Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,101

could hear Jai’s voice suggesting daft ideas stolen from Police Patrol to find her. Her parents would probably listen to him. Jai wasn’t Runu. Jai wasn’t a girl. She turned her hands and looked at the calluses ringing her fingers, these timestamps of every bucket of water she had carried, every brinjal she had sliced, every shirt she had washed. There were black ribbons on her hands where flames had singed her when she cooked. These were the lifelines pitted into her palms, the ones that sealed her destiny.

The water-vendor approached her hesitantly. On the highway, a bus rolled past, the driver keeping his hand pressed on the horn, the honk like an endless scream.

“Are you lost?” the vendor asked. “What are you doing here?”

“What’s it to you?” she said, but only in her head. She turned and walked away from him, remembering this was why she had started running, and running fast; she didn’t want people asking her why she was blowing her nose or eating gol-gappas or watching the rain tumbling from the sky. No part of her life was hers, no corner of the world either. On the running track was the only place where she felt alone even if a hundred eyes were watching; there, it was just her and the sound of her shoes thudding against the earth.

“Runu?” said a voice that cracked with hesitation. Then Pravin stepped forward with his hands in his pockets. “I heard children have been going missing from this very spot,” he said. “You should go home.”

She looked around and realized, from the electric transformer safeguarded by an iron fence, that she was in the Shaitani Adda of Jai’s stories. Something had brought her here, anger or sorrow or an emotion she couldn’t name.

“Runu, chalo,” Pravin said.

“Try Clearasil,” she said, gently. “Maybe it will help.”

“You’re only a three,” he said, and it took her a minute to figure out what he was talking about.

“Three is much higher than minus hundred, which is where you are,” she said. She was surprised, and grateful, that her brain had come up with a retort.

He looked as if he might cry, but then he left.

The Shaitani Adda was now empty. The pulse in her temples quickened. Even if djinns weren’t real, the disappearances had indeed taken place. She didn’t want to be a number, a totem for the Hindu Samaj. She had dreams (still). In a year or two, she would figure out a way to escape from home, but for now she would have to make do with the stale air of their one-room house.

A man’s voice spiralled out of the blackness toward her: “What are you doing here?”

“Do you know what they say about girls who stay out at this hour?” a woman asked.

No place could be quiet for long in this basti (she should have known).

PAPA SAYS WE ARE GOING ON A PATROL—

—as soon as the smog lets a bit of morning light into our basti.

“We should have kept watch at your Shaitani Adda,” he tells me, “when the children started disappearing. It was careless of us, not to do even that much.”

I stay quiet. It’s not yet forty-eight hours since the spotty boy saw Runu-Didi; that will be tonight. We have a whole day to find Didi.

When our patrol starts, our group is just Papa, Ma, Kabir-Khadifa’s abbu, Shanti-Chachi and me; soon others join, men who don’t have to work in the day, grandpas and grandmas, and a few women holding small children wrapped snugly in shawls and dupattas. No one calls Kabir-Khadifa’s abbu a terrorist; maybe we Hindus don’t hate Muslims anymore.

Papa knocks on every door, pulls back every curtain, asks, where is my daughter? Have you seen her? Look at this photo, look carefully, look closely. If Ma knows the woman of the house, she says, you have seen Runu at the water tap, remember?

The parents of all the other missing children join us, except for Omvir’s ma and Kabir-Khadifa’s ammi and Chandni’s ma and papa. Even Drunkard Laloo is here. Maybe there are fifty people in our patrol group now, or seventy.

We knock on more doors. A woman Ma knows from the water tap tells her, “You’re so unlucky. What a horrible thing to happen.” She looks gratefully at her baby who is safe in her hands.

Another woman says Ma should have been stricter with Didi. “All that running business, I told you it wasn’t going to end well. Daughters should never be allowed