Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,50
my skin too tight, and there isn’t enough air in my lungs and my eyes are watering and then Samosa ducks into a narrow lane between houses and I have to slow down.
Faiz is huffing behind me. I wave at him and shout, “Keep up.” Pari must have stayed behind to comfort Barkha.
I turn to the side and inch through the lane. The walls are swirly with moss and dirt. I stumble out of the path and so does Faiz. We sit down on the ground with our mouths open so that our breaths can catch up with us.
Samosa appears in front of us. He’s panting too.
“Was Bahadur here?” I ask. He barks. I think he’s saying yes. Faiz dabs his forehead with the rag around his neck.
We are at the very edge of our basti, facing the rubbish ground that’s much bigger than our school playground. Right in front of me, a man washes his backside with water from a mug. Pigs dive into the grey-black rubbish, their pink-white bellies splotched with dirt. Cows with dried dung on their backsides chew rotting vegetables, blinking their eyes to bat away flies. Dogs nose through the filth for bones, and boys and girls collect cans and glass. Smoke rises from the smelliest piles that people have set on fire to make them stink less.
The scavenger children remind me of Mental’s boys, who also picked up plastic bottles, but from railway tracks. Pari says Mental is just a story made up by Guru. I can’t argue with her. The green card from the reading center makes her the story-expert.
I stand up to get a good look at the rubbish ground and feel sad for the kikar trees and the thorny shrubs that were living here long before people started dumping their trash around them. Some of the trees are still alive but their leaves are black with soot, and the wind has bandaged their branches with Maggi wrappers and plastic bags.
Beyond the rubbish ground is the wall, and beyond the wall, hi-fi buildings disappear into the smog. The hi-fi people are trying to get rid of the rubbish ground, Ma says. The prices of their flats are going down because of the stench. Ma says the municipality was supposed to clear the rubbish ground years and years ago when the hi-fi buildings went up, before I was even born, but they didn’t. The government ignores us always but sometimes they ignore the hi-fi types too. The world is strange.
“Boys,” a man smoking a beedi and sorting heaps of trash into glass bottles and plastic bottles calls us over. He must be a scrap-dealer. Many kabadi-wallahs live near the rubbish ground, and towers of plastic and cardboard grow tall outside their houses. A black parrot with open wings is tattooed to the man’s forearm; it looks like it will fly away into the sky any moment.
“They’ll have to stick three needles as long as palm trees into your stomach if that dog bites you,” he says, pointing the red tip of his beedi at Samosa.
Samosa will never bite me because he likes me. Also, Samosa doesn’t have rabies. He’s not a mad dog.
“Want a puff?” the man asks, holding his beedi toward us.
“Ammi will beat me if I smoke,” Faiz says.
“The missing boys, Bahadur and Omvir, ever seen them here?” I ask.
The man scratches his feathery beard. “Kids around here disappear all the time,” he says. “One day they’ll have too much glue and decide to try their luck somewhere else. Another day they’ll get hit by a rubbish truck and end up in a hospital. Some other morning, they’ll be picked up by the police and sent to a juvenile home. We don’t make a fuss about anybody vanishing.”
“We aren’t making a fuss,” I say. “We’re looking for our friends.”
Children with heavy sacks slung over their shoulders slop-slop through the rubbish toward him. On his head one boy carries a sack so huge it covers his face.
“Good catch today, haan?” the man asks him.
“Haan badshah,” the boy says.
A few stray dogs have followed the children. Samosa darts off toward his four-legged friends.
“Samosa, come back,” I call after him, but he doesn’t.
The scrap-dealer stubs out his beedi. A scavenger girl opens her sack that’s splitting at the sides and takes out a broken toy helicopter. “I got this today, Bottle-Badshah,” she tells the man.
Bottle-Badshah is an excellent name. I should have thought of a fancy name like that for Samosa.