Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,18
asked the gods to lift the curse they had put on him, and children who sneered at the way letters stayed glued to his tongue no matter how much he tried to spit them loose. To them he was always That Idiot or Duffer or Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka or He-He-He-Ro-Ro. They called him Rat-eater and asked him if his mother cleaned the shit crusting the basti’s toilets. There was none of that in the bazaar at night. He didn’t have to talk to anyone. If he wanted, he could even pretend that he was a prince patrolling his kingdom disguised as a street child.
The downed shutters of shops were crinkled like waves. The cold caught up with him, no matter how fast he walked. He stopped near a cycle-rickshaw driver sleeping under a blanket on the passenger seat of his vehicle. Hanging from the handlebar was a white plastic bag that the man had used to pack his lunch or dinner, with something dark and thick pooled at the bottom. Bahadur untied the bag as quietly as he could, then ran ahead and inspected its contents. A ladle’s worth of black dal, which he guzzled with his neck tilted toward the sky.
This was his third night wandering around the bazaar. His best chance for a proper meal would be when his mother returned home on Tuesday, but it was still Saturday and the hours stretched ahead as dark and boundless as the sky. He chucked the bag in his hand into a gutter, then kneeled down and sifted through a pile of trash heaped by the stalls where in the day vendors sold papdi chaat and aloo tikkis glazed with curd and tamarind chutney. But the animals of the bazaar had got to the food before him. He wiped his hands against the bottom of a discarded aluminum foil bowl and stood up.
A heaviness settled in his chest. The air was sharp with smoke and soon the tickle in his nostrils would turn into a cough that would leave him gasping for breath. He knew that it would pass, in a few minutes perhaps. It seemed unfair to him that he struggled with the things that came naturally to everyone else, things like talking and breathing. But he was done with cursing gods, done with trying to get them on his side with prayers.
He walked a little ahead to Hakim’s Electronics and Electrical Repair Shop, which was his favorite place in the bazaar. Hakim-Chacha never expected him to talk and instead taught him about blown capacitors and loose cables and paid him for the work he did around the store though Bahadur would have done it for nothing. Bahadur’s mother had once hired two boys to bring home a clattering refrigerator and a TV that a hi-fi madam had tossed into the rubbish ground near their basti. Bahadur had fixed them in no time, made them as good as new. Chacha said that Bahadur had a gift. That when he grew up he would be an engineer and live in a hi-fi flat.
Bahadur wished a man like chacha had been his father. The past two days, each time he visited the electronics shop, chacha had bought him newspaper cones filled with warm peanuts roasted in salt. He had done so without knowing Bahadur was hungry. Bahadur had stored a few peanuts in the pockets of his jeans for later, though they were all gone now. He checked again, without hope, pushing his hands deep into his pockets. When he brought them out, a few papery skins were stuck to the tips of his fingers. He licked them, tasting the salt, remembering too late that it would make him thirsty.
A smog was beginning to swill against the street lights. He swallowed the air in big gulps and curled up on a raised platform outside the repair shop, his hands around himself, his knees pulled up toward his chest. He was still cold. He got up and found two red crates caked with dirt stacked outside the shop next door, and balanced them on top of his legs, but they were uncomfortable and didn’t lessen the chill. He pushed them aside and lay down again.
The smog looked like the devil’s own breath. It hid the street lights and made the darkness darker. To calm himself Bahadur thought of all the things he liked to do: pulling the orange ears of a blue mother-elephant toy, an elephant baby the size of a gol-gappa