Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,35
even a giant will look as small as an ant.
Our cycle-rickshaw rattles past men peeling potatoes and dicing onions and tomatoes outside roadside stalls. Cars with bumper stickers that say strange things like DON’T GET TOO CLOSE, I’M BRUCE LEE and PROUD HINDU ON BOARD honk and screech and brake at a junction where the lights flash red, orange and green at the same time. A dwarf who can travel for free on the metro because he’s not over three feet tall begs in the middle of the road, standing on his toes to knock on car windows.
The road is full of craters like the moon, and I have to clutch the sides of the rickshaw so that I won’t fall.
“How are there accidents when the traffic is so slow?” Pari says, looking at an overturned Honda City in the middle of the divider. The rickshaw’s wheels trundle over a dead crow flattened against the tar.
At the end of the ride, Pari asks me to pay because she has just enough money to buy tickets for herself. She must have guessed I have more money than I let on. Ma’s rupees look at me accusingly as I extend them toward the rickshaw-wallah. They disappear into his pocket. Forty rupees gone, just like that.
We have to climb a flight of stairs to reach the metro station. I keep my eyes and ears open so that I can catch all the sights and sounds I have never seen or heard before. At the top of the stairs, I point out hi-fi buildings to Pari.
“All this land, na,” I say, “it was once empty.” That’s something Papa told me. He said the land was at first full of boulders, which farmers pounded with tractors to grow mustard. But after working hard for years, they sold their land to suit-boot builders from the city, and now the farmers sit at home, boredom curling out of their mouths and noses in clouds of hookah smoke.
“How do we buy tickets?” Pari asks. She doesn’t care about farmers.
The counters are shut and boards pressed up against the glass say CLOSED. The ticket-vending machines, taller and wider than us, look like complex puzzles that even Pari can’t figure out. She asks a man in a striped red-and-black shirt for help and he takes our money but asks us many questions: Don’t you have school? Why are you alone? Where are you going? Do you know how dangerous the city is? What if someone snatches your money? What if someone snatches you?
It’s good that Pari is with me because she comes up with lies at the same speed with which the man asks us questions.
“We’re visiting our grandmother,” Pari says, “and she’ll send her boy to pick us up at the station.”
Only rich people hire boys to run their houses but Pari makes the grandmother sound so real that I can smell her old-woman smells, see her papery skin and the talcum powder dusted into the folds on her face and neck. The man is finally convinced. He presses a few keys. A map of stations appears on the screen and he asks us where we want to get down. Then he presses even more keys. The machine slurps our money and spits out plastic coins that the man says are like tickets. He tells us to listen to the announcements so that we will know where to get off.
“Be alert,” he says before he leaves.
I’m very alert. I look around the station, wishing I could tell which parts Papa worked on. Maybe his fingerprints are hidden under the paint, stamped in cement. The noise of the road outside streams into the station but the walls hush them. It’s like we are in a foreign country. Even the smog looks tame from here.
Pari grabs my sleeve and says, “Why do you keep staring at things like a dhakkan? That too when we have no time to waste. Focus.”
We copy what the people in front of us are doing and place our tokens against short, pillar-like machines that let us through. Our bags are X-rayed, then we pass a metal-detector gate that won’t stop beeping. A policewoman checks ladies behind a curtain and a policeman frisks gents at the gate. “What’s in there?” a cop asks a man, tapping a wallet sticking out of the pocket of his jeans-pant. But they let us go without troubling us because they know children can’t be terrorists carrying bombs.