Poverty, stigma force man to dump wife’s body on.roadside

In a heart-wrenching tale of love and despair, a poor man faced an unimaginable tragedy when his beloved wife succumbed to an illness amid severe heat. Stricken by grief and unable to afford the last rites, he kept her body at home for three agonising days, hoping for a miracle that never came.

It is not a script of a Bollywood flick but a real-life tragedy faced by a 55-yearold man in Chandan Nagar, of the commercial capital of the state which also boasts to be ‘Mini Mumbai’.

The heartbreaking reality came to the fore when city police started investigating the case of an abandoned decomposed body of an old woman wrapped in a cloth found in a sack on Sunday morning.

The deceased was identified as 57-year-old Asha Nargave, a native of Barwani district and was staying on rent in Rajkumar Nagar, Bank Village, Dhar Road.

The woman’s husband Madan Nargave told about his ordeal to the police that his wife had died due to some illness and excessive heat on the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday. He felt ashamed to inform society about his wife’s death as talks would centre about him not having enough money to perform her final rites so he kept the body at home for three days.

But when a stench started coming from the body, neighbours started talking about the foul smell which forced him to dispose of the body. He wrapped the body in a saree put it in a sack and then carried the sack on his shoulder and dumped the body across the road approximately 200 metres away from his house and went to sit in a garden at Raj Mohalla as he was filled with remorse at what he had done.

Initially, when the body was found outside a house, panic gripped the Ahmed Nagar area in Chandan Nagar police circle. The police reached the spot and uncovered the body.

ACP Nandani Sharma said that a FSL team and sniffer dog were called to gather evidence and investigate the case thoroughly. There were no external injury marks on her body and initially, it was suspected that the woman was murdered but within six hours of the incident police disclosed that it was a death due to some illness and the body was dumped by her husband.

However, to know the exact cause of the death, police sent the body for autopsy examination.