know I haven’t been quick enough. He’ll shove your shit up your mouth, I think. It’s something I once heard my Muslim-hater classmate Gaurav say; he was talking about what Quarter would do to anyone who crossed him.
“Where’s he gone? Where’s the boy?”
My eyes lock on the white plate of a dish antenna angled toward the sky, attached to the edge of a tin roof across the lane. If I look at it with both my eyes, really look at it, I won’t be able to see anything else. Everyone will disappear, even the policeman.
But he’s standing at my side with his fingers drumming the lid of the water barrel. He takes off his khaki cap. Its tight elastic band has left a blotchy red line in the middle of his forehead.
“Let’s see if this fits you better,” he says, smiling and waving the cap in my face.
I shrink back from the cap that smells like armpits, and jails maybe.
“Don’t want?” he asks.
“No,” I say, and my voice is so weak even I can’t hear it.
The policeman places the cap back on his head but doesn’t pull it down. Then he scrapes the mud off his black leather shoes against a brick. The sole of his left shoe falls slack-mouth open, and loose stitches tremble like threads of spit. His shoes are torn exactly like my old ones.
“No school today?” he asks.
I haven’t been coughing, so I say, “Dysentery. The teacher sent me home.”
“O-ho,” the policeman says. “You ate something you shouldn’t have, didn’t you? Mummy’s cooking not to your liking?”
“No, good, it’s very good.”
Everything is going wrong today and it’s all because of Bahadur.
“This boy we’re looking for,” he says, “you know him? He’s in your school?”
“Same class only.”
“Did he say anything about running off?”
“Bahadur can’t speak. Stutter he has, right? He can’t make words like proper children.”
“What about his father?” The senior constable lowers his voice. “The boy said anything about his father beating him up?”
“Could be, that’s why Bahadur ran away. But Faiz thinks djinns took him.”
“Djinns?”
“Faiz says Allah made djinns. There are good and bad djinns same as there are good and bad people. A bad djinn might have snatched Bahadur.”
“Faiz is your friend?”
“Yes.”
I feel a bit guilty about snitching to the senior constable but I’m helping him in his investigation. Something I say will turn out to be a big clue that will help him crack the case. Then a child actor will play me on a Police Patrol show. It will be called The Mysterious Disappearance of an Innocent Slum Boy—Part 1 or In Search of a Missing Stutterer: A Heartbreaking Saga of Life in a Slum. Police Patrol episodes have brilliant names.
“We don’t have enough space to hold people in our jails. Now if we start arresting djinns too, where will we put them?” the policeman asks.
He is making fun of me, but I don’t mind. I just wish I knew what he’s waiting for me to say so that I can say it and he can find Bahadur. Also, my neck is hurting from looking up at him.
The policeman scratches his cheeks. My stomach growls. Faiz usually helps me shush it by giving me the sugar-coated saunf he carries in his pockets, stolen from the dhaba where he works on some Sundays as a waiter.
“Maybe Bahadur was bored here, you think?” the policeman asks.
My stomach rumbles again and I push it down with my hands so that it will stay quiet. “Did his ma say that?” I ask. “She called you, didn’t she? We never go to the police.”
I have said too much but the policeman’s face is empty. He hitches his khaki trousers up, straightens his cap, and turns to leave.
“There’s a cobbler two lanes away,” I say after him.
He stops and looks at me as if he’s only seeing me for the first time now.
“For your shoes,” I say. “He’s very good. His name is Sulaiman and after he stitches the shoes, they’ll look like there are no stitches only and he—”
“Has the president awarded him a Padma Shri too for his service?” the policeman asks. I don’t answer because it’s a joke but not a funny one.
He struts back to where everyone is standing. He nods his head at the junior constable, three sharp nods that are part of a secret signal like the ones between bowlers and fielders on a cricket field. Pari, Faiz, and I should make up a secret signal too.
“Nothing to see