Dattagupta’s house. File picture
A 79-year-old retired teacher and a member of the Tagore family was robbed at knifepoint and then locked in a bathroom for over one and a half hours on Friday evening, exposing the plight of senior citizens in what is known as Tagore’s abode of peace.
Haimanty Dattagupta, the great-granddaughter of Rabindranath Tagore’s elder brother Satyendranath who was the first Indian Civil Service officer, was rescued when a passer-by heard her cries from the bathroom window.
Late on Friday night, police arrested Karna Mondal, who had earlier been accused of petty crimes, and recovered two gold bangles and a mobile phone, which the youth had allegedly robbed at knifepoint. The fate of Rs 8,000 stolen in cash was not known. The police closed the investigation by getting the arrested youth identified by Dattagupta.
The septuagenarian, whose maternal grandfather was Surendranath Tagore, son of Satyendranath, was in a state of trauma 12 hours after the incident. Several residents voiced their anguish over the robbery at the one-storey garden house in Santiniketan’s Diganta Pally, part of the core Santiniketan.
“Around 4pm, a person aged around 25 came and asked me for Puja subscription. I declined and then he asked to speak to someone else in the family. The moment I told him that there was no one else, he pounced on me and forcibly took away two of my gold bangles. Then he took a knife from the dining table, held it to my neck and threatened me with dire consequences if I didn’t hand over all the money I had at home. I had withdrawn around Rs 8,000 from the post office and I gave it all to him. Then he locked me in the bathroom and fled,” recounted Dattagupta.
“I was in a state of trauma…. Then, through the bathroom window, I found a woman who works in a neighbour’s house. I shouted to draw her attention, she spotted me, came inside and rescued me,” Dattagupta told The Telegraph.
Dattagupta, a former teacher of St. Xavier’s School in Durgapur, would occasionally visit her Diganta Pally home. As her two daughters live in Delhi and the US, she would be alone at home on most occasions.
“So many of us elderly people here live alone and an incident like this scares us,” said a resident of neighbouring Ratan Pally.
After the incident, Dattagupta went over to the house of her cousin Supriya Tagore, a former principal of Patha Bhavana, who lives 200 metres away.
Supriya Tagore explained the residents’ problems. “We don’t find any police patrolling in our area…. There aren’t enough street lights and some groups roam around,” he said.
Birbhum police chief Kunal Aggarwal said: “We have arrested the youth and recovered the stolen mobile and the gold bangles. We will reach every home in Santiniketan and provide our helpline number.”
The district police had started an initiative named Aswas (assurance) for the elderly in Santiniketan.
Police sources said the main problem in reaching out to all residents of Santiniketan is that most of them are weekend visitors. “We need to make a database with contact details of all residents,” said a source.
