An old man in Bihar in the twilight of his life has donated most of his modest life’s savings to chief minister Nitish Kumar urging him to set up an oldage home. The 80-year-old man, a published novelist, took the decision after getting thoroughly disappointed with what he called his “only child’s insatiable greed”.
The story of Naresh Gupta of Barauni in Bihar’s Begusarai district could well sound like a cautionary tale about family life and money in modern times. A widower struggling with an aggravated asthma and a shivering hand that foils his attempts to write poems, Mr Gupta felt deeply betrayed by his only daughter, Chanda Devi, 50, and son-in-law, Prabhakar Kumar, who live in Hyderabad with their two children.
“I appeal to Nitish Kumar to kindly accept `12 lakhs from my total savings of `15.45 lakhs and use it for setting up an oldage home in Barauni, where there is no such facility. If I die before this, my daughter and son-in-law will soon take away all my savings. I want to retain `3.45 lakhs for continuing treatment of my asthma and eyes and for my shraddh rituals to be held after I die,” said Mr Gupta to this newspaper on Wednesday. After his wife Sulochana Devi, a teacher at a government school, died in December 2008, his daughter forced him to withdraw money from his five fixed deposits at the UBI’s Barauni branch before full term at a loss of `1 lakh, threatening not to hold the shraddh rituals otherwise. “My daughter took `2.80 lakhs for her mother’s shraddh and returned to Hyderabad with the `2 lakhs lying unspent. She has been betraying me ever since,” said Mr Gupta, whose novel Alikhit Patra, Abole Samvad was published in 1988.
As Mr Gupta started living and buying medicines from the `5,000 he got as his wife’s monthly pension, Chanda and Prabhakar took him to their Hyderabad home in May 2009. But before leaving, Prabhakar forced him to withdraw money from a fixed deposit prematurely and write a cheque of `65,000 in Chanda’s name. “But I was heartbroken in the six months I lived with them in Hyderabad. They did not give me enough food to eat, only tea and sliced bread. I used to sit on the streets with an empty stomach in daytime. They were unhappy to see me still alive despite getting little real food for six months,” he said.