- Two diaries found at the Sant Nagar “house of horror” have helped police make some sense of the bizarre “mass suicides”.
- Lalit had been hallucinating that his father was giving instructions to the family through him, said an officer.
NEW DELHI: Two diaries found at the Sant Nagar “house of horror” have helped police make some sense of the bizarre “mass suicides”. A day after TOI reported the diaries’ contents, a special team in crime branch minutely studied them and is preparing a report.
According to sources, it appeared that Lalit, Narayani Bhatia’s youngest son, had been making notes on someone’s “directions” – possibly his father, Gopal Das Bhatia, who died 10 years ago. “It appears that Lalit had been hallucinating that his father was giving instructions to the family through him,” said an officer who studied the diaries.
Cops said it was evident that the family was blindly following all these “directions”. One of the last notings reads that that the mother would feed rotis to everyone (ma sabko roti khilayegi). This has been corroborated as the family ordered 20 rotis from a nearby shop for which it paid Rs 200. They didn’t order any vegetables. The police have found the restaurant bill in the house. The food was delivered around 10.40pm.
As TOI reported on Monday, the police confirmed that the diaries gave a step-by-step account of what happened on that night. It had detailed instructions for “mass salvation”, including how the hangings should be conreducted.
The Bhatias, who ran a shop in the area, seemed to have followed the instructions, some of which may have been written months ago. They conducted a “havan” hours before the suicides.
A senior police officer said: “Right from asking them to stand on stools, to the mother lying on a separate bed in the other room, and Pratibha, the widowed sister of Lalit, to hang near the temple’s chaukhat — everything is mentioned in detail in the notings.” He added: “The first entry in the diary is of 2015.
For a few months, there are no entries… then it starts again… There is a gap between most entries… In all, there are around 40-50 pages.” Sources confirmed that the entries in the registers had become more frequent after January this year, indicating that Lalit’s condition may have worsened.
