Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,17

says, “but you said you’ll look for him right away?”

“Everything in its own time,” the senior says. Then he tells the junior, “Those NCs aren’t going to write themselves. Chalo, bhai, hurry up.”

“You’re troublemakers, the whole lot of you,” the junior constable tells Drunkard Laloo, “stealing current from the main lines, making hooch at home, gambling away everything you own. You keep misbehaving like this, the municipality will send JCBs to raze your homes.”

Fatima comes out of her house after the policemen leave, scratches Buffalo-Baba between his horns, and feeds him a handful of spinach.

I don’t want our basti to be bulldozed. When I find Bahadur, I’ll give him a tight slap for making trouble. He won’t even stop me because in his heart he will know, that’s exactly what he deserves.

BAHADUR

From a distance the boy watched three men swathed in blankets huddle by a fire. Ash-tipped flames rose from a large metal bowl once used to carry cement at a construction site. The men let their hands hover above the fire as if performing a solemn ritual. Yellow sparks leaped higher than their faces but their hands didn’t return to the folds of their blankets.

There was a silent companionship between these men that made Bahadur wish he were older, so that he too could have sat with them. But he was only a boy hiding under a pushcart that smelled of guavas, a faint sweet note that trickled down to him through the charred winter air.

The cart’s owner was sleeping on the footpath nearby, his body turned toward a shop’s padlocked shutter, and covered like a corpse from head to toe with a sheet that wasn’t thick enough to muffle his snores. Bahadur had searched, carefully, under the folded tarpaulin sheets and sacks on the cart for guavas and found none. The owner must have walked long and far to sell the fruit.

Bahadur wasn’t sure how long he had been watching the men. It was well past midnight and he knew he should sleep, but it was cold, and he wanted to walk and warm the blood in his veins. He crawled out and turned to look at the men again. They were drinking from the same bottle, each man taking a sip, then wiping its lip against his sweater sleeve before passing it on. In another hour, they would be drowsing by the fire, with bricks for pillows, legs half-covered by blankets splayed out across the lane.

The alleys of Bhoot Bazaar stretched around Bahadur like the gaping mouths of demons. He wasn’t scared. He used to be, when he first started sleeping outside on those nights his mother stayed back at the flat where she worked, to care for madam’s feverish child, or to serve guests at a party that madam was hosting. Until then Bahadur had seen the bazaar only in the day, when it heaved with people and animals and vehicles and the gods invoked in the prayers drifting out of loudspeakers from a temple, a gurudwara, and a mosque. All these scents and sounds so thick they seeped into him as if he were made of gauze.

So, aged seven, when he first snuck away to the bazaar late at night to escape his father, its stillness spooked him. The sky roiled blackish-blue above tangled cables and dusty street lamps. The market was mostly empty but for the crumpled forms of sleeping men. Then his ears grew accustomed to the distant, steady thrum of the highway. His nose learned to catch the weakest of smells from hours before—marigold garlands, sliced papayas served with a pinch of chaat powder on top, puris fried in oil—to guide his steps to the right or left in dark corners. His eyes could tell the stray dogs in the alleys apart by the curves of their tails or the shapes of the white patches on their brown or black coats.

Now he was almost ten, old enough to be on his own though he would never say that to his mother. She didn’t know that he came here. The world had long ago receded from his father’s hooch-stained eyes such that he couldn’t tell flesh from shadow.

On the nights his mother was away, his siblings cajoled the neighborhood aunties into taking them in. They thought a friend’s family did the same for him. But Bahadur didn’t want a corner of anyone’s crowded floor. In every house—even his only friend Omvir’s—there was a chachi who clucked her tongue too often and