Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,102

out on their own.”

Ma’s face contorts in pain, as if someone has stabbed her.

News of our patrol spreads across our basti and Bhoot Bazaar. Quarter turns up with his gang. His eyes dart around, and his legs and hands shudder as if he’s nervous. Maybe he’s worried about Runu-Didi. Maybe he knows something he can’t tell us.

If Quarter is the child-snatcher, he shouldn’t have been here. Or he’s here so that we won’t suspect him. Which one is it? Pari would know the correct answer. But Pari is writing the EVS exam right now.

“My father is going to speak to a minister in the city,” Quarter tells Papa now. “He will insist that special police be sent here.”

“Are we fools to believe such lies?” someone in the crowd says.

“Who said that?” Quarter shouts, but no one admits to asking the question.

“Does your father even live here anymore?” Papa asks Quarter.

“Let’s focus on finding your daughter first,” Quarter says.

He forces his way into people’s houses as if he will find Runu-Didi tied up inside. No one protests, not even an old woman who is changing out of her clothes when Quarter kicks open a door. She quickly wraps a sheet around herself.

I see older sisters taking care of little babies, families that are still whole, nobody missing, not even a pet goat or a kitten.

We go around Bhoot Bazaar. Our throats run dry. Someone offers us water. Someone else offers us tea. Bahadur’s ma stays close to my ma, but she tiptoes around her as if she’s afraid she’ll step on Ma’s sadness, which must be the same size and shape as Bahadur’s ma’s sadness, only a lot fresher.

“The rubbish ground,” someone shouts.

I run and so does Ma and Papa and everyone else. I stumble and fall.

Ma’s hands help me up. “Maybe they have found Runu,” she says. “Maybe she was hiding when we went there yesterday.”

Her eyes are bright like a crazy person’s, her hair has come undone, and white spit-marks have crusted around her lips. I want to believe her, but I can’t. Nothing good is ever found at the rubbish ground.

* * *

“Send the women and children back,” a man’s voice roars at our patrol. I can’t see him because I’m too short.

“Who are you to tell us what to do?” a woman roars back.

There’s a gash in my palm from when I fell down. It stings and throbs. Clothes hanging from washing lines flap against the faces of grown-ups. There’s pushing and shoving and cursing. Elbows punch my face. I scream but no one hears it, the scream is quiet.

“We deserve to know what’s happening to our children,” a woman shouts. “We gave birth to them, not you.”

The crowd sweeps forward, carries us forward too. It’s like the wind, and Ma and Papa and I are kites with broken strings, going where it takes us. A hundred people might be around me, maybe two hundred. The air, stinking of rot and shit and burning rubber and batteries, shudders with our fear and anger.

We enter the lane that faces the rubbish ground. There’s more space here and the crowd spreads out and I can finally see what’s happening. Quarter, Aanchal’s papa, the press-wallah, and Kabir-Khadifa’s papa are standing near Bottle-Badshah and the ragpicker children. I grab Papa’s hand and we join them.

“Go on, tell them, don’t be afraid,” Bottle-Badshah says to a snotty boy my age, wearing a yellow glass-bead chain around his neck and holding a muddy-brown sack tight in his hand. I don’t think Ma and I talked to him yesterday.

“My kids are always on the hunt,” Bottle-Badshah says, looking at Quarter as if he knows Quarter is the most important person here. “Whoever gets the best stuff makes the most money.”

I wonder what the children found. I want to know. I don’t want to know.

A girl with a red headband keeping her hair out of her face pushes the bead-necklace boy. “Talk,” she says. He doesn’t.

I recognize her; she’s the girl who was flying the broken helicopter when I came here with Faiz. She doesn’t seem to remember me.

“Arrey, just now,” the helicopter-girl says, “we saw a man go deep into the rubbish with something hidden under his blanket. Nobody goes that far to do No. 2.”

I look around. Everywhere there are small fires and smoke and pigs and dogs.

“After the man left, we went to check—we didn’t go close at first, in case he had really done No. 2. Then we saw