The man whom Mohammed Nisham ran over with his Hummer was once a theatre artist and singer, who did back-breaking work to support his family after he got married.
On January 29, 2015 he was brutally attacked by beedi tycoon Muhammed Nisham inside the Shobha Villas apartment complex in Thrissur for a delay in opening the gate. The security guard was first mowed down and then beaten with an iron rod. As a result of the grievous injuries he suffered, he subsequently died on February 16, 2015.
Kattungal Chandrabose lived in a four-roomed unplastered house in Vilakkumkal, 18km away from Thrissur district, Kerala.
“Bose-ettan was a loving husband,” his wife Jamanthi reminisces to The News Minute. ('Ettan' is a suffix in Malayalam to address an older man with love and respect)
“Ours was an arranged marriage. He used to speak so loudly, that people could easily locate him just by his voice,” she says, adding that Chandrabose had been a drama artist and a singer before their wedding.
Jamanthi and Chandrabose both hailed from the same village, Kanjani in Thrissur. While she was working as a daily wage labourer in the diamond polishing industry in the city, her husband was a manual labourer.
“Only after marriage, he started working as a manual labourer. Then he started toddy-tapping,” Jamanthi says.
He contracted back problems after years of physical labour and later worked as a waiter in a hotel for six years. With his meager savings and a loan, he bought an autorickshaw.
“But that did not work out. We incurred losses and eventually had to sell the vehicle,” she says.
It is after this that he took up the job of a security guard. “Come August, it would have been three years of Bose-ettan working as a security guard.”
Jamanthi soon left her job at the diamond polishing industry. She then started working as a domestic help in a nearby house where an old couple lived.
“When their daughter gave birth to a baby in Dubai they asked me if I could go there to help and I agreed. For the next one and half years, I was there and it was my mother-in-law who took care of my husband and children.”
With the money she earned abroad along with some financial aid, the couple bought 2,178 square foot of land on which they built the house that stands today.
“It was six years ago that we constructed this house but we had enough money to only build one room and a kitchen. The four of us stayed in this one room. After a few years, we made a two-roomed hut attached to this room,” Jamanthi says.
Every rupee earned was saved by the family, and it was only a week before the day of Chandrabose’s death that the two-roomed hut was converted into a proper house. Only the electrical work, tiling, and plastering remained.
“The night Bose-ettan left home on 28th he had told us that we will begin the electrical work soon,” she says.
The family has a liability of Rs 5 lakh. Shobha Developers for whom Chandrabose worked has assured that they will pay his last drawn salary to the family for the next five years. They have also assured to meet all the educational expenses of the children.