Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,107
Ma and so does Papa.
Runu-Didi would have been four times as fast as us.
The waste around us hisses and sputters as we run, it bites our feet, it tries to pull us down. Two cows stumble away from us.
We reach the cordon.
“Ask that man to tell me where my daughter is,” Ma shouts.
The policewoman who said she was from a chowki stands in front of Ma, her palm an inch short of Ma’s face. “Have patience,” she says. She doesn’t let Ma move forward.
Dogs bark excitedly. Samosa isn’t here, he must be under the samosa cart near Duttaram’s tea shop. Varun sways as if he’s drunk, dark blood thickening around a cut on his eyebrow. His wife cries.
The JCB’s claw turns the waste again. A black plastic bag comes up.
“What’s that?” a voice shouts from near my ma. It’s Aanchal’s papa.
A policeman picks up the dirty bag with his bare hands, unties it and holds it upside down. Out falls a bunch of old Hindi film VCDs.
“What did you do to my Aanchal, you animal?” Aanchal’s papa screams.
Varun’s eyes are half-shut. His chin drops down to his chest. A policeman prods him with a baton. He stands straight.
* * *
It’s late afternoon now, not yet forty-eight hours. Bottle-Badshah asks his scavenger children to spread out sacks on the ground so that we can sit. I know Runu-Didi isn’t hidden here but Varun knows where she is, and maybe if he stands here for long enough, stones slicing his skin, the truth will rush out of his mouth.
Chandni’s ma and papa arrive. People circle them like hawks.
The pradhan isn’t here anymore. I didn’t see him leave. Quarter is in charge. His gang-members bring him food in plastic packets from Bhoot Bazaar.
Pari turns up at my side with her ma, who must have left work early to bring Pari home from school. Faiz isn’t with her.
“We heard,” Pari says. Her ma sobs.
I move to the side, making space for Pari on the dirty-white sack. She sits with her shoulder pressed to my shoulder, and she puts her hand into mine.
“How did your exam go?” I ask.
“Okay,” she says.
I don’t ask her if she thinks Varun is a djinn. I know what she will say.
Drunkard Laloo presses one nostril with his index finger and shoots snot out of the other. Ma and Bahadur’s ma talk, their heads down, cheeks damp. Another jeep arrives with even more police. Varun collapses to the ground. The policemen wake him up with kicks and spit that waterfalls out of their mouths, which he can’t wipe off because his hands are cuffed. “Don’t, don’t, forgive, forgive,” his wife shouts.
Ma gets up and wanders by the rubbish like a ghost. A fish bone is stuck to the sole of her left slipper. Pari’s ma walks with her, saying Runu will come back, I know. But she cries the entire time she speaks.
“I wish my ma would stop,” Pari says.
The air turns colder. The smog licks us with its mangy-grey tongue as we rub our red eyes. What are the police hiding behind the cordon? Have they found bodies? Is Runu-Didi in a plastic bag? I can’t think of it, I won’t think of it. The JCB growls, it beeps and pings as it goes backward and forward, it sputters and coughs.
“Getting dark, haan,” Drunkard Laloo says. This must be when he usually goes to the daru shop for his evening quota of hooch.
“Leave if you want,” Bahadur’s ma says. She sounds as disgusted as I feel.
Faiz and Wajid-Bhai arrive. They say they heard what happened from the basti-people and Bhoot Bazaar shopkeepers.
“Don’t you have work?” I ask Faiz. I know he stacks shelves at the kirana store after a day of selling roses.
“Not tonight,” he says. He sits on the very edge of our sack, most of him on the filth-strewn ground. His hands are full of thorn-cuts, and his voice is hoarse, probably from breathing fumes on the highway.
“You didn’t go to the police station?” Pari asks Wajid-Bhai. “They can’t keep Tariq-Bhai in jail when that man”—she gestures toward the cordon—“has been caught. Red-handed.”
“They say it will take time. But Tariq-Bhai will be released, I’m certain.” Wajid-Bhai sounds excited though his face is trying to look normal. A sharp stone rolls down my throat.
The pradhan returns to the rubbish ground. He speaks to the police. Then he claps his hands so that we know he is about to give a speech.