Lucknow, March 21: A young home-maker allegedly throttled an 80-year-lady who had come home to beg, dressed her in her own bright clothes as she lay unconscious and burnt her alive to fake a suicide and escape her abusive husband.

Firozabad resident Fahmeeda Begum’s macabre act mirrored that of Priyanka Chopra’s character in 7 Khoon Maaf where she sets her own house on fire to fake her death after killing one of her seven husbands.

School dropout Fahmeeda, 28, fed the famished lady — a widow reduced to penury— before killing her and draped her body in the dress the homemaker had got as an Id gift from her husband before setting the lady ablaze, the police said.

But Fahmeeda made a mistake that did her in. She forgot to remove the beggar’s clothes from her room and had gone back home in a burqa to remove that piece of clinching evidence when she was caught yesterday.

The police said Fahmeeda had even left behind a suicide note saying: “No one is responsible for my death. I am sorry that I could not become a mother in eight years of my marriage.” She had tried but failed to a get divorce from her toy-salesman husband who allegedly abused her for the couple’s failure to have a child.

“Fahmeeda told us she had wanted to escape from her husband and start life afresh. She was being blamed over her failure to produce a child. Her husband, although obsessed with her love, kept tormenting her. She wanted a divorce but he refused to let her go,” Firozabad senior superintendent of police Manjul Saini said.

The grisly chain of events began on Saturday, when Fahmeeda invited Haseena Begum, the beggar who had arrived on her doorstep, into her house in Firozabad’s Ramgarh area, offered her food. Hungry, Haseema polished off the bread and vegetables in no time.

As she was trying to rise and take the plates for washing, Fahmeeda crept up from behind and held her throat tightly for a few minutes. As Haseena passed out and lay still, Fahmeeda dressed the old lady in her red salwar and light blue kameez, which her husband Mohammad Arshad had given her last year. Fahmeeda then painted the woman’s face black before spraying petrol and lighting a matchstick, the police said.

Husband Arshad was away in Delhi for work, and the blaze apparently went unnoticed as it was 3pm and the pre-summer heat had kept neighbours indoors.

Fahmeeda reached Firozabad station and wanted to escape to a relative’s place in Agra when she realised to her horror that she had forgot to remove from her room Haseema’s salwar. Fahmeeda dropped her plan to leave town immediately and went back to her house yesterday morning, dressed in a long black burqa. Arshad was still to come back. But she was caught just as she was stepping out with the beggar’s clothes.

“We initially thought it was some other lady. But we challenged her, asked her to stop and removed the veil from her face. To our surprise, it was Fahmeeda,” said inspector Umeed Khan of the Ramgarh police station.

Fahmeeda was today produced in court, which remanded her in judicial custody. Her advocate Sarfaraj Alam said the homemaker was being continuously blamed for “the curse of childlessness” and abused by her husband.

Agra psychoanalyst Namita Soni said it was hard to miss the parallels with 7 Khoon Maaf even though Famheeda might have herself not seen the Vishal Bhardwaj-directed dark thriller released last month. “Famheeda’s story, although somewhat different from Suzanna, comes close in some ways to the film’s character. Famheeda was also driven by her desperation and what we call a reduced personality control system,” Dr Soni said.

An American study on domestic violence by D. Umberson of the University of Texas and K. Anderson of Drew University said “the victimisation of a woman adversely affects her sense of control”. An abused woman experiences a real and perceived personal control reduction, rendering her helpless,” the study said.

Such tales of marital abuse have also been captured in Sleeping with the Enemy, the 1991 Hollywood film in which Julia Roberts plays an abused wife who tries to escape from her husband while the two go for a swim.