Woman keeps mom’s body for months

Shalini Gupta has just ordered the pizza that’s lying on her dining table. On the wall adjacent to the longest sofa in the room are two photographs. One is of a woman in a white sari with chandelier earrings, a distant look on her face. The other is that of her parents together. “My parents were rich. Look at my mother’s earrings. Doesn’t it seem so?” she asks.

Shalini betrays no emotions. At least nothing to suggest she has been living with the body of her 80-year-old woman mother, Vinode Gupta, who passed away at least six months back at their D-58 residence in Saket. Strangely, Shalini, who had been living with her for the past 15 years, had no idea that her mother was dead.

On the left is another bedroom which Shalini doesn’t allow entry into. “It’s too messy. The maid hasn’t come in a long while,” she explains. Shalini’s mother’s room is dimly lit. The corridor light is enough to reveal what lies inside. The room has a strange stench; musty and gloomy. In the room is a sofa-cum-bed on which the body was found. Beneath it lie a pair of cream-coloured slippers.


Clad in a pair of black pyjamas, a dark grey shirt and a pair of red and black bathroom slippers, Shalini appears disillusioned. “This was where my mother slept. My father died last December.” But she does not show any sign of remorse. “My mother died because she was ill. She was too old and had lived a very traumatic life.” Shalini, the only child of her parents, has been taking care of her mother for the past 15 years.