A homemaker was found murdered at her Girish Park home in north Calcutta on Monday, her hands and legs tied to the bed-frame with torn parts of a sari.

Police said Pratima Maity, in her 40s, had nothing on except a piece of cloth around her neck.

Pratima's husband Dilip, a trader in Andhra Pradesh, had sent one of his employees in Calcutta to check on her on Monday morning as she had failed to respond to his phone calls over the past two days.

The employee found the door of the one of the two rooms occupied by Pratima locked from outside, while the door of the other was bolted.

The employee called up his boss and then got in touch with one of his brothers. The brother, Ajit, and neighbours of the Maitys decided to alert the police, their suspicion having been aroused by a stench emanating from the house.

The police said it was not possible to ascertain from the condition of the body whether the victim had been sexually assaulted or not.

"A clear picture will only emerge after the post-mortem. The body swelled beyond recognition, making it difficult to draw any conclusion," an officer in the homicide department said.

"The piece of cloth tied around her neck and the pillow on which the victim's head was resting suggest she could have been strangulated or smothered or both."

Pratima lived alone in the two rooms on the ground floor of a two-storeyed building on Baranasi Ghosh Street, off Central Avenue. Two other tenant families shared the premises.

"Dilipda called around 9am and asked me to check on boudi. I came and found the house locked. I reported back to Dilipda and then called his brother Ajitda," said a youth who works at a gold ornaments shop on Hari Ghosh Street owned by the Maitys.

The police said Dilip, a costume jewellery trader, lives in Hyderabad, while Ajit looks after the family business in Calcutta. Dilip's elder son and daughter-in-law live with him, while his younger son lives in Gujarat.

"They (the Maitys) used to live here for decades. But something happened a few years ago and they moved out of the locality. They returned around one-and-a-half years ago, but this time only Pratima started living here. Her husband and sons would visit her occasionally," a neighbour said.

Investigators said they were yet to find out whether there was any rift within the family.

The two rooms Pratima occupied opened into a small courtyard. When officers of Girish Park police station turned up at the house around 3pm, the light in the courtyard was on.

"Circumstantial evidence suggests the body was not more than one-and-a-half days old. But the heat in the closed room quickened the decomposition," said an investigator.

The police have found Pratima's cell phone, connected to a switchboard with a charger.

The fact that there was no apparent mark of ransacking in the house has prompted the investigators to suspect that the killer was known to the victim.

A police dog sniffed its way till around 500m from the spot and led the investigators to a blind alley called Girish Park (North), close to the jewellery shop owned by the Maitys on Hari Ghosh Street.