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Pawned jewellery behind mystery of woman’s suicide
View(s):By Mirudhula Thambiah
Selvaratnam Vijayalakshmi planned her death carefully: She waited until her husband had taken the two younger children to school. Then she locked up her eldest daughter in a room, secured the front door and wedged the fridge against the kitchen door to prevent rescue, and set herself on fire.
Vijayalakshmi
Vijayalakshmi, 46, died last Monday with her last amount of jewellery pawned for Rs.100,000 – and a total pawned jewellery debt said to be many times that amount. Police are grappling with the conundrum of how the woman, whose family lived in a space approximately 3 x 5 metres in a house in Walls Lane, Modera, could have accumulated so much jewellery.
There were times when Vijayalakshmi could not buy basic foodstuffs – not even a coconut – when she could not pay her electricity bills. Her sister says the family had more than once helped her out with groceries. The dead woman had worked as a private tuition teacher; her husband is a trishaw driver whose work brought in about Rs.600 a day.
The family income had been sporadic: for a while, Vijayalakshmi had been the only breadwinner, and lately, depressed by her debts, she had found herself unable to cope with normal routine and had stopped giving tuition. There are conflicting claims about key aspects of the woman’s situation. She had become short-tempered in recent weeks, always complaining about her financial situation, according to her eldest sister, Gunasundari.
They said Vijayalakshmi’s interest payments on all the jewellery she had pawned had gone into arrears and now amounted to more than the value of the jewellery. Seventy-year-old Selvamani, the mother, told this paper all her daughters lived within easy reach of one another and helped each other. She rejected information from police that Vijayalakshmi had set fire to herself following a family dispute regarding her pawned jewels.
Vijayalakshmi’s husband, Selvaratnam, 50, denies the dead woman had been complaining to others about her debts. He told the Thinakkural newspaper on Tuesday that in the days preceding the death his wife had grown silent and had dodged questions about her mood, saying she was just sleepy.
He said Vijayalakshmi had told him several times that she was worried because she had borrowed her mother’s jewellery and pawned it for Rs.100,000 and could not repay the loan to redeem the jewels. He had offered to sell his trishaw to redeem the items.
Vijayalakshmi’s mother and sisters complained to the Sunday Times about media reports that could wrongly imply that they bore some responsibility for the suicide.
The kitchen where the suicide took place. Pic by Indika Handuwala
Police are trying to piece together the puzzle, with the post-mortem report due on Tuesday. Unusually, Vijayalakshmi had not cooked breakfast for the family last Monday, the day of her death, but had asked her husband to buy some food for the two younger children when he dropped them off at school.
Shortly after 7.15 a.m. that day, as Selvaratnam drove the couple’s nine-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son to school in his trishaw, Vijayalakshmi locked 18-year-old Sangavi, her eldest daughter, into a bedroom. Why are you doing this, asked Sangavi, who had stayed home that day on study leave from school. Her mother, who was kind but strict, had told her that it was good for her to sleep, and pulled the bedroom door shut.
Sangavi, daughter of Vijayalakshmi, wept as she recalled that parting. “Before our mother left she spoke to me very kindly and advised me to look after my brother and sister well. But I had no idea that she would make such a harmful decision.” Then, the troubled woman had locked the other doors of the house, crouched on the floor in front of the gas cooker and poured kerosene oil over herself. She set fire to herself with a flame from the cooker.
Sangavi told the Sunday Times that her mother had screamed once after setting fire to herself. Neighbours rushed to Vijayalakshmi’s house when they heard Sangavi’s cries for help. Seeing the flames, they sent for the police.
According to an officer from the Modera police station a message had been received on Monday at 7.30 a.m. that there was a fire in a house on Walls Lane. The police rushed to the scene along with the fire brigade within 15 minutes. Vijayalakshmi was found dead, her body completely burned.
The funeral was held last Tuesday at Gunasundari’s large, two-storeyed house, a contrast to the dead woman’s small house, which has the ground floor rented out for badly-needed income.
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