In an electrical shop in north Delhi’s Gandhi Vihar, Geeta Devi sits hunched on a worn out revolving chair, eyes glued to her smartphone. Exhausted with the swarm of reporters thronging the neighbourhood for the past week, she looks up with exasperation at a man who has stopped at her shop. She’s half-expecting to be questioned about the alleged murder of a 32-year-old man in the neighbourhood. It turns out the person at her counter is a potential customer.

Relieved that the customer is a local, she rushes into a conversation on the incident that has become a subject of discussion in the area. “Dekhiye aaj kal ki ladkiyon ko (Just look at this generation’s women),” she says. “He was a nice boy. The only vice I could see in him was that he would sit on the steps of shops and smoke.” She adds that she hadn’t known him personally.

On October 6, Ramkesh Meena’s body was found in a burnt down flat in Gandhi Vihar. Within two weeks, police said they had traced the death to his partner Amrita Chauhan and her associates Sumit Kashyap and Sandeep Kumar.

Gandhi Vihar is a neighbourhood where single-room flats with little ventilation dominate. Here, every second house is inhabited by migrants preparing for government examinations. It lies next door to Mukherjee Nagar, once the hub of coaching centres. Many live here for years, picking up books from bookstores that dot the markets, clustering in groups to discuss the future, or just grabbing a b