Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,12

the attack weren’t from our school, so Quarter wasn’t expelled. Kirpal-Sir stopped taking the roll call from that day onward, but he carries the register everywhere, tucked under his armpit. It’s not a secret. Even the headmaster knows sir will never expel anyone again for missing school.

Kirpal-Sir’s chalk is screeching again. Some of the boys in the front row crick their necks to look at me. I roll my upper lip and bare my front teeth. They snicker and turn away.

Pari scribbles on the newspaper that covers her Social Science textbook. Faiz has a sneezing fit. I shift to the side, so that his snot bullets won’t hit me.

“Silence,” Kirpal-Sir turns around and shouts. I think he says silence more often than any other word; he must yell it in his sleep. He lobs the chalk-stub in my direction. It misses me and falls between my desk and Pari’s.

“But, sir,” I say, “I didn’t do anything.”

He picks up the register with his left hand and flick-flicks the pages with his floppy right hand.

“Here you are,” he says. He raises his eyebrows at me when he says you. Then he removes the pen clipped to his shirt pocket, writes something on the page, slams the register shut and drops it on the table. “There, it’s done. Happy?”

I don’t know why I should be happy.

“What are you still doing here?” Kirpal-Sir says. “Jai, come on, pack up your things. I have marked you absent for the day, just as you wanted. Huzoor, this means you’re getting a day off”—now he sweeps both his hands toward the classroom door—“out you go.”

“If just like that you’re getting a chutti,” Faiz says, “take it, yaar.”

I don’t want a day off. I don’t want to miss the midday meal because then I’ll have to go hungry until dinner, which is more hours away than I can count on my fingers.

“Out, now,” Kirpal-Sir says. The whole class is silent. Everyone is shocked that sir is showing his anger instead of swallowing it whole like he usually does.

“Sir—”

“There are other students here who, unlike you, want to learn. They hope to become doctors and engineers and suchlike. But”—spit bubbles at the corners of his mouth—“your calling is to be a goonda. It’s best you learn about that outside the school gate.”

The anger in my stomach hops to my chest and my arms and legs. I wish Quarter’s boys had killed Kirpal-Sir. He’s a terrible teacher.

I push my things into my bag, go out into the corridor, and stand on the tips of my toes to peer outside the school wall. Maybe Quarter is there. I’ll ask him if I can become a member of his gang.

Kirpal-Sir barges into the corridor, his face dotted with strange winter-sweat, and says, “Oye, loafer, didn’t I tell you to leave? No free lunch for you today.”

I have been sent out of the class before, because I forgot to do the homework or got into a scrap, but I have never been thrown out of the school. I walk toward the gate, stopping to kick the penguins, and don’t look back even once. I’m going to leave school for good and take up a life of crime, just like Quarter. I’ll be the scariest don in all of India and everyone will be frightened of me. My face will come on TV but I’ll hide behind large, dark glasses and I’ll look a bit like me but no one will be able to tell for sure, not even Ma or Papa or Runu-Didi.

I WALK AROUND BHOOT BAZAAR, IMAGINING MY LIFE—

—as a criminal. It won’t be easy. I’ll have to grow taller and heavier because only then will people take me seriously. Right now, even shopkeepers treat me like a scruffy dog. When I squash my nose against the glass cabinets in which they display their wares—orange rows of Karachi halwa and half-moons of gujiyas decorated with powdered green cardamom—they poke me on the head with broomsticks and threaten to douse me with mugs of cold water.

My feet slip through the holes in the pavement. “Beta, watch your step,” says a chacha whose face is as wrinkled as my shirt. He’s sipping chai in a tea shop that juts out into the lane. Playing on a radio at the shop is an old Hindi film song that’s Papa’s favorite. “This Journey, So Beautiful,” the hero sings.

The men sitting next to the helpful chacha, on knee-high barrels and upturned plastic crates, don’t see me.