Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,13

Their eyes are full of sadness at not being picked for a job today. All morning they must have waited at the junction near the highway for the contractors who arrive in jeeps and trucks to hire people for laying bricks or painting walls. There are too many men and too few contractors, so not everyone gets work.

Papa used to wait at the highway too until he got the good job at the Purple Line metro station and then the building site. He has told me about beastly contractors who steal money from workers and make men swing from tattered rope harnesses to clean hi-fi windows. Papa says he doesn’t want that dangerous life for me, so I should study well and get an office job and be hi-fi myself.

My eyes sting when I think of how ashamed he’ll be if I become a criminal. I decide I don’t want to be Quarter 2 after all.

* * *

I turn into the alley that leads to our basti and cough with my hand covering my mouth. This way, if a lady from Ma’s basti-ladies’ network sees me and snitches to Ma about me cutting classes, she’ll also have to say that I looked quite sick.

I realize that my cough is as loud as an airplane. Something is not right but I can’t tell what. I stop and look around. Hold my breath and listen. My heart knocks against my ribs. I open my mouth wide and blow my breath out and catch it back like Baba Devanand does on TV. Slowly the knots in my stomach loosen. Then I see what’s wrong.

The alley is quiet and empty. Everyone is missing, the grandpas reading newspapers, the jobless men playing rummy or bluff, the mothers soaking clothes in old paint tubs, and the little children waddling around with mud-caked knees. Dirty vessels, some of them half-washed, are scattered around the plastic water barrels that guard every door in the basti. Something rumbles behind the smog. Maybe it’s a djinn. A bad feeling flickers through me. I want to pee.

A door to my left creaks open. I jump. I’m going to be snatched. But it’s just a woman in a sari. She has vermillion paste in the parting of her hair, and it’s smudged all over her face.

“Boy, don’t you have a brain on you?” she bellows. “There are policemen everywhere in our basti. You want them to catch you?”

I shake my head, but I stop feeling like I have to go to the toilet. Policemen are scary but not as scary as djinns. I want to ask the woman why the cops are here and if they have brought bulldozers with them to frighten us and shouldn’t someone start a bucket collection to pay them off, but instead I say, “You have got sindoor on your cheeks.”

“What will your mother think?” the woman asks. “She’s working so hard that she doesn’t have any time to pray at the temple, and just look at you. Cutting classes and enjoying yourself, haan? Don’t do this, boy. Don’t disappoint your mother. Go back to school now. Otherwise you’ll regret it one day. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Understood,” I say. I don’t think she and Ma are friends.

“Don’t let me catch you again,” she says and shuts the door in my face.

I can’t believe Bahadur’s ma got the police to come to our basti. That’s why everyone’s hiding. I should hide too, but I also want to find out what the policemen are doing. They are supposed to Serve and Protect us, but the cops I see around Bhoot Bazaar only ever do the opposite of that. They pester shopkeepers, fill their tummies with free food from the carts of vendors, and ask anyone late with a hafta payment to choose between a baton up their backside or a visit from the bulldozer.

The smog proves useful for once because it gives me good cover. I stick to the sides of the lane, close to the water barrels, even though the ground is squishy there because of all the vessel-washing. I pass two pushcart vendors covering their vegetables and fruits with tarpaulin sheets. Three cobblers squat nearby, the black bristles of their shoeshine brushes poking out of the sacks slung over their shoulders. They are on their marks to get set, go at the first whiff of trouble.

I’m not scared like these men. I’m not spineless either, like Shanti-Chachi’s second husband. Everyone says he does