Balwanti Devi and Apna Devi still shake with emotion when they remember the night their men were dragged away by an angry mob and gunned down in the fields of northern India.
Although the killings were at different times, in different villages and, on the surface, for different reasons, the two women, both in their 60s, share the same grief.
But they are on opposite sides of India's cruel caste wars: victims of the hatred that divides their communities.
The ageless caste system remains a powerful and defining force, particularly in rural India, where the reach of government and police is tenuous at best. Tension is rising as the world's largest democracy heads for national polls in April and May.
"The viciousness of the caste system is being played up by the politicians, for the vote bank. This is democracy in India," says Satish Sharma, whose cousin, Apna Devi's only son Santosh, was executed by a pro-lower-caste leftist rebel mob in 1999.
Publicly, the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the main opposition Congress shy away from caste in their polished election campaigns, focusing instead on economic management and good governance.
But caste remains a critical factor - determining who stands and who wins in some seats and shaping some of the key alliances with regional parties that will decide the next government.
"There is a lot of caste in Indian politics," says analyst Mahesh Rangarajan. "The issue of caste will not diminish in any way but the way it plays out will and has changed.
"The most striking feature is the increasing confidence of the Dalits (untouchables) and adivasis (tribals) and the way in which the democratic process has given them autonomy.
"The reality is that the caste groups engaged in manual labour or cultivation are numerically so important."
India is witnessing a shift in the caste power balance in the northern Hindi heartland, home to most of parliament's 545 seats.
Low caste leaders now control two of the most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with a total 120 federal seats and a combined population of about 250 million people - four times that of the United Kingdom.
"Caste is a very, very important factor. Caste is the eminent and permanent factor," says Bihar's de facto premier, Laloo Prasad Yadav, a member of the Yadav cowherd caste and fiercely anti-BJP. "The masses are suffering masses and the leaders are from the upper castes. There are snakes everywhere."
His Rashtriya Janata Dal party has four seats and he aims to boost that as part of an anti-BJP alliance.
The upper caste-led BJP is changing its strategy to deal with the new balance: it is courting lower caste leaders in Uttar Pradesh as allies and installed a popular backward caste woman, Uma Bharti, as chief minister in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
And BJP officials privately say they had put a new emphasis on caste equations in crucial seats in December state polls in Rajasthan - where it shocked analysts with a landslide win.
But the high politics of caste calculations is a long way from the grassroots realities of the two Devis, who have never met and would never expect to: they are worlds apart.
Squatting on a damp dirt path, tugging nervously at her dupatta headscarf, Apna Devi sobs as she recalls in an unsteady voice how Santosh died: "They came at 10 o'clock at night. They took all four to the fields and gunned them down. I was woken up by firing. I rushed out - but he was dead."
Santosh, 20, and three relatives in their Bhumihar caste village of Bhimpura, were accused of being part of an upper caste militia, the Ranvir Sena, which had massacred 12 Dalits, or "untouchables" in another village three weeks earlier.
For Balwanti Devi, it was her husband, a Dalit cobbler named Ragu Mochi, who was hauled from bed by the Ranvir Sena around midnight one day in mid-1988 in mainly Dalit Nonahi-Nagwan.
"I tried to block the door, but they broke in and took my husband, despite us crying for mercy," she says angrily. "They dragged him out and shot him. How can I survive now?"
That mob killed 21 Dalits, including a six-month-old baby, after villagers protested landlords were cheating them of their pay - even 16 years later barely a dollar a day.
Today, a forlorn, cracked red concrete memorial listing 21 names stands under a Banyan tree on the village edge.
Nearby stand neglected fish ponds, now useless and devoid of fish, given by authorities in compensation after the murders.
"If you need development, you have to have a massacre," half jokes Sanjay Paswan, a jobless labourer, as men thresh wheat by hand in the hot sun.
The threat of violence constantly overshadows such villages. In central Bihar, more than a thousand people have been slaughtered in caste wars since the mid-70s, and three or four more die every week.
But no one really knows: when is a murder over who drinks from which village well, over an "insult" or over wages about caste or something else?
The only unusual thing about the two Devi stories is that the leftists who killed Santosh used guns - normally they save their expensive ammunition and slit victims' throats.
"Anytime they can start violence in the name of caste," says Paswan. "The sense of insecurity has increased. There is tension over trivial things."
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