Kolkata woman, who stepped out of home after four years, dies in hotel

KOLKATA: Sabita Basu, the 70-year-old woman who was shifted out of her wobbly house for the East-West Metro tunneling, died in her sleep on Sunday in the central Kolkata hotel where she had been moved to last Tuesday.

For the last three decades, Basu was living on the top floor of the three-storey building at 9A JL Nehru Road. Though the house is located right in the heart of Kolkata, she never stepped out after her dentist husband Samir Basu’s death. She went into depression and could no longer climb down the steep stairs over the last four years. She had been an active member of Inner Wheel Club of Calcutta Mid-West till the last day of her life. She had even donated an ambulance for HIV-affected kids and set up a corpus for the education of needy kids. Though she kept herself confined to her house, she did her networking over the phone.

Basu, along with five of her employees and another family of three, was shifted out of their home so that the East-West Metro authorities could strengthen the unsafe building before the giant tunnel borer hit SN Banerjee Road to build the west-bound tunnel.


Her death came as a shock to her family and friends, who she had been keeeping contact with over the phone from her hotel room. “She was so happy to be on a ‘holiday so near home’. Initially, she was agitated. She had even gone through a panic attack the night before the shifting. But gradually, she relaxed, watched television and was enjoying the hotel stay,” said Rajesh Das, one of Basu’s employees. “She was taking her afternoon nap as usual, but we realized something was wrong when we tried to wake her up around 7pm. We rushed her to the hospital where she was declared dead,” said Das. She died of a heart attack.

Her sister-in-law, Rita Basu, who flew down with her husband from Delhi to cremate her on Monday morning, told TOI: “This is so sudden. She (Sabita) sounded so happy on the phone these days. She kept saying she had become a celebrity (referring to TOI reports about her over the last fortnight). But I guess her high blood pressure and obesity turned fatal,” said Rita.

Basu, the former president, will be missed by fellow members of her Inner Wheel club, said Aparajita Majumdar, post-doctoral research fellow in JU and the current president. “We were already missing her as she went into depression after her husband’s death and stopped coming out of the house. Her contribution to the club’s social activity was immense. The house was in such a condition that Sabitadi just didn’t feel like venturing up and down the stairs.”

Her friends would often advise her to shift to a more “convenient” and “livable” house, but Basu would insist on staying at 9A JL Nehru, where she had been living for the last three decades. “She said she wanted to run her husband’s clinic as long as she could to keep his memories alive,” rued a friend, adding, “This is one of the strangest deaths I have ever come across.”