When Akash Sarkar returned home on June 7, he received an unexpected welcome: his father — assuming the 22-year-old to be dead — was half-way through conducting the rituals for his last rites.
In a bizarre turn of events in Kalibazar area of West Tripura district, an alert villager stopped Pranab Sarkar in the nick of time from completing the ‘shradh’ of his son who went missing a month ago.
On June 3, a body was found floating in the lake near Melrmath under West Agartala Police Station. Preliminary investigation found that the deceased was a resident of Kalibazar, who was missing since one month.
Soon after, police contacted the family of Akash Sarkar and informed them about the corpse. The body was handed over to Pranab Sarkar after the postmortem.
“I identified the body which was recovered from the pond. Though the shirt he was wearing was different from that of my son’s, the bag and trousers belonged to him. The tablets he was taking for his backache were also found with the body. Police told me that as the body had bloated and was partially decomposed, proper identification was difficult. I went with my daughter and son-in-law to the hospital but didn’t take them along into the morgue as I thought they would be disturbed,” said Pranab Sarkar.
He added: “The police pressured me to accept that the body in the morgue was my son’s. My son’s uncle and I cremated the body. We had made all preparations for the ‘shradh’ when a villager called me to stop the rituals, saying my son was approaching home.”
Akash, meanwhile, claims that it was his aunt who brought him home. Allegedly addicted to drugs, Akash said he moved out of his home a month ago with the bag which was found near the corpse and often begged for a living.
“I live near the Batala Bridge and beg for a living as I cannot do physical work due to my backache. I was admitted to GB hospital in Agartala and my aunt brought me home and informed my parents that I was alive. I was not was aware of my ‘shradh’ ceremony at home,” he said.
(With inputs from Kajal Koiri, Agartala)
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