The cousin of the dead man told me not to go. He expressly forbade it. But I'd come all the way to India, and I wasn't going to leave without seeing the site of the accident—or, as most people regarded it, the scene of the crime. The Savita Vihar neighborhood of New Delhi, separated from the slums of Old Delhi by the Yamuna River, is typical of the modern, upscale residential colonies multiplying around the city. Two decades ago, eastern Delhi was mainly farmland and forest. But that had given way to gas stations, Nokia shops, and housing for millions of residents, many of them members of a burgeoning middle class periodically celebrated on the covers of Newsweek and Time.

My driver turned down a tree-lined lane. He drove slowly, me hunched paparazzo-like next to him with camera and notebook, until we parked opposite No. 59, a gated, three-story building of white stucco.

P.S. Bajwa, the dead man's cousin and the owner of a construction company, had met me an hour earlier inside an office tower his crew was building. Shouting over the shriek of a circular saw, he'd taken out a pencil and sketched what he thinks happened to his relative on the morning of October 20, 2007.

Now I pulled out the drawing and looked up at the house. I pictured Surinder Singh Bajwa emerging from double doors onto a second-story balcony to pick up his morning paper. He looks up, spots a gang of intruders coming his way, and, panic-stricken, grabs a stick to fight them off. He lunges forward and takes a mighty swing, but the intruders dart to safety. Bajwa is carried forward by the momentum of the attempted blow; he hits the balcony railing and tumbles over the side, plunging 13 feet and landing on his back. That's how he's found, face up in a pool of blood. A day later he is dead.

Twenty yards from the balcony stood a large billboard marked with slogans for the Indian People's Party. The face of Surinder Bajwa dominated one corner. He wore a Sikh's red turban, clipped beard, and upturned mustache and had a commanding gaze. Bajwa had been the deputy mayor of Delhi. That's one reason his death became internationally known. The other is that the intruders blamed for his death were monkeys. It didn't matter that they hadn't actually murdered Bajwa; to the public and media, they were to blame. MAYOR KILLED BY MONKEYS, one headline screamed.

P.S. Bajwa wanted me to stay away from the house because he feared I would disturb Surinder's widow. But he supported my investigating the issues behind his cousin's death. "The monkey menace is increasing every day," he said. "It must be stopped."