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He worked in a security agency. She worked in a bar, and possibly still does. They lived with the man’s family in the traditional Bengali middle-class locality of Kalighat Road. The marriage ended with Dipak writing the story of his life — at least its concluding part — in a 20-page letter and tying a dupatta round the fan, tying the other end round his neck and then kicking the stool or chair on which he stood.
Just as we don’t know if the dupatta was his wife Sona’s, we also can’t confirm the aforementioned details surrounding his death. But there is no denying that that’s how people hang themselves.
Just as there’s no refuting that earlier that day — in the afternoon of the day before Poila Baisakh, the Bengali New Year — Dipak had received the notice for divorce from his wife of many years. Between the afternoon and the night fell the shadow, and in the lengthening shadow Dipak wrote his 20-page life-ending letter.
That’d be the natural interpretation but it’d be wrong. According to investigators probing his death, assumed as suicide, he wrote it possibly over several months: the testimony of a failed marriage — and a failed life of 42 years. Several empty bottles of liquor were found in the room. He and his wife were living separately for the past five months.
A police source said: “It’s not a typical suicide note, saying why the victim is ending his life. It is more of a diary, scribbled on the pages of his daughter’s notebook over many months. Dipak repeatedly writes of his fears that his wife loves him no more. He seems to feel she is involved with some other man, for the letter asks her to tell him who she is in love with.”
Was Dipak a jealous husband? Or was his wife really having an affair?
The un-answer to that question leads us to Sona’s job at the bar as a receptionist. Dipak’s family holds its silence. His elder brother would only say: “My brother’s wife had no values.”
If there’s a hint in that statement that the family holds the woman responsible for his death, one of Dipak’s friends said: “I do recall him being upset about the fact that his wife worked in a bar. He had been trying to get her a job, but she was not qualified enough.”
But she is pretty, a lot younger and possibly earned more.
Security secret
A married woman with a grown-up daughter living with her husband in the man’s family home in Kalighat Road would expectedly be viewed with general suspicion and not as someone breaking the mould.
“She started working only two-three years back, but even before that she was flighty. I have seen much that cannot be described. She had many male friends,” said a shop-owner near their residence, who claimed to have known Dipak for decades.
But if the work she does defines the woman, the man isn’t safe either.
Dipak held a job as a security agent that was below his so-called social standing. Conditioned by circumstances where work is less than work if it fails the conformity test, he himself made that very evident.
Someone who knew him well said: “He would wash his uniform himself and dry it inside out so that no one could see the company name. When he went out to work, he would always wear a shirt over his uniform.”
After his death, his brother is said to have checked his belongings for an identity card or a uniform to find out where he might have worked. There was nothing.
If that can be interpreted as evidence of his being ashamed of the work he was doing, he has left behind proof of his shame at Sona’s occupation by confiding in his friends.
One of them had lived in the UK for a number of years before returning to settle here. They were equals as friends but probably not as social beings. Another of Dipak’s friends was travelling on work in Delhi or Chennai — surely not as a security guard — at the time he hanged himself. A third owns a shop in the locality that appears to be doing brisk business.
It wasn’t money or the lack of it, though, that seemed to have been the relationship killer. Or at least that’s what people who knew Dipak think.
“The (family) house is very big (three-storeyed) and they have many tenants. Money was never a problem,” said a friend.
Dipak’s room was air-conditioned and he rode a motorcycle, which a security guard, who usually earns between Rs 2,500 and 3,000 a month, wouldn’t be expected to be able to afford. Before he joined the security company, a relatively recent job, Dipak worked in a road-repair company that closed down.
His friend recalls that Dipak had dropped out of school, which was unusual in a middle-class family which would be expected to press him to continue his education. Acquaintances offer an explanation for the family treating him with kid gloves: Dipak had shown suicidal tendencies earlier.
When he was very young, much before marriage, he had drunk phenyl to kill himself after breaking up with his then girlfriend, said a friend. About three years ago, he slashed his wrist after his wife left him, temporarily, but could be saved that time.
Shattered image
Psychoanalyst Nilanjana Sanyal said most people who committed suicide had a certain character trait — that of excessive self-love and image consciousness. “In the case of Dipak this sense of image might have been hurt because of his wife working at the bar,” she added.
At the time they got married soon after meeting each other at a wedding, Dipak didn’t betray any signs of being overly image conscious. He didn’t even have a job then, recalled a friend. “(It) must have been tough, especially as his family refused to support him.”
His parents probably did not approve of the match and Dipak moved into his in-laws’ place in Howrah. After his parents passed away, his brother brought them back to the family home and possibly even supported him when he didn’t have a job. But even such a kindly elder brother didn’t grow any fonder of Sona.
After Dipak’s death, his brother apparently said he had been forced into the marriage.
Sona’s mother said: “Let them (Dipak’s family) say what they like. We don’t have anything to say. It is all over for us.”
Emerging from their Howrah home, again in a very middle-class locality, in an off-white sari bordered with red and wearing light jewellery, Sona’s mother said her daughter wasn’t at home.
“Nani ma,” Dipak’s teenaged daughter, who had answered the door, had called out to her grandmother earlier. Pretty in capris and T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a braid and with a cellphone that didn’t look cheap, she stood nearby, calm and collected, as her grandmother spoke — a fortnight after her father’s unnatural death.
A broken family and a 20-page scribble constitute his legacy to his child.
The notebook in which he wrote is now locked away with court papers, its contents beyond public and even family reach.
If he had been writing it for months, Dipak might have ended his story abruptly because he hadn’t expected his wife to dispatch a notice for divorce. It wasn’t the first time she’d left home – and had always come back.
Or, having received it in the afternoon, he might have used the time to ponder and write an ending that ends a few minutes before he killed himself. If an end lies in a beginning, the diary speaks of an evening when his wife’s friends were visiting them and they’d all been drinking. That evening ended in a fight between husband and wife.
Perhaps, the beginning lay even farther back in time that Dipak may or may not have revealed in his notebook. And that beginning might have ended in an evening of love which no one cared to remember.
IMPORTANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM
Marital strife over the wife’s career is becoming increasingly common in Calcutta. “In our society, in many cases, if a woman is the bread-earner and the man a jam-earner, it becomes a problem. The man’s self-esteem takes a beating,” says consultant psychologist Anuttama Banerjee.
She recalls that a 29-year-old MNC employee’s relationship with his teacher wife changed when he was faced with the threat of the downturn. He was scared of losing his job and becoming financially dependent on his wife who had a more secure job. He would find fault with everything that she did, blame her for being away from home and undermine her work, she said.
Psychoanalyst Nilanjana Sanyal points out how successful women find it difficult to maintain a happy marriage. “I remember this case where both the husband and the wife were working and then the husband lost his job. The wife started to support the family. One day she got a belt for her husband, but he wanted to know its price. She told him she had got it because she loved him, but he felt that her gesture was meant to demean him. Their problem increased and the man eventually killed himself,” she says. In another case“a girl from an affluent family fell in love with a man and married him. After a baby was born, the girl decided to keep the baby at the creche and work so that she could supplement the family income. But the man was reluctant. He couldn’t accept that his wife had to work for a better life. It led him to suicide,” Sanyal says.
P.B.
(Some names in the report have been changed)
