Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,29

to come over, and he buys them tea as well.

“It must be getting late,” Pari says when street lights turn patches of the black smog yellow.

We say goodbye to the chacha and walk home.

“My instinct tells me Bahadur ran away.” Pari speaks like a detective. “No one in our basti has any reason to snatch him. He must have made a lot of money working for the chacha, and now, he has gone off to join another TV-repair shop. One far away from here, and Drunkard Laloo.”

“In Manali?”

“Why not? People in Manali watch TV too.”

Boys and girls from our school, playing in the alley, wave at us. I don’t wave back. I don’t want to encourage them to join our detectiving team.

“Either we tell Bahadur’s ma about his Manali plans,” Pari says, “or we go to the main railway station, show his photo to people, and ask them if they have seen him.”

“We can’t tell Bahadur’s ma and Drunkard Laloo. They will get angry with Bahadur’s sister and brother, beat them up even.”

“Then we have to go to the city station,” Pari says. “Stop Bahadur before he gets on a train.”

“Arrey, but what if he’s already in Manali?”

“If we can find out for sure that he took a train to Manali, the police there will look for him. They can’t be as bad as our basti-police, can they? Right now we don’t know if Bahadur is here or where. What we need is one good clue, that’s it.”

I remember that the railway station will have CCTV cameras; Police Patrol cops often scour CCTV footage to catch criminals and runaway children. I don’t tell Pari that. Instead I say, “You have forgotten or what, first of all, you have to get to the station, which is so far away in the city. Second of all, you have to take the Purple Line till there and you can’t even get on a metro platform without a ticket. The metro is not like the Indian Railways.”

“I know that.”

“Is your father a crorepati that he can spare money for our tickets?”

“We can ask Faiz for money.”

“Never.”

“Didn’t you say, after the first forty-eight hours, it becomes more and more difficult to find a missing child?”

I don’t remember saying that, but it also sounds like the kind of thing I would say.

* * *

It’s dark when I reach my house, but I’m lucky, Ma and Papa aren’t home yet. Runu-Didi is talking to Shanti-Chachi, and stretching by standing crane-like on her right leg. Her left leg is folded at the knee.

“Shouldn’t you be making dinner?” I ask Didi.

“Listen to how he speaks to me,” she tells Shanti-Chachi. “He thinks he’s a prince and I should wait on him hand and foot.”

“When he grows up,” chachi says, “with some luck, he’ll get a wife like me who’ll teach him that he can either cook himself or starve, it’s his choice.”

Maybe that’s why Shanti-Chachi’s first husband said okay-tata-bye to her, and why her three grown-up children never visit her. But I know better than to point that out.

“I’m never getting married,” I tell Runu-Didi when we are in our house.

“Don’t worry, any girl will smell you from a mile away and run off.”

I sniff my armpits. I don’t smell that bad.

Ma and Papa get back late, but together. They stand in the alley, talking to our neighbors. Their faces are too full of worry and crossness for me to ask them where they bumped into each other. Runu-Didi finishes making rice and dal, and calls Ma and Papa, but they tell her not now, Runu.

“Arrey, a man is dying of hunger here,” I say, pressing my belly.

Runu-Didi troops outside. I march behind her, singing “Why Am I Like This?” Smoke crawls out of houses, heavy with the smell of dal and baingan-bharta.

Papa points at me and says, “If we don’t watch this little shaitan, he’ll be the next one to vanish.”

“What?” I ask.

“The press-wallah’s son has disappeared,” Ma says. “We saw him just two days back, haan, Jai, you remember?” Then Ma turns to the others and says: “We asked that boy, do you know where Bahadur is? He said he didn’t. How he could lie with a straight face, I’ll never understand.”

“Omvir is missing?” I ask.

“He and Bahadur must have planned it all along,” Ma says.

“Such selfish children,” a chachi says. “Didn’t even stop to think how worried their parents would be. Now the police will get involved. They’ll come here with their machines. All