Mumbai: In a shocking case of sheer neglect by relatives and indifference to neighbours, a 63-year-old widow lay dead for a couple of months in her flat in suburban Oshiwara until her son returned from the US to find his mother’s decomposing body.
He had not been in touch with her for a year.
According to police, the deceased woman has been identified as Asha Sahani and was living in her 10th floor flat of Belscot Tower in Lokhandwala since her husband’s death in 2013. Her only son, Rituraj, has been working in the US as a software engineer since 1997 and had talked to her more than a year ago, in April 2016. Surprisingly, no neighbour realised that the woman had died.
“Rituraj landed in Mumbai on Sunday. After he reached their house in Lokhandwala, he rang the door bell but did not get any response from inside. He then called a key maker and got the door opened around 4.30pm,” an official said, according to a PTI report. When the son entered the flat, he was shocked to see his mother’s decomposing, fully clothed body on the floor.
The official said that the exact cause and time of the death is being examined even as the body was sent to a hospital for a post-mortem. Oshiwara police registered a case of accidental death and investigation is still under way, said the police.
During the last phone call to his mother, Rituraj said that his mother had told him that she could not live alone and that she should be moved to an old age home.
This incident brings into focus the scores of senior citizens living a life of loneliness in the city even as their children work outside of Mumbai and do not find time to keep in touch with their parents on a regular basis.
A study by a professor at Brigham Young University in the US, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, says, “There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators.”
