Ashok Shah and wife Rashmita, who were found murdered in their Bhowanipore flat in south Kolkata on Monday, wanted to sell their house and buy a smaller flat and spend the remaining money on their third daughter’s wedding, sources close to the family said.
Relatives and friends remember the couple as ‘doting parents’ who would do their best to make their daughters happy.
“He (Shah) would often call me and express his anxiety about his third daughter’s wedding. He would always say that he had managed to get his two daughters married and now had only one responsibility left, to get his third daughter married,” said a family friend.
The Shahs’ eldest daughter, Priyanka Mehta, lives with her family in Jamshedpur. Second daughter Sneha lives in her in-laws’ house in Bhowanipore.
The youngest, Disha, who works in a firm, is unmarried and stayed with her parents.
All the daughters were at Bhowanipore police station on Tuesday to get their statements recorded. They refused to comment after stepping out of the police station.
A friend of the Bhowanipore residents said Shah had been trying to sell his house — a ground-floor flat in a three-storey building on Harish Mukherjee Road — for more than two years.
He was apparently in touch with multiple brokers and prospective buyers. Sources said a broker who was in touch with Shah had brought two offers, of which one was almost finalised.
One of the brokers was interrogated at Bhowanipore police station till early on Tuesday.
Shah’s family is originally from Waknaner in Gujarat. People who knew him said he had been living in Kolkata since his early years.
“He would call himself a Bengali. If you did not know his surname, you would mistake him for one,” the family friend said.
Shah — who had two sisters — spent his early life in a rented house on Elgin Road in south Kolkata, from where he shifted to the Harish Mukherjee Road house with his wife, daughters and mother in 2000, said a former neighbour of the Shahs on Elgin Road.
“Of Shah’s two sisters, one stays in Indore. The other sister, who chose to stay back at their Elgin Road house, is no more,” he said.
One of Shah’s friends in Bhowanipore told The Telegraph that Shah and his wife would like to mingle with relatives and friends. “The best thing about him was that he would never lose his calm, whatever the circumstances,” the friend said.
The police said they had learnt that Shah ran a torch-battery store at Mehta Building, which he later shifted to another address near Nandram Market. “He was also into share trading,” an officer of Bhowanipore police station said.
One of Shah’s friends who has known him from his 40s said he was a “simple person” and would not engage in any dispute. “It is so shocking that someone would kill him and his wife like this. To the best of my knowledge, they did not have any enemies,” he said.