The idyllic, creative environment that 65-year-old artist Shireen Mody (pictured, photographed by Prabuddha Dasgupta, shireenmody.com) had created in Arpora, North Goa, was shattered on October 6 this year when her gardener allegedly bludgeoned her to death with an iron pipe. According to the police, the alleged assailant Prafulla Jena also succumbed to injuries 
caused by a fall while trying to flee the scene of the crime, noted the Mumbai Mirror (MM) of October 7. Mody was "struck several times” by Jena, stated the news report, quoting an unnamed officer from the Anjuna police station. The Times of India (ToI) noted on October 7 that Mody’s daughter, artist-illustrator Saffron Wiehl and servants found her lying in a pool of blood. Reportedly, the gardener had called Mody to a storeroom opposite her house in the same compound on the pretext that it needed to be cleaned. Mody was declared dead at the Goa Medical College. Prafulla succumbed at a local district hospital. ToI reported on October 8 that Mody’s maid servant Shilpa Puri told the police that she saw Jena coming out of the storeroom with a metal pipe in his hand. Puri told ToI that he "abused” and "tried to assault” her also with the pipe.
A student of Bombay’s Elphinstone College, Mody had worked in advertising in London among other cities. According to the artist’s website, she lived and worked in Goa for three decades. Her works are generally large format acrylic on canvas depictions of Goan lifestyle, notes her website. MM noted that Mody and Wiehl opened their gallery, Studio Arpora in November 2018. "My life as a painter was nurtured and contained in Goa… It is the inspiration and the theme,” Mody’s earlier statement was quoted by ToI. She was married to a German architect, now deceased.
"A life outside of Goa may have been more lucrative for me, but that is far outweighed by the fact that I would probably have died young of stress related complaints,” Mody ironically had told ToI in an interview in March this year.