Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,1
why he had to die. One of them whispered Mental’s real name into the wind, which was a secret known only to them, and a shadow stirred in the lane. The boys thought it was a cat or a flying fox, though there was a charge in the air, the metallic taste of electricity on their tongues, the flicker of a rainbow-colored bolt of light, gone so soon they could have only imagined it. They were worn out from hunting bottles and light-headed from hunger. But the next day, rooting through the trash on the floor of a train, each one of the three boys found a fifty-rupee note under different seat-berths.
They knew the money was a gift from Mental’s ghost because the air around them rippled with the warm breath he exhaled, smelling of Gold Flake Kings. He had come to them because they had called him by his real name.
The boys started leaving cigarettes for Mental at his wall, and tinfoil bowls of spiced chickpeas tangy with lime juice and garnished with coriander leaves and slivers of red onions. They cracked rude jokes about the smells and sounds that Mental had produced the afternoon he ate a quarter-kilo of chickpeas in one sitting. His ghost didn’t care for their wisecracks and afterward they found cigarette holes in their shirts.
Mental’s boys are scattered across the city now, and we hear some of them are grown up and married with children of their own. But even today, a famished boy who falls asleep with Mental’s true name on his cracked lips will wake up to find a white tourist buying him ice cream or a grandmother-type lady pressing a paratha into his hands. It’s not much, but Mental wasn’t a rich man, so he didn’t become a rich ghost.
The funny thing about Mental is that his boys were the ones who gave him that name. When they first met him, they saw he was tough in many ways but his eyes turned soft if they showed him a missing toe or a scar thrashing like a dying fish on the back of their thighs where they had been whipped with red-hot iron chains. They decided that only a man who was Mental could be half-good in this crooked world. But first they called him Brother and the youngest boys called him Uncle and much later they started to say Mental, look at how many bottles I found today, and he didn’t mind because he knew why they had settled on that name.
Months after he became Mental, on a spring night when he had drained several glasses of bhang, he bought the boys creamy phirni in clay cups and whispered to them the name his parents had given him. He told them he ran away from home when he was seven because his mother cuffed him for ditching school to hang about with the town’s Roadside Romeos, who burst into shrill song each time a girl walked past them.
His first few weeks in the city, Mental lived in the railway station, wolfing down scraps from the half-eaten parcels of food that passengers threw out of train windows, and hiding from the police in the alcoves beneath footbridges. Every thumping step above him felt like a blow to his head. For a while he believed his parents would arrive by train to find him, scold him for frightening them and take him home. At night he slept fitfully, hearing his mother call his name, but it was only the wind, the rattle of a train, or the glassy voice of a woman announcing that the Northeast Express from Shillong was delayed by four hours. Mental thought of going back home but he didn’t, because he was ashamed of himself, and because the city made men out of boys, and he was fed up of being a child and wanted to be a man.
Now that Mental is a ghost, he wishes he were seven again. We figure that’s why he wants to hear his old name. It reminds him of his parents, and the boy he used to be before he hitched a ride on a train.
Mental’s real name is a secret. His boys won’t tell anyone. We think it must be a name so good, if Mental had gone to Mumbai instead of coming here, a film star would have flicked it from him.
There are many Mentals in this city. We shouldn’t be afraid of them. Our gods are too