– relatives want to know, based on their findings
RELATIVES of the 68-year-old Hardai Singh, a pensioner also called ‘Auntie Kuntie’, who perished when fire destroyed her Soesdyke home on Wednesday evening, are calling on the police and fire authorities to revisit the scene and conduct a thorough investigation into the death of their loved one. They said they fear her death might have been the result of foul play.
The woman’s granddaughter, Nirmala, who spoke with this newspaper yesterday, said relatives’ grief was intensified when they revisited the burnt building early yesterday morning only to find that parts of her body had been detached and remained on the burnt floor.
“When we reached there, we found one foot and one hand still next to where the body was when she was taken away by the men from the funeral parlour.”
Nirmala said they had to call the police and ask them to get the undertakers to return for the dead woman’s limbs. She said the shock and pain were minimally eased only when they considered that dogs could have found and eaten the limbs before family members had gotten there.

Cause of fire
Relatives claim there was no way the woman could have been cooking, since her meals had always been prepared by her daughter who lives at Farm, East Bank Demerara, and dropped off at Hardai’s home.
“Even though she had a table model (gas) stove and two kerosene stoves, she never had cause to light any of them,” Nirmala insisted. And even if a gas cylinder had exploded, there would have had to be some fire coming into contact with it for that to happen; and that was not how the fire had started, relatives insisted. They added that the whole incident is very strange.
Asked about the possibility of her kerosene lamp perhaps toppling and causing a fire, Nirmala  said that was also impossible, since the lamp was on a wall in her bedroom, and when found, the woman was in her chair near the front door. As for the possible explosion of the lamp, Nirmala said it was known that a certain set of boys in the neighbourhood would pass by and hurl bricks at the old woman’s home. So if there was an explosion, then maybe a violently hurled missile had hit the lamp, she contended.

Foul play?
“She has a three-piece chair suite, and her charred body was found sitting upright in the chair. What we would want to know is how come she would be crying out for help, hear people banging at a door which is just an arm’s length away, and not open up the bolt?” her granddaughter questioned.

Nirmala, who grew up with her deceased grandmother from age one to 21, when she got married and moved out, said that the old woman was never one who would go into a deep slumber. “At the slightest sound she would jump up…even if she had a ‘drink’. She was never a deep sleeper. For this reason we suspect foul play and think that Aunty Kuntie (grandmother) might have been bound and could not move from where she was.
She said relatives have good reason to believe that was the case, but would not go into details with the media.

Robbed
Just last week, the old woman was robbed by persons unknown, her granddaughter recalled. She said when the person who washes and cleans for Auntie Kuntie reported for work one morning, she found that a window to the house with a six-foot elevation was open. She alerted the family, and when they got in, they found that her pension, her box-hand she’d collected a few days earlier, and U.S. money sent by a relative had all gone missing.
Relatives are also peeved that, according to them, the police and fire ranks did not return to the scene where the woman perished, and that persons were visiting the site of the disaster unrestricted.
“I think that place should have been considered a crime scene and treated as such, until such time as investigations are completed,” Nirmala said in disgust.