KOLKATA: Fourteen-year-old Pratip Dey, who survived a car crash on the EM Bypass on Feb 19, has told a state child rights functionary that his mother Sudeshna and aunt Romi had backed out of a suicide pact at the last moment, but his father and uncle — Pranay Dey and Prasun Dey, who also survived the crash — refused to relent and had slashed their wrists, killing them.


Pratip also told West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights (WBCPCR) adviser Ananya Chakraborti that his uncle, on his father's instructions, had tried to smother him with a pillow. He had only survived by using "yoga techniques" of breath control and by playing dead, the boy reportedly told her.
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Chakraborti, reporting what Pratip told her, said the two Dey brothers had planned to jump from the roof of their four-storey residence when payesh, laced with sedatives, which they had eaten on Feb 17 failed to kill them. Sudeshna and Romi had refused, which was why they were killed, Pratip told her.
Pratip narrated these harrowing details to Chakraborti quite matter-of-factly, she said, adding this was an indication of his "state of shock".
"Pratip said he was in a stupor and felt guilty that he could not save his mother and aunt, though he could hear them struggle when his father and uncle were murdering them," Chakraborti said.
When his father and uncle had come to kill him, Pratip said he had fought back with every ounce of energy in his body. When he heard his father tell his uncle to smother him with a pillow, he took a deep breath and held it as long as he could. When his uncle removed the pillow and checked whether he was breathing, he pretended to be dead. It was only when they left their room, convinced that he was dead, that he breathed again, the teenager said.
It was after his uncle and father left his room, thinking he was dead, that Pratip Dey found his cousin, Priyamvada, dead, he told West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights (WBCPCR) adviser Ananya Chakraborti.
Pratip says Priyamvada was frothing at the mouth. She was the only person suspected to have died from the strong sedatives in the payesh the family had eaten the previous night, which Pratik says was "very bitter". In other rooms on the first floor, his mother and aunt lay dead.
Pratip said he then went upstairs and saw his father and uncle preparing to die by suicide. They convinced him to join them. "When we asked him why he agreed, he said all his loved ones were dead. He said: ‘What was his point of living?'," Chakraborti said.
Police at Lalbazar said they received the detailed postmortem reports on Thursday and tallied those with statements of the three survivors. According to police sources, there were inconsistencies in the statements of the two brothers. Prasun has claimed to the cops that Sudeshna and Romi had slashed their own wrists. Police are now relying on the autopsy report, which indicates that the cuts on the women's hands wre not self-inflicted. "Someone else cut the veins in the women's hands," an officer said.
The autopsy report reveals that of the three, Priyamvada was the first to die, probably sometime on Sunday (Feb 23) night or in the early hours of Monday (Feb 24).