says.
Someone pinches my cheeks. It’s a woman carrying a cloth bag stuffed with vegetables. Her hands are goose-bumped because she’s wearing a sleeveless shirt.
“You’re too young to be here,” she says. “Does your mother work in a kotha?”
“Basanti, don’t use up your charms this early in the day,” the man tells her. “I promise I’ll send you someone special.”
The woman smiles at us and waves goodbye. Her gold-colored chappals slap-slap against the pavement.
“You were asking about the girl who’s missing,” the man says to Pari. “I heard you. How do you know Aanchal?”
“She gave us tuitions,” Pari says.
That’s a bad lie. Why would a brothel-lady teach us Maths or EVS or Social Science?
“The Aanchal I have heard about doesn’t teach children,” the man says. He sips from his cup and gargles, but swallows the water instead of spitting it out.
“Where’s the reading center?” Pari asks him.
“You know where it is,” I say.
“There’s a reading center in a kotha here, isn’t there?” Pari says, shoving me aside.
The man extends his neck, splashes water on his closed eyes from the clay cup, then wipes the water with his knuckles.
“Two shops to the left,” he says. “Take the stairs to the first floor. I don’t know if anyone will be there now. They usually shut by late afternoon.”
“We’ll check,” Pari says. “Do you know a boy named Quarter? He’s the pradhan’s son.”
“You ask a lot of questions,” the man says.
“Have you seen him?”
“Which kotha does he work at? What number?”
“He doesn’t work in a kotha.”
“I don’t ask the men who come here for their names. I help them, and they give me money. That’s all.”
I hurry away from the man, who is thickening the air around him with his sliminess. Luckily, this time, Pari comes with me.
“Isn’t your reading center near Faiz’s mosque?” I ask. “How did it get here?”
“Must have walked,” Pari says. “Or did it take an e-rick?”
Her face is full of knowing. She looks exactly like this when she writes her answers noisily during an exam. If I as much as glance at her, she hides her answer-paper with her hands because she’s afraid I’ll copy her brilliant words.
We stop at the building where the shiny-slimy man said the reading center is. A staircase with cracked steps twists up into the musty-dark.
“The center here is for the children of brothel-ladies. The didis at my center work here on some days,” Pari says. “I have heard them talk about it.”
“This is the kind of thing an assistant should know,” I say. “Good job.”
Pari swats my arm.
We go up the stairs. The green walls on either side are crusted and brown in parts from old paan stains. Out of the corner of my left eye, I see a drawing of a boy-part that’s pointed like a gun at a woman’s mouth. Someone has tried to scribble over the boy-part to hide it, but they haven’t done a good job. I don’t laugh. Pari won’t like it.
We enter a room where the walls have wonky paintings of orange lions and green camels and blue coconut trees that look like they were made by small children, maybe the ones who are sitting on the floor right now, drawing and reading.
“Pari, what are you doing here?” a woman screeches.
“Didi, why, I came to see you,” Pari says. “They said you would be here.”
“Asha told you to come here?”
“No, I asked around and someone said you were at this center today. This place is nice, didi. Better than what we have.”
I lean against a fluffy lion-tail. Pari hasn’t pinned up the front of her hair, so it’s falling over her forehead. I can’t tell if her eyes are full of shame from lying so much and so fast.
“This,” says the didi, who wears a blue jeans-pant and a red sweater, “is no place for children.” But right away she knows she has said a silly thing because two of the little girls sitting on the floor look up at her. Their faces say: why are we here then?
“Outside,” the didi tells Pari with a sharp nod of the head. That includes me too. We obediently follow her to the landing, which is already narrow but made narrower by a shelf lined with empty plastic bottles, rope, and paint buckets with lids. Cobwebs drape the ceiling.
“Do your parents know you’re here?” the didi asks.
This is the biggest problem with being a child detective. I bet no one ever asks Byomkesh Bakshi or Sherlock-Watson about their