Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,40

wrapped around his neck. Tied around his wrist is a gauze strip brown with dirt and dried blood.

“Are you Guru?” I ask. “A girl at the Children’s Trust told us to speak to you.”

“You have run away from home, haven’t you?” he asks us like everyone else. I’m getting tired of these questions.

“No, we haven’t,” Pari says.

“That woman you were talking to, she works for a trafficker. You know what a trafficker is?” Cat-Eyes asks.

“They turn children into bricks,” I say, which isn’t what I meant to say at all.

Cat-Eyes laughs but it’s a quiet, short laugh. “Her sweets put you to sleep and then her boss carries you away and sells you as a slave. You were lucky we came here when we did.”

“If you know that woman is bad, why haven’t you told the police about her?” Pari asks. “Why isn’t she in jail? She must be giving the sweets to someone else right now.”

“The police can only arrest her if they catch her doing something wrong,” Cat-Eyes explains to Pari patiently, the same way Pari explains things to me. Even his tone is the same as hers; tinged black with irritation but also smooth and vain. “They can’t put her in jail just because she has orange sweets in her bag. She’s clever, that woman. Sly also. She’ll never get arrested because she knows how to disappear before anyone realizes she has snatched a child.”

“How do we know you aren’t working for her?” I ask.

“You’re smart kids,” Cat-Eyes says. “What are you doing in a big railway station like this without your parents?”

“We came here to take our friends back to our basti,” Pari says. “They might be here.”

“Guru is the right person to ask,” one of the bodyguard-boys says. “This is his area.”

“You’re Guru?” Pari asks Cat-Eyes. He nods. She gives him Bahadur’s photo. “Seen this boy before? He would have been wearing the same uniform we’re wearing.”

Guru stares at Bahadur’s photo for a long time, biting the white skin flaking from his dry lips.

He and his sidekicks look much older than us, fourteen or sixteen or maybe even seventeen, it’s impossible to guess. Their faces are burnt crisp by years of outside, their chins are bristly, and mustaches sprout above the corners of their lips like patchy thickets.

“Is this your brother?” Guru asks.

“Bahadur is our classmate,” Pari says. “CLASSMATE.” She has to make her mouth a loudspeaker because the queues at the ticket counters are long and noisy, and people are fumbling and swearing at each other to get to the front. The air smells of sweaty feet and smoke. Our school queues are less rowdy and we behave much better and we aren’t even half as old as these people.

Guru makes us move away from the counters and asks, “When did your classmate disappear?”

“Last week,” Pari says.

“From where did he disappear?”

“The school,” I say. “No, Bhoot Bazaar.”

“It’s a market near our basti,” Pari says. “Bahadur disappeared and then a friend of his disappeared too. Omvir. Just yesterday. The two of them might have been planning to run off to Mumbai or Manali.”

Guru looks at the photo again and returns it to Pari. “We haven’t seen him,” he says. “Or any other children in your uniform. We’re certain. But we can ask the railway police to take a look at the CCTV footage. They might catch something we missed. Have you talked to them?”

“Pari didn’t want to,” I say.

“That’s smart,” Guru says. “They can be mean to strangers. But we know one of them well. He was like us, then the Children’s Trust took him in. He lived in one of their shelters for years before he became a cop.”

We walk with Guru to the station entrance where we saw the policemen before. On the way, he tells Pari that she must be a good person; no one else would travel this far to look for missing friends. He even carries her backpack for her. My bag is growing heavier and heavier as if the air is stuffing books inside it.

Guru asks us to wait and talks to one of the constables who is inspecting a bundle carried by a woman dressed in a burqa.

“Why does this Guru refer to himself as we?” I ask Pari. “Does he think he’s a king?”

“You’re just angry he didn’t offer to carry your school bag,” Pari says.

The constable Guru is speaking to twists around to look at us. He’s young, maybe only a year or