How she died is yet to be established.
The mutilated body of a woman was found in a plastic bag stuffed in a closet in her home in Mumbai, the police said today. Her 23-year-old daughter has been arrested.
Veena Jain's body was mutilated, said the police, and pieces of flesh and bones were found in a steel tank. The body, kept for months in the closet, was in a decomposed state.
Rimple Jain was questioned for hours before she was arrested for allegedly murdering her mother in their home in Mumbai's Lalbaug area.
The victim had four brothers who used to help her with the household expenses every month, said the police.
The crime was revealed when the dead woman's brother and nephew approached the police on Tuesday and reported her missing, according to senior police officer Praveen Munde. They had last seen her on November 26.
The neighbours said they suspected a dead rodent behind the foul smell coming out of the house.
"Construction work was going on, everything was dug up. We thought some rat must have died, so everyone ignored it," said a neighbour.
When the police searched Veena Jain's first floor apartment, they found the plastic bag in the closet with its grisly contents.
How she died is yet to be established. Veena Jain fell down the stairs in December, the police said.
This is the latest in a series of murders-at-home reported in the last few months. In Delhi's Shraddha Walkar murder case, 28-year-old Aaftab Poonawala allegedly killed his live-in partner and kept parts of her body in a refrigerator he bought for the purpose, and then scattered those, one by one, across the city's Mehrauli forest.