Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,45
afternoons didn’t stay half as long. Something gritty in the air, the men said. Voices called out to them. Smells brought to mind the times they had sinned, perfume bottles broken in anger, the asafoetida in overturned dishes of masoor dal, the turmeric in the warm milk their wives gave them on nights they felt the beginnings of a cold or a fever—and here they were, with women who weren’t their wives. The air had a strange energy to it as in the second before a closed-up fist makes contact with a cheek.
Their suspicions were confirmed one November evening when darkness descended quickly, as it does every winter. The sky was black that day, though still golden orange in the west where the memory of the last rays of the sun lingered. Inside homes, fathers pleated their legs in front of the television, glasses of whisky or tea raised to their lips, and mothers sliced enough okra for dinner and the next day’s lunch.
At a traffic junction, a group of young men slowed down as they drove past a girl, asked her if she wanted a lift, and didn’t leave when she said no. The girl clutched her handbag close to her chest, called a friend on her mobile and said, “Nothing, yaar, just some men, doing bak-bak, so I called.” Maybe the friend stayed on the phone. Maybe the friend said, “I’ll send the police” and she disconnected to call the toll-free Woman-in-Distress Helpline numbers the police advertises in newspapers, and no one answered.
The girl’s dupatta trailed the ground. She didn’t lift it up because what if a tiny movement of her wrist, a flash of the bare skin of her hand, made the men pounce?
Maybe she could smell the aftershave on the man closest to her, see the strands of his hair carefully arranged with thick gel so that the breeze wouldn’t dishevel his style. Maybe she thought of the exams she hadn’t yet written, the boy she hadn’t yet married, the flat that wasn’t yet in her name, and the children she would never have.
Maybe she remembered Junction-ki-Rani and wondered if her mother too would take to standing in scalding sunshine and winter rain. Who would look after her younger brother and sister, and who would remind her father to take his blood-pressure medications on time?
She heard it then, a slap that held in its five fingers the force of thunder. The man with the waxy hair screamed. His cheek reddened. The car’s wipers flailed over the windshield. A dent shaped like a giant hand appeared on the roof. The driver pressed the accelerator, but the car didn’t move ahead; its wheels spun and spun as if the vehicle was stuck in mud.
The men were repeatedly slapped and punched. Invisible fingers strangled their throats. Blood sputtered out of their mouths, and tears and snot trickled down their faces.
Sorry, they cried to the girl. Make this stop. Please, we’re sorry.
The wheels moved forward. The girl, still shuddering, watched the car’s tail lights disappear. Then she ran home.
Afterward, when she had grasped the enormity of what had happened to her, she told her friends about how Junction-ki-Rani saved her. Her friends told others and some of them talked about it in front of a shopkeeper who told a chai-wallah and he told someone we know.
Junction-ki-Rani should be worshipped like a goddess, like Durga Mata, but almost everybody is scared of her. On some nights, you can hear her cry, and on some afternoons, when the sun rinses the tomb’s walls at a certain angle, you can see the tracks left by her tears. Very few people visit the tomb or only those boys who want to take photos of themselves posing in the backyard to impress their friends.
But, once in a while, a girl somewhere in the city, maybe she lives across the river, maybe she lives in a basti near here, will feel the fear that every girl in this country knows as she walks alone on a deserted road. It may be from the full-throated roar of bike engines behind her, or the sight of a hairy hand thrusting out of a jeep window to pull her inside, or the stink of a man’s sweat. She will remember Junction-ki-Rani, and the rani’s spirit will arrive to protect her. The man will be taught a lesson.
Junction-ki-Rani is not a story. She lives—
—you mean her spirit lives.
She lives because she’s still looking for her daughter’s killers.