Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,47

sooty fingerprint on the side of a glass the way Ma would.

After I finish washing, I serve tea and nankhatais. I’m cold, so I could do with a glass of chai too, but Duttaram offers me nothing. Hot tea splashes on my wrists as I run around. A brown dog with a black nose tries to trip me and grins like he has done something funny. Then he hides under a samosa cart nearby.

Someone asks me if I’m Runu-Didi’s brother. I don’t see faces anymore, just dust-coated, paint-coated, cement-coated hands into which I press chai glasses. I have to look up to see who’s talking. It’s the spotty boy who follows Runu-Didi everywhere.

“Your sister, the star athlete,” he says. He isn’t making fun of her; his tone is awestruck, like Ma’s when she talks to gods.

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” I say firmly. Even if Ma were to see me, I’ll pretend I’m someone else.

The afternoon rush starts. It’s mostly beggars who find Duttaram’s tea to be loads cheaper than the roti-subzi that people with money buy for lunch. I ask them about gangs that kidnap children and train them to steal mobiles and wallets.

“Boys your age watch too many Hindi films,” says a beggar with hair standing up like the points of a star, and brown teeth that curve sideways and backward like Buffalo-Baba’s horns. “Go, get me some more chai instead of wasting my time.”

* * *

I work and work. I grow tired, I sulk, but no one notices my sulking. I should be playing chor-police or cricket or hopscotch right now. I wish I had never stolen Ma’s money. I want to pretend I didn’t, but each time I remember the Parachute tub, sweat dampens my armpits and muddles my eyes.

Faiz turns up at the tea shop in the evening with a bandaged thumb and a mask around his face made of a rag. “I was chopping ginger, but the knife was too sharp,” he explains like he doesn’t want to explain at all, and sits down next to me as I wash glasses.

“Waiters have to chop things too?” I ask.

“The cook fell ill. All of us had to help in the kitchen.”

Today Faiz worked at the dhaba by the highway, where truck drivers stop for lunch and dinner. He’s always collecting wounds and scars like tips at the places he works. No one tipped me today. You don’t get tips at a tea shop.

“I’m thinking of recruiting that dog for our detective mission,” I tell Faiz, pointing at the dog under the samosa cart. “A dog can help us find Bahadur and Omvir’s gone-cold trails.”

Faiz pulls his mask down so that it hangs around his neck like a scarf.

“Dogs are stupid,” he says. “They run toward dog-catchers as if the men are carrying shammi kebabs for them.”

“Dogs can flare their nostrils and pick up the stink of a bad man’s feet or the coconut oil in his hair from all the other thousand-million smells in the world,” I say. “Your nose can’t do that.”

“Is this a playground or your place of work?” Duttaram asks me, which isn’t fair. My hands are washing the glasses even as I’m talking. “Take this to those people over there,” he says, gesturing first at a wire rack full of chai glasses and then a group of men standing around an empty pushcart.

“I’ll do that,” Faiz says.

“Fine,” Duttaram says.

Faiz hands the glasses to the men prattling on about a beautiful woman who arrives in a fragrant cloud of ittar at the tea shop every morning as soon as it opens. They use words that Ma would say aren’t fit for child-ears.

“Duttaram, you have started hiring children to cut costs?” asks a tall, hatta-katta man with a chest that looks wider than the door of our house. He’s probably an egg-and-ghee-eating wrestler who goes to an akhara every morning, and he may also be the kind of man who calls the police about child labor.

The wrestler-type fellow eyes me as he accepts the glass of chai Duttaram reluctantly thrusts in his direction. His sweater sleeve rides up. A gold watch circles his hairy wrist. I can’t tell if it’s real gold or fake. On the inner side of his wrist where the hair is less and the skin is so fair it’s almost white are red lines tinted pus-yellow at the edges, probably made when a mosquito bit him in his sleep and he tried to scratch the