Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,44

the ending, fool.

But jaan, that’s not the ending either.

Someone told us—

—was it the rickshaw-puller or the peanut vendor?

Will you be quiet, please?

We never met Junction-ki-Rani in the places we hid when the Anti-Begging Task Force tried to catch us, or at the shelters where we queued on nights the winter-cold snapped our bones, or in the long lines for the free food rich people distributed on Ram Navami or Janmashtami. But we heard all these stories about her: she once worked as a cook in eight or ten houses; she lost her husband to alcohol; her son shipped himself as cargo to Dubai from a port in Mumbai on the day he turned eighteen and ended up in Nigeria as a corpse. They say Junction-ki-Rani safety-pinned all her hopes on her daughter who studied engineering in the day and gave tuition in the evening, but four men snatched the girl one night as she walked back home. The men returned her to the exact spot from where they grabbed her, but only after tearing her apart such that she couldn’t be mended.

Junction-ki-Rani lit her daughter’s funeral pyre because there was no one else—certainly no man—to pick up a burning log and free the daughter’s soul. Afterward she rummaged through hot embers with her bare hands to gather ashes and shards of her dead daughter’s warm bones. She carried them in a pot to Varanasi to scatter in the holy Ganga.

For a long time, she believed the police would find the men who attacked her daughter. Newspapers interviewed her, and she appeared on TV to talk about her daughter the engineer-to-be-who-would-now-never-be, but the newspapers were discarded, eaten by cows or swept away by brooms. A bomb blast that killed and maimed a hundred displaced her daughter’s face from the screen. When she spoke to them, the police wondered if her daughter had loose morals; everyone knew only a certain kind of woman was found alone in the street after a certain hour.

Junction-ki-Rani returned to her cooking job in the eight or ten houses where she had always worked, and the madams said how unfortunate such things keep happening to you in their different languages, Bengali or Punjabi or Hindi or Marathi, and then they asked her to deseed chillies because baba or nana had developed acidity in the brief while she had been absent. Acidity so bad we thought he was having a heart attack. But everything Junction-ki-Rani cooked tasted of her daughter’s ashes. No matter how much she scrubbed, her fingers smelled of smoke and fire and burnt flesh. The madams let her go.

That was when she started standing at junctions, swearing at passersby. In every man’s face she saw the face of her daughter’s killer.

We got rich because of her anger.

No one got rich. We were beggars then and we are beggars now.

Junction-ki-Rani lived for a year after her daughter’s death, or maybe it was two years. When you live like us without a house, with nothing to mark the passage of time except the weather, and the weather is mostly the same year after year, maybe a little too hot or too cold, it’s hard for us to tell. We don’t even know when we were born.

The police sent a van to collect Junction-ki-Rani’s corpse. We heard that they cut her up like her daughter at a mortuary and burnt her at a crematorium by the river. They did that much for her; watched the wood crackle and pop as flames licked that poor woman clean. We thought she had finally found peace.

We can see, this is hard for you to hear. This is not the kind of story parents tell their children as they fall asleep. But it’s good that you’re hearing it. You should know what our world is really like.

If you have finished with that lecture—

—of course, my apologies again.

For a few months after her death, we didn’t hear much about Junction-ki-Rani, and then we were always hearing about her.

By the traffic junction she frequented the most was a tomb with a dome made scaly by rain and fumes and pigeon shit; its grounds thrived with thorny shrubs whose names no one knew. People say when she was alive, Junction-ki-Rani used to go to the tomb in between cursing the men on the highway, to rest when her buckling legs couldn’t hold her up anymore.

After her death, lovers from other parts of the city who used to disappear into this tomb for whole