By a strange quirk of fate, members of a dead man’s family have become his representatives in a legal battle for divorce, a case his estranged wife dragged him into while he was alive.
Subodh Ghosh, a resident of south Calcutta, died on October 29 last year, fighting a divorce suit with estranged wife Anjali Ghosh in Calcutta High Court, after a lower-court verdict failed to please him.
The decree for divorce was granted but he died about a week later. Consequently, the execution of the decree was stayed, as some questions in the case, relating to family property in Kalighat, remained to be resolved.
And so was born a rare scenario in a divorce case. No one in Subodh’s family could decide whether Anjali, was a widow — following her husband’s death — or a divorcee.
Central to the query was the issue of inheritance. If Subodh died without being legally divorced from Anjali, she would be one of the main contenders for the prime south Calcutta property. But if she had been legally divorced before Subodh’s death, she would not be in the running when the property was divided between Subodh’s legal heirs.
Four members of Subodh’s family — father Jogendranath and sisters Mina Ghosh, Gita Dasgupta and Rani Das — went to court, asking the judge to resolve the dilemma. As a part of the divorce case — the issue concerning Anjali’s right to her estranged husband’s property — was yet to be resolved, they wanted to know whether Anjali was a divorcee or a widow in the eyes of the law.
Subodh’s death had cast a shadow over the legal validity of the divorce decree itself, they pleaded, wanting the court to decide on this issue first.
Quite expectedly, the four happened to be the only legal claimants of the property, apart from Anjali.
The judge found the case remarkable. Subodh’s father and sisters had raised a “very interesting and important question of law”, Justice Samaresh Banerjee admitted, making all of them respondents in the original case.
While deciding so, Justice Banerjee took cognisance of the fact that the four wanted to deny Anjali the status of a widow as then she, too, would get a share of the south Calcutta property.
After doing so, he exercised the only option he had: decreeing that the divorce case would continue and that Subodh’s father and three sisters could become his legal representatives.