During his tenth class exam, the one thing that had pushed Faisal to study hard was his father's promise to buy him a cellphone that would "click pictures, play music and have WhatsApp", if he did well. When the exam results came in, he and his father, Shauqat, headed straight to the local mobile shop and bought Faisal's first smartphone – a cheap Chinese one since that was all Shauqat, a carpenter, could afford to buy.
Tall, curly haired, 15-year-old Faisal lived in Sarai Kale Khan, an early 19th-century settlement in South Delhi. Initially the abode of a Sufi saint, Kale Khan, it also served as a shelter space, a 'sarai', for travellers. In present-day New Delhi, Sarai Kale Khan is home to one of the city's largest bus terminuses, functioning as a transit point, or the permanent destination for poor rural migrants. According to Save The Children, an organisation that has been working with poor women and children in the area for almost two decades, Sarai Kale Khan has a population of approximately 280,000 people. Of this population, 70 percent are Muslim migrants, mostly from north India, and another ten percent are non-Muslim migrants. The non-migrant landowners form the remaining 20 percent of the population. This includes a few Muslims but most are from the Hindu Gujjar community.
Faisal's family had moved here 12 years ago from a village in Gonda, a district in Uttar Pradesh (UP). His father had found a steady job as a carpenter in a shop, while his mother worked as domestic help. They lived in one of the many buildings that offer rooms on rent in Sarai Kale Khan. Every landowner in the area owns on average five buildings, each with six to seven floors. Each floor has up to 20 rooms and one common toilet to be shared by all inhabitants on that floor. The rent for a room varies between INR 1700 (USD 25) to INR 3000 (USD 45) per month, excluding water and electricity costs. The rooms either have a small window or no ventilation at all. The claustrophobic environment worsens when meals are cooked here. Water supply is limited: twice a day for an hour each. Residents line up in long queues to store water. There are open electricity wires and usually every month someone gets electrocuted. Almost all the tenants work in the unorganised sector, as daily wage labourers, domestic workers, security guards, and artisans like Faisal's father.
In his building, Faisal was more educated than the rest of the children. His schooling had empowered him and he had started pointing out how the landlord was fudging the electricity and water bills, charging INR 8.5 (USD 0.10) per unit instead of INR 4, which led to a minor rebellion in his building. A week before Diwali in 2015, his phone number was found in the call logs of Rina, the daughter of Avtaar Singh, Faisal's Gujjar landlord.