow in our father’s footsteps.”

No, Paul cannot fathom why a person like her husband — “he was considerate almost to a fault” — would be murdered. Since the case is sub-judice, its details cannot be discussed, except maybe to point out that part of the prosecution’s argument as far as the motive for the murder is concerned is that the gynaecologist was going against a powerful medical racket and the final nail in his coffin was driven when he refused to perform an abortion on a doctor — one of the accused.

But as far as Paul is concerned, all that is for the trial to decide. The only thing that she is concerned with right now “is to see justice done”. As she says, “I will only rest in peace when those who snatched away my beloved husband and the father of my children are punished.”