Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,113
vile man did. But we’re taking her in for questioning anyway.”
Papa and Wajid-Bhai shepherd us out of the crowd with their spread-wide arms. We take the lift down, walk past the entrance strewn with glass, out of the gate and the broken boom barriers. TV vans are parked on one side of the road, behind police vehicles. A reporter stands with a mike under a street lamp that has come on. The cameraman tells her to move a little to the left.
“This is going to be on TV,” Pari’s ma says, sounding surprised. “Now the police will have to do something.”
“It’s too late,” I say without meaning to, but after I say it, I know it’s true.
ALL WINTER THE SMOG HAS BEEN STEALING—
—the colors of our basti and now everything has turned grey-white, even the faces of Ma and Papa as a newswoman pushes a mike into their faces. I stand outside Shanti-Chachi’s door, half-hiding behind chachi.
It’s been three days since we found the sleep-making bottles in the boss-lady’s Golden Gate flat. Our basti has become famous and also the opposite of famous. Every hour a new TV van pulls up at Bhoot Bazaar. Reporters who look only slightly older than Runu-Didi dash around with their camerapersons, talking to anyone who’ll talk to them.
The journalist who is interviewing Ma and Papa now is doing a story about the parents of missing children. She told us so. Papa holds in his hands the photo of Runu-Didi we showed the police. Ma presses the pallu of her sari against her mouth.
“We would like our daughter back please,” Papa says, extending Didi’s photo closer to the camera. His usually too-loud voice is so soft now, the microphone can barely catch it.
The reporter swishes her hair back. “Speak up,” she mouths.
“Our daughter, please, give her back,” Papa says. Then he and Ma stare into the camera in silence. The reporter makes a cut-throat hand gesture to the camerawoman.
Shanti-Chachi calls the reporter over. “Did the police tell you why they ignored our complaints for so long?” chachi asks. “Did they say why they didn’t look for a single missing child for over two months?”
The cameraperson zooms in on Shanti-Chachi.
“Will the police let the owner of the flat go because she’s rich?” chachi wants to know. “Where has she hidden our children?”
“Did you get that?” the reporter asks the camerawoman, who nods. She turns her back to chachi and says to the camera, “The residents of this blighted slum are accusing the police of negligence. Questions are being raised about the role of Ms. Yamini Mehra, the owner of the penthouse flat worth seven crores at Golden Gate. Ms. Mehra has asserted that she was unaware of her servant Varun Kumar’s nefarious activities in the flat. Meanwhile rumors are spreading like wildfire about Varun Kumar’s motives. Was he part of a child-trafficking ring or a kidney racket? What has he done with the children he snatched? Why did he collect souvenirs from his victims, which the police have pointed out, is the behavior of a serial killer?”
Ma crumples to the ground. The camerawoman bends down so that she can catch Ma’s sadness for the news at nine. Shanti-Chachi runs to Ma’s side and puts her hand on Ma’s back before Papa can.
“How can you live with yourself?” Shanti-Chachi shouts at the camerawoman. “You want us to cry, pull our hair out, beat our chests. What will you get from it, a promotion, a big bonus next Diwali?”
The camerawoman stands up.
“Let’s go to another house,” the reporter tells her.
“Yes, leave, that will be very easy for you to do,” chachi says. “We’re the ones who have to be here, today and tomorrow and the day after that. This is our life you’re talking about as if it’s just some story. Do you even understand that?”
* * *
Runu-Didi’s friends come to see us. They are here and Didi isn’t and it seems wrong. Ma asks them to sit on the bed, then we fold ourselves into the corners of our house. The girls don’t know what to say; we don’t know what to tell them. Ma’s alarm clock tick-tocks awkwardly, misshaping time between its slow hands. It feels like morning and night and yesterday and tomorrow and last week and next week all at once.
Papa asks Didi’s friends if they had seen Varun Kumar hanging around the school. They say no. I saw him so many times and I talked to him too and I