Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,117

It’s tough to listen to such things every day. Allah knows why they still blame us.”

“They’re mad,” Pari says.

“And Tariq-Bhai, once you have been in jail, that’s a stain that doesn’t wash off. He’ll have better luck finding a job among our people.”

Pari nods.

“You’ll be leaving soon too, right?” Wajid-Bhai asks her. “You’ll be a star at your new school. I heard every student gets to use a computer there.”

Pari looks at me because she knows I don’t like hearing about it. “I won’t be going anywhere until this school year is finished,” she says. “It might not even happen.”

The cycle-rickshaw arrives. Wajid-Bhai loads the last of the bags into it. The rickshaw-wallah’s feet are lined with deep cracks and ash-colored patches of dead skin. The back of his neck glistens silver with sweat.

Faiz sprints back to our side. “I’ll come to school one of these days,” he says. “When you’re having the midday meal. That way I’ll get lunch too.”

“They’re going to cut your name from the roll,” Pari says.

“They haven’t struck off Bahadur yet, and he has been gone for three months,” Faiz says. “It will be a year or two before they get to me.”

“Let us know when Tariq-Bhai is released,” Pari tells Wajid-Bhai. “You can call my ma. Faiz has her mobile number.”

“Inshallah it will happen soon,” Wajid-Bhai says.

“Tariq-Bhai won’t touch his mobile after the police release him,” Faiz tells Pari and me. “He’ll never want anything to do with a mobile again, so his mobile will become mine, and then I’ll call your ammi and”—his eyes shift from my face to Pari’s—“your ammi.”

“Poor Tariq-Bhai,” Pari says. “If the police had tracked Aanchal’s mobile, the way Tariq-Bhai told you, that Varun-monster would have been caught before—”

She coughs, because she knows better than to complete that sentence.

“The good djinns at the djinn-palace are watching out for Tariq-Bhai,” Wajid-Bhai says. “Jai, tell your ma to pray there.”

“That place isn’t as scary as it looks from the outside,” Faiz says, clasping his amulet.

He and Wajid-Bhai get on the cycle-rickshaw. “You’ll go to the palace for sure?” Faiz asks me, leaning out of the passenger seat.

I wave goodbye.

The rickshaw-wallah presses the pedals but the rickshaw is heavy, and it takes him a while to get going. Pari and I and others in the alley watch the rickshaw barely move forward.

Someone says a Hindu family is going to buy Faiz’s house. A family with four children and a ma and a papa and a dadi too. I don’t think I’ll be friends with any of them. They probably don’t even know what Purple Lotus and Cream soap is.

* * *

I tell Pari I’m going to the rubbish ground. “Ma won’t be home for another two hours,” I say.

“I’ll go with you,” she says. Her ma isn’t home either.

We don’t stay out in the dark anymore. We don’t want our parents to worry. They have stopped following us around though. Maybe because no one else has been snatched since Varun, his wife and boss-lady were arrested.

“Do you think the boss-lady is innocent?” I ask Pari though we have talked about it many times before. “Her lawyer has applied for bail.”

“She won’t get it,” Pari says. “It’s such a big case, it’s going to come on Police Patrol.”

I’ll never watch Police Patrol again. When they act out real stories of people getting snatched or killed, it will feel as if someone is trying to strangle me, I just know it. A murder isn’t a story for me anymore; it’s not a mystery either.

“The basti-women who work in Golden Gate, they’re saying now that politicians and police commissioners went into the boss-lady’s flat at night,” I say. “Those VIPs will get her out.”

Many things about the case make no sense to me, which is why I have to keep asking Pari about it. Even the newspeople on the TV I’m not supposed to watch, but which I secretly watch before Ma gets home, are confused. The reporters say different things each day, and their guesses change like the price of the boss-lady’s flat, which was four crores one day and twelve crores the next day and costs next to nothing today after the shocking revelations that have caused property prices at Golden Gate to plummet.

According to the same reporters, the boss-lady and her manservant were part of a trafficking ring, a kidney racket, and a child pornography racket, which is a kind of racket that involves making films with children. They