Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,37

the bad air. The masks in the city are hi-fi, pink with black buttons, red and green with mesh strips, and white with yellow snouts and straps. They make people look like giant, two-legged insects.

“The government schools here in the city, na, they’re very good,” Pari says when we are on the overpass. “Their students score better marks than private-school students who pay thousands and thousands of rupees as fees.”

I hope we won’t see a single school. If we do, Pari will insist on going inside.

We climb down the overpass, dodging the men and women who shoulder us, their bodies twisted by heavy bags. The main railway station is to our left. It’s huge; as big as the malls I have seen from outside, and it’s crowded too. I wonder why all these people are not at work and, if they don’t work, how they have the money to take trains. Ma says the same thing about those who go to malls between Mondays and Fridays.

We walk around the station, looking for Bahadur and Omvir below boards announcing the times trains will arrive and leave. There’s a Faiz-shaped space between me and Pari. Had he been with us, he would have seen djinns in the dogs lying around the station. He says djinns often shapeshift into dogs and snakes and birds.

I spot CCTV cameras poking their noses into everyone’s business from the ceiling, but I don’t look at them for too long in case the policemen watching me on the screen at the other end think I’m a suspicious character. There are policemen here at the station too, hovering near the many entrances, checking the bags of passengers.

“We can ask the police if they have seen Bahadur or Omvir,” I say.

“They’ll want to know what you’re doing so far away from home and arrest you,” Pari says.

Her plan seems to be to keep walking, which is a stupid plan. We study the faces of the men and women at the station, sitting on their suitcases or sleeping on towels spread out on the floor, their belongings tied up in large plastic or cloth bags by their heads or feet. There are a million people here and it will take us months to ask everyone about Bahadur and Omvir. But the police can slow down or speed up the footage from the CCTV cameras that are all around us, and zoom in on Bahadur or Omvir easily.

I see a run-down, double-storeyed building that’s separate from the station, but within the same compound. A board hanging to its side says:

CHILDREN’S TRUST

Children First and Foremost

Of the Children, By the Children, For the Children

“We should go there,” I tell Pari.

“It sounds like a zoo with different kinds of children.”

“Children are children,” I say, but I’m not that sure. Faiz will be sorry he didn’t come with us if it’s an actual children’s zoo.

We head past a mock train engine, a little girl guarding a row of bags, a red-shirted porter balancing three suitcases on his head, and a man who barks into a mobile that he holds near his mouth and not his ear. Loud voices push themselves out of the speakers hidden around the railway station, warning people about bomb threats.

Then we are at the building. It has a locked door with a sign that says Reservation Counter. Next to the door is a puddle where two mynahs wash their faces like I do: in and out of the water in seconds. We climb up a mossy external staircase to a terrace that surrounds a large room with huge windows. I can hear murmurs but I can’t see anyone.

A man with hair combed over his forehead comes out of the room and asks, “Are you lost? Where are you from?”

“We’re looking for two boys from our basti,” Pari says, showing him Bahadur’s photo. “This is one of them. His brother-sister think he ran away from home to take a train to Mumbai.”

“Could even be Manali,” I say.

“The other boy must have joined him here yesterday. Or today,” Pari says.

“You ran away too?” the man asks. He doesn’t even look at the photo.

“Of course not,” Pari says.

“We want to find our friends. We think they’re at the station,” I say. It’s hard to get a word in when I have a blabbermouth for an assistant.

“Achha-achha, I thought you were runaways,” he says. “Where are your parents? Why aren’t you at school?”

“Our parents are at work. We don’t have school today. The