Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,111
Who’s going to check if that’s true or not?”
“The watchmen are always gossiping about her. They say she takes a different man up to her flat each night. But it’s hard to know for sure. We can’t see their faces, even on CCTV. The men sit in the backseat when she drives her SUV past the boom barriers.”
A wail begins from behind me. It’s Bahadur’s ma.
“We have to find out if our children are inside,” a man says.
We run into the building. We are faster than the grown-ups, Pari, Faiz and I. We get into the lift. We have lost our mas and papas and Wajid-Bhai, but it doesn’t matter because some people from our basti have also entered the lift with us. Faiz presses the button right at the top: 41. We go up, zooming-zooming, fast like rockets. My head feels light. I lean against the glimmering steel wall. I sniff the metal smells, like Samosa. My nose tries to track Didi.
The lift opens into a square room with marble floors and a door that’s shiny and black. We ring the bell by the door, we knock and kick until our feet hurt, and the boss-lady, mobile pressed against her ear, opens it. We race past her. She can’t stop us anyway; other basti-people are behind us and they corner her, push her against the wall.
A chachi snatches the boss-lady’s phone and gives it to a chacha, who puts it in his jeans-pant pocket with a grin. Her phone keeps ringing.
The windows in the flat stretch all the way from the ceiling to the floor. Everything outside looks small from here, the malls and the roads and the white and red lights of cars and maybe even our basti, but I can’t tell where our basti is. I can’t see people. The Purple Line train dashing across a bridge is a toy train on a toy bridge.
Pari grabs my hand. “Don’t just stand there,” she says. “Focus.”
We look around. Everything is in perfect order. Cushions sit up with their spines straight on cream sofas. Lights tucked into the ceiling shine like so many little suns, too bright to stare at. Fresh and fragrant yellow roses press against each other in black vases. Metal sculptures of birds and animals and gods sit still on the wooden shelves built into the walls. The rugs on the floor are soft like clouds.
“The police will put all of you in jail,” the boss-lady threatens. Then I remember why I am here. I forgot. The strange thing is that other basti-people are behaving like me too. We are all open-mouthed. Our feet and hands move slowly in this room that’s bigger than twenty of our houses put together. The hi-fi flat is doing black magic to us, it’s stopping us from thinking; maybe this is how they trapped children.
“Runu-Didi?” I say. Then I say it louder, “Runu-Didi? Runu-Didi?”
Our handprints and fingerprints and footprints will destroy the evidence here, but what can we do? A man who says he has already inspected the whole flat shouts, “No children here.” He must know a chant that protects him from black magic.
The boss-lady screams security, security, anybody there, anybody? Then she says, “I know your pradhan. You won’t see your houses when you return tonight. I’ll have that entire stinking slum of yours demolished.”
“I’ll check the kitchen,” Pari says, which we can see from where we are standing. “Faiz, you check the bedroom, and Jai, take a look at any other room they have.” We can’t even guess how many rooms this flat has, or for what purposes.
Through a narrow corridor, I run into the other room that’s a bedroom, with a big bed on which five people can sleep, and a wooden cupboard with four doors that takes up a whole wall. I check under the bed. The white bedsheet on it is crisp. The peacock-blue pillows have a new smell to them. I open the cupboard doors. Saris, salwar-kameezes, bedsheets, men’s shirts and trousers are folded neatly on each shelf.
I go outside to the balcony that borders the bedroom. There’s nothing there except for plants in blue pots, and two chairs on either side of a low table. The wind is louder here, and it’s freezing-cold. My ears hurt. I shiver, I peer out into the smog, I shout Runu-Didi, Runu-Didi and, when there’s no answer no matter how many times I call her name, I go back inside.