After horrors and abuse, mapping a path for this senior's recovery

Bangalore: Aananthaiah Shetty, 74, who was found chained on the roof of his son's house in Bangalore, is now recovering in hospital and will soon move to a shelter run by a private trust for the elderly.

Mr Shetty was rescued by the police on Wednesday after neighbours called them. They took him to the General Hospital where doctors say he was brought in very poor condition. "He was stinking. He was malnourished and had respiratory infection as well as neurological and cardiac problems. We are treating him accordingly," said Dr B G Saroja, the hospital superintendent.

A social activist Saravana, has offered to take Mr Shetty to a shelter which houses about 200 elderly people once he leaves hospital. "We are going to admit him there and we are going to support him. Whatever he likes I am ready to do. His sons have agreed to admit him there," Mr Saravana said.

For months, Mr Shetty lay on a faded mattress, a steel plate lying beside him. Disturbing images before he was unchained show him crouching under a small enclose under the water tank on the roof. "They tied me up today... they give me food, rice and saru..." said the man to a local television channel on Wednesday.

The cops who found him said, "There was a foul smell...it was totally unhygienic."

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The senior citizen's son, Suresh Hanumanthaiah Shetty, lives in a lower middle-class neighbourhood and admitted that they chained his father regularly. "He would keep making the house dirty. So in the morning we bring him and keep him here. In the evening we take him inside," he said.

The son claimed that they fed the old man three square meals a day, though doctors have now confirmed that he was brought to hospital malnourished. His wife, Kalpana, said that her father-in-law was chained not because he often suffered from diarrhea and so would "dirty the house," but because "he might fall down the stairs. That is the only reason...six months ago, he fell from the steps in another son's house."

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One neighbour, Srikant, told NDTV, "It is a horrible case. At least an ordinary common citizen can't expect that much horror to an old person of that age. That too being a father to six children - we can call it a crime... even as neighbours what they are doing, we are unable to know."

The horrors of his story follow that of a 34-year-old woman who was rescued from her parents' home in Bangalore on Tuesday where she was kept locked up for five years.