Noida: A Dalit family in a Noida village woke up to neighbours' shouts on Tuesday morning to find the door bolted from outside and two of its daughters, aged 18 and 13, hanging from the backyard Indian Devil Tree at the end of their dupattas.
Senior superintendent of police Love Kumar said the bodies bore no injuries apart from the ligature mark on the neck, indicating suicide, but the parents hinted at the possibility of murder.
Mother Rajendri said she had recently rejected a distant relative's request to marry her 18-year-old daughter - one of the dead girls - and the boy's family had rung up from their home in Bulandshahr on Monday night and issued death threats.
Father Bhushan, a sanitation worker at the nearby Neo Hospital, "has lodged a complaint expressing his suspicion that some relatives may be involved", Kumar said. Officers said a murder case had been registered.
At least outwardly, the tragedy in Barola, 50km from Delhi, is eerily similar to the May 2014 Badaun incident where two teenaged Dalit sisters were found hanging from a tree near their home.
The family of seven - Bhushan and Rajendri lived with two other young daughters and a young son, while their two eldest daughters are married - in a one-room tenement on the first floor of a building facing a canal that carries sewage.
"I saw them (the two girls who died) lying on the charpoy around 3am. When I woke again around 4.30, they weren't there. I assumed they had gone to the bathroom," Rajendri, who is physically challenged and does not go out to work, told The Telegraph.
The bathroom is on the same floor, and the family are the only residents of the building, which has a pharmacy and a ration shop on the ground floor.
"Sometime after 6am I heard shouts. The girls were not in bed. We tried to open the door but it was bolted from outside," Rajendri said.
Several Dalit and Muslim families live in one-room tenement buildings close to Bhushan's home, circling a field with the Indian Devil Tree ( chhatim), on the fringes of the village, dominated by Rajputs and Gujjars.
One of the neighbours, a butcher who would not give his name, said: "I saw the girls hanging when I came out to relieve myself. Everyone stepped out and started shouting for the family to come out," he said.
"They did not and we were too scared to go up to their room as we didn't want to get entangled in a murder case. Eventually, the police came and opened their door, which was bolted from outside."
Rajendri highlighted the neighbours' anxiety not to get involved: "No one offered us even a glass of water."
She elaborated on the family's suspicions. "Earlier this month, a distant relative's son, Ravi, had come and stayed with us for some time. He is a lout in my ancestral village of Rangpur (also in Bulandshahr), so we refused when he asked to marry my daughter (the dead 18-year-old)," she said.
"His family has been threatening us for a while. Around midnight yesterday, his brother Rohit called saying his uncle Bablu from Mumbai would shoot us if we didn't agree to the marriage."
Bhushan said the family, Balmiki Dalits from Bulandshahr, had moved to Barola less than a year ago. The dead 18-year-old and her 16-year-old sister, Mamta, worked as domestic help in nearby high-rises.
The dead 13-year-old had just been admitted to a Hindi-medium private school in upper kindergarten. Her 10-year-old brother Harish is in Class II, and eight-year-old sister Shama in nursery.
"In our village, Kalyanpur, we were farm labourers. I couldn't send my children to school. We moved when I found work here so I could do something at least for the ones that wanted to study," Bhushan said.
The upper caste villagers said they had not heard of the deaths. Officers said the post-mortem had confirmed death by hanging. In October, an outside gang had killed two Brahmin boys from the village after a dispute over a cricket match.
