Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,20
spreads out a pink bedsheet with black flowers, the colors wrung out to almost-grey by too many washings. Then she picks up the things we can’t do without and heaps them on the sheet: our best clothes, including my plastic-wrapped uniform, her roti rolling pin and board, and a small statue of Lord Ganesh that Dada gave Papa years ago. The TV stays on the shelf. It’s too heavy for us to carry around.
“When did our house become a set for a Hindi picture, haan, Jai?” Papa asks, sitting next to me with the TV remote in his hand. I straighten his crooked shirt collar. It’s tattered where Runu-Didi or Ma scrubbed it too hard to get rid of dirt and paint stains.
Didi tries to help Ma but keeps getting in her way. Ma doesn’t scold her. Instead she keeps muttering Bahadur’s ma was wrong to go to the police.
“Her brain isn’t working,” Ma says. “All this running around hospitals, I suppose it can make anyone go mad. Arrey, she even asked Baba Bengali to tell her where her boy is. Paid him a fortune too. Everyone was talking about it when Runu and I went to the tap to get water in the evening.”
Baba Bengali looks like he has just stepped out of a cave in the Himalayas, with his ropey hair and muddy feet, but he uses computers. Once I saw him outside Dev Cyber Print House in Bhoot Bazaar, holding a sheaf of posters that he then pasted around the bazaar. The posters claimed he had answers to grave problems such as cheating wives, cheating husbands, angry mothers-in-law, hungry ghosts, black magic, bad debt and bad health.
Ma walks around the room, deciding what else needs to go into her bedsheet. She picks up her alarm clock that never runs on time but puts it back on the shelf.
“What did Baba Bengali say?” I ask.
“He said Bahadur will never come back,” Runu-Didi says.
“That baba is a fraud,” Papa says. “He makes money out of people’s misery.”
“Ji, you don’t believe in him, that’s fine,” Ma says. “But don’t badmouth him like this. We don’t want him cursing us.”
Then she stands on a footstool and removes an old, blue plastic tub of Parachute 100% Pure Coconut Oil from the topmost shelf. The oil inside it is all gone. Instead, there are a few hundred-rupee notes that Ma stores in case “Something Happens,” though she has never said what the Something is that might Happen. She puts the tub on top of her mango-powder tin, from where it’s easier to grab if we have to run out of the house in the dark. The tub is like Ma’s purse except I have never seen her open it.
“Listen,” Papa tells Ma, “Madhu, meri jaan, the police won’t do anything to us. Drunkard Laloo’s wife has given them her gold chain. Nobody’s bringing JCBs to crush our basti.”
I look at Papa open-mouthed because he only just came home but has already found out about the gold chain. What if he knows Kirpal-Sir kicked me out of school too?
So far no one has asked me why I got home early, not Shanti-Chachi who gave me a plate of the kadhi pakora and rice her husband had made for her, or Runu-Didi, whose No. 1 job Papa says is to keep a sharp eye on me. Ma didn’t even notice the new dirt-stains on my uniform, probably because the basti was full of talk about Bahadur and the police, whispery-scary talk that made people forget me.
“What do we lose by being a little careful?” Ma says now. “Maybe there’ll be bulldozers, maybe not. Who knows anything for sure?” She wraps two cotton dupattas around a framed certificate that Runu-Didi’s team won for coming first in a state-level relay race, and places it gently on top of her pile. It slips down to the side and lies crooked above the rolling pin. Ma straightens the frame again, biting the inside of her cheeks and breathing heavily.
The dangly bulb above me hums with hot current, and its shadow swishes over the shelves, the cracks on the wall, and the watermarks from monsoon floods that I can see now because Ma has moved tins and plates around. Ma likes our house to be clean, and she scolds me if I don’t put my school books and clothes where she has told me to put them, and now she’s the one making a big mess.