Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,26
goes inside her house to put him to sleep, drawing their curtain-door shut behind her.
The boy, who’s smaller than us, finishes peeing and zips up his jeans-pant.
“Does Omvir have a mobile?” Pari asks him. “We need to talk to him.”
“Bhaiyya is with Papa. Papa has a mobile. You want his number?”
“No,” I say. It will be tough to explain our detectiving to a grown-up.
“Omvir doesn’t come to school or what?” Pari asks.
“Bhaiyya is busy. He has to help Papa all day. He picks up clothes to be ironed from customers and, once it’s done, he drops them back. If he has any free time, he spends it dancing, not studying.”
“Dancing?” Pari asks.
“That’s all he talks about. He thinks he’s the new Hrithik.”
The boy hums the notes of a Hrithik song, swings his hands, bobs his head, jiggles his legs. It takes me a while to figure out he’s dancing.
“Why Am I Like This?” he wails, prancing around happily. “Why Am I Like This?”
Pari grins. She’s enjoying the show.
“Our work’s not over,” I remind her.
* * *
The front door to Bahadur’s house is open. When we peer inside, it’s exactly like my home except there’s more of everything: more clothes hanging from the clotheslines above us, more upturned pots and pans on a raised platform that’s the kitchen corner, more framed photos of gods on the walls, the glass turning sooty because of the joss sticks thrust into the corners of the frames, a bigger TV, and even a fridge, which we don’t have at all, so in the summer everything Ma makes we have to eat the same day. Bahadur’s ma must get paid a lot more than my ma and papa.
Drunkard Laloo is sleeping on a bed that looks like a hi-fi bed. A blanket is pulled up to his shoulders. Bahadur’s younger brother and sister are sitting on the floor, picking out stones from the grains of rice spread on a steel plate.
“Namaste,” Pari says, standing at the doorstep. She never greets anyone that way. “Can you please come outside? We want to find out about Bahadur.”
“Bhaiyya isn’t here,” Bahadur’s sister says as she gets up obediently, gaping at us though Pari and I are wearing the same school uniform that she must have seen Bahadur wearing. Her brother comes out too.
“Do you know where Bahadur is?” Pari asks, which is a bad question. They would have told their ma if they had known.
“What’s your name?” I ask the girl because good detectives become friends with everyone first so that they’ll speak the truth. The girl wiggles. She’s wearing boy’s trousers several sizes too big for her, tightened at the waist with a long, fat safety pin.
“We’re Bahadur’s classmates,” Pari says. “I’m Pari and this here is Jai. We’re trying to find your brother. Was there some place he liked to go to after school?”
“Bhoot Bazaar,” the boy says. He’s wearing a girl’s blouse with white ruffles and pink embroidery. Maybe he swapped clothes with his sister and his ma didn’t notice.
“Where in the bazaar?” Pari asks.
“Bahadur-Bhaiyya worked at Hakim-Chacha’s Electronics Shop. He fixed our TV and also our fridge and also that air cooler.”
“Bahadur fixes things?” I ask. A cobwebbed pink cooler is plonked on top of bricks so that it faces a window-like gap in the wall, from where it can blast cold air into their house.
Pari shoots me a warning glance with her eyes as round as she can make them. If we had a secret signal, she would have used that right now to shut me up.
“We think Bhaiyya has run away,” the boy says.
“To where?” I ask.
The girl presses the bridge of her nose with her hand, squashing it. “My name is Barkha,” she says. Then she puts a finger inside her nose.
“Bhaiyya used to talk about running away to Manali,” the boy says. “With the press-wallah’s son. Omvir.”
“No Manali. Mumbai yes,” the girl says.
“Is it Manali or is it Mumbai?” Pari asks.
The boy scratches his ear. The girl pulls her finger out of her nose and looks at her nails.
“Omvir wants to go to Mumbai to see Hrithik Roshan,” the boy says. “But Bhaiyya wants to see the snow in Manali. Now it’s winter, na, so there’s lots of snow.”
“Omvir is still here,” I say.
“Haan, maybe Bhaiyya went to Manali by himself,” the boy says. “He’ll come back once he has played in the snow.”
“At home everything has been okay?” Pari asks. “The last time I saw Bahadur at school