An Indian man has become viral and featured in news headlines for following his late wife’s wish to build a life-size statue of her so they can still be together.
Tapas Sandilya is a retired government employee from India’s West Bengal. He lost his wife of 39 years in 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Indrani was taken to the hospital while he was forced into isolation. They could not be together when she passed away. Tapas began to look for an artist that could develop a lifelike silicone statue of Indrani and spent 6 months and around $3,000 on this unique project.
“We visited the Iskcon temple in Mayapur a decade ago and could not stop admiring the lifelike statue of the order’s founder AC Bhaktivedanta Swami,” Tapas Sandilya told The Times of India. “It was then Indrani had me of her desire for a similar statue if she happened to pass away before me.”
Last year, Sandilya found a sculptor that agreed to work on the life-size silicone model of his late wife. He spent days working with him on a clay cast that would later become the base of the silicone casting. The 65-year-old made sure that the model came out exactly how he wanted it to be, insisting that nothing less than Indrani’s actual facial expression would do for him.
In the end, the art came out amazing. A 30-kg silicone model of Indrani dressed in an Assamese silk sari that the woman had worn at her son’s wedding reception will now be permanently seated on a swing, her favorite place in the family home.
“My family was strictly opposed to the idea of installing such a life-like sculpture but gave in. Some of my relatives and neighbors helped,” Tapas told Indian reporters. “If we can keep framed photographs at home after someone’s death, why not a statue?”
This tribute is quite unique and eerie. Back in 2021, there was a woman who built a marble idol of her late husband, and a year before that there was the story of the man who lived with a lifelike sculpture of his dead wife.
