“The shop belonged to a Muslim, so it was destroyed,” a middle-aged man with vermillion on his forehead told me. “If the owner came, we would have killed him too. They’re doing this to Hindus in Jaffrabad, and we’re doing this here.”

At around 8 pm, I returned to the Maujpur-Babarpur metro station. The armed group had dispersed and the Hanuman Chalisa had stopped, but men with menacing frowns still roamed the area. The main Maujpur road was ugly, with red and grey stones, the fences around the divider razed to the ground.

In Vijay Park, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, men were grouped near the bylanes. They claimed that rioters from Maujpur were sneaking in through these bylanes and attacking them. Locals claimed that a daily wage worker named Mubarak Hussain had been shot and killed around noon. The situation had been so tense that his corpse was only taken away in the evening at about 7 pm.

“He was in his late 20s and hailed from Bihar,” said Raees Ahmed, a local. “We had to keep his dead body on the main road so that the police were forced to take notice and take it away.”

Mubarak was shot in the chest. Ahmed showed me a video on his phone. It was made by someone on the other side of the Shahdara drain, and captured a man wearing a red T-shirt and a helmet shooting three times inside the lane where I now stood.

“This one, this is the shot that hit him,” Ahmed said, yelping when the third shot was fired.

Locals in Vijay Park alleged that it was “goons” from the Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena who led the communal violence in the area, with the help of the Delhi police. “It all began with Kapil Mishra’s speech on February 23,” a young man told me, and others nodded.

As we stood there, a rumour rippled through the area. Young men who had been standing near the main road said a curfew had been imposed, and that the police would shoot anyone lurking outside. Within minutes, people panicked and the groups dissipated. Vijay Park turned eerie and still.

A man named Nafees then walked up to me and said the forces had likely detained his injured friend at the nearest checkpost, about 50 metres away. The friend had a fractured leg and was returning home from the hospital. Nafees sheepishly peered towards the checkpost, scared he would be shot if spotted. He couldn’t locate his friend.