Woman journalist found dead, body decomposing for 3 weeks in Noida flat: Why we are living and dying in solitude
Last year, when a young man working in the US came home to find his 63-year-old mother's body lying decomposed for days in her 10th floor Mumbai apartment, journalist Babita Basu, like most of her colleagues in newsrooms across the country, perhaps breathed a deep sigh. In all likelihood, she may have even posted the news online on the portal she was working for. We don't know what Basu thought of the disturbing piece of news, or did, or didn't do. We can only assume.
Yes, assume, because she is no longer with us.
On Sunday (October 14), Basu's colleagues and friends woke up to the news of her death — the body found decomposed in her 16th floor flat in Noida. According to police, Basu, who was living alone in the flat for the past 20 months, appeared to have died three weeks ago.
The tragic death was discovered when her landlord knocked on her door after she did not respond to phone calls from him to get the rent agreement renewed last week. He reportedly got a foul smell from the house and called up her son, who lives in Bangalore. "He, too, tried to reach out to his mother. When he could not get through to her, he called me up on Saturday night and requested if I could visit her. I told him about the foul smell in the house. He came to Noida this morning and broke the door in the presence of a police team," the landlord was quoted by The Times of India.
Sadly, though not surprisingly, Basu's neighbours had no idea what had happened to her since her "flat is located at the end of a corridor".
Basu, 52, worked with TOI (digital). As her co-workers and former colleagues are slowly coming to terms with the news, it is perhaps the fear of such 'lonely deaths' that grips most of us, even those who didn't know her. The fear of living alone and dying undiscovered — the body smelling, the rotting flesh slowly giving away. Waiting for someone to discover our tragic end. Stretched out in complete privacy of those four walls and a roof staring down at that cold, immovable mass of flesh which was once someone's mother, someone's son, someone's colleague, someone's friend.
Among the solo dwellers in our cities are a chuck of working women, mostly middle-aged. Then comes the elderly. There are equal or more numbers of men living alone. And unlike our previous generations, people who live alone today mostly jostle together in metropolitan areas, within the secure walls of 'gated apartments', backed by independent careers or robust retirement plans. Of course, this is not how anyone of us wanted it to be. Sometimes it was a compulsion, at times a choice.
It's strange how we are finally getting to see the results of that remarkable social experiment that we so proudly discovered as a gift of our new lives in the cities of our dreams — a life of solitude, a life of independence, a life away from prying eyes. We just don't know how solitude became melancholy, how independence became chronic loneliness and how all those prying eyes —normally busy browsing through the private details of our lives — suddenly missed to see us lying dead in the lonely corridors leading to our flats. Because somewhere trapped between the solitude of those high-rise buildings are the walls that we have created around us — we can't see anybody, no one can see us.
India is among the top countries with the highest number of one-person households. The rising affluence and growing number of planned cities have added to our unplanned loneliness.
It's not just the ageing population that we decided to abandon long back, but the very young and vibrant adults who are becoming a victim of solo living. What do you do when you are forced to live away from your families, far from the comfort of home-cooked meals and mother's lap or father's shoulders to rest your head on? For how long can you take the intrusion of strangers living together as your flatmates, forced to hug their presence as company? The moment we see the opportunity to wriggle out of it, we are happy to embrace loneliness as solitude.
How long do we wait for our sons and daughters to quit their jobs, ruin their careers to come back and live with us?
How long do we wait for that ideal life partner not to rush into unhappy marriages and living-ins?
How long do we wait not to become that misanthrope that Babita Basu thought she was?