When a building at Laxmi Nagar in East Delhi collapsed on 15th November, killing at least 70 people, the media did not generally permit the grievous loss of so many lives to speak for itself. Before the dust from the fallen masonry had settled, before the broken bodies had been identified and cremated or buried, new horror stories were spun out of the tragic incident. A new kind of ‘tragedy tourism’ had been discovered, knots of onlookers, bystanders who had forfeited their title to innocence, ghouls who had come to be close to the site of the macabre happenings. Once the owner had been made known, tales of his unique rapacity and exploitation were heard. He was charging more than 2500 rupees a month for a room that was little more than a cupboard, and was even renting space under the staircases for 350 rupees a month. The police failed to appear on the scene until more than an hour and a half after the collapse. Later, false relatives appeared, claiming corpses to whom they were not kin, in order to avail themselves of the compensation hastily promised by politicians. There were even tales – quite untrue – that local people had been less charitable than they might have been in their response to the loss of life, while some people were reported to have been looting the scanty belongings of the deceased. Rumours that children had been working in an illicit factory in the basement, a conviction that the numbers of dead was higher than the official count, that officials had begun filling in the improvised mass grave even before all the bodies had been retrieved – everything added to an impression of grisly festival. Even the opportunistic sellers of snacks had, in some versions of the story, made their appearance on the scene, while airlines were charging 10,000 rupees to ‘repatriate’ the exiled bodies to their home in Bihar and West Bengal.