An alleged dowry death and a gruesome revenge

A horrible tragedy that has singed two families, left three people dead and sent seven people to jail. The incident on the night of 18 March in the northern Indian city of Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) has also sent shockwaves through residents of two crowded middle-class neighbourhoods. "It was around 11pm when about 60-70 people turned up at our home. They started beating us mercilessly," says Shivani Kesarwani.

The intruders, she says, included family members and relatives of Anshika, her brother Anshu's wife, who had been found hanging at the Kesarwani home an hour earlier.Shivani and the police say Anshika died by suicide - but her family and neighbours allege that she was murdered for dowry. The Kesarwanis had a family business dealing in timber and lived in a joint family. The ground floor and the basement were taken up by the shop and the warehouse and the family lived above it. Each floor had one bedroom - Anshu lived on the top floor with his wife since their marriage a year back, his parents lived on the first floor and his sister Shivani had the second floor.

"Anshika usually came down around 8pm for dinner but on that day, she didn't show up and we thought she must have fallen asleep," Shivani told the BBC. When her brother came up from the store at 10pm, she said, he went up to call his wife. "When his knocks and calls went unanswered, he broke a glass pane above the door to release the lock. He found Anshika dead. He screamed and all of us went rushing up."Anshu and his uncle reported the death to the police station, less than half a kilometre from their home, and Anshika's parents were informed.

Less than an hour later, police say, Anshika's family turned up along with dozens of relatives and within minutes, an ugly fight is said to have broken out between the families. On her mobile phone, Shivani shows us videos of men shouting, hitting each other with wooden sticks. A policeman stands in the middle, trying - and failing - to bring order.Once Anshika's body was taken out of the house, police say her relatives set fire to the house.The timber, stored in the ground floor and basement, burned furiously, trapping Shivani, her parents and an aunt in the house. 

Shivani and her aunt broke the window of the second floor and crawled to safety in the adjoining house which belongs to her uncle. Her parents were not so lucky. When firefighters, who took more than three hours to put out the blaze, entered the house around 3am, they found the elderly couple's charred bodies. "My mother was found sitting on the steps. She was carried to the mortuary in a sack," says Shivani, wiping her tears.