Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,55
parents.
“Accha, didi, you heard about Aanchal?” Pari asks. “You know her, don’t you?”
“I heard she’s missing.”
“Remember I told you about Bahadur and Omvir,” Pari says. “Our friends who have disappeared. Like Aanchal.”
“I’m sure Aanchal had nothing to do with your friends,” the didi says. “Maybe Aanchal mixed with the wrong crowd, maybe she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Like you two.” She grabs Pari by the shoulders and shakes her. “What do you think you’re doing, wandering around a place like this that your parents must have told you to avoid?”
“When did you see Aanchal last?” Pari asks as if the didi isn’t frothing at the mouth. “Did she come here the night she disappeared? She was supposed to be with a friend but she wasn’t.”
“Aanchal didn’t work in a kotha,” the didi says, and she lowers her eyes as if she wants to cry. “She visited our center—the center from where you borrow books, Pari, not this one. She asked for books she could read to improve her English. That’s the only time I met her.”
“She wasn’t a brothel-lady?” I ask and Pari pinches my arm so hard it hurts even though her nails have to get past my sweater and shirt to reach my skin.
The didi looks at me as if she wouldn’t mind pinching me either and says, “Who is this?”
“He’s an idiot,” Pari says.
“Don’t come here again, all right?” the didi says, breaking a splinter of wood sticking out of the shelf. “Go home now.”
We say okay-tata-bye and run down the stairs, not touching the sides even when our feet are about to slip. Outside, the lane is filling with men arriving in cycle-rickshaws and bikes and scooters.
“Should we find out if the TV-repair chacha came here?” I ask.
“That didi doesn’t lie,” Pari says. “If she says Aanchal didn’t work in a kotha, it means Aanchal isn’t a brothel-lady.”
“Then what is she?” I ask.
“We’ll talk to her neighbors. They’ll know.”
That’s a good idea. I wish I had thought of it.
“Chutiye, don’t even try to take my photo,” a brothel-lady shouts at a boy holding a phone in the direction of her window. A slipper lands on his head. He throws it back. Men in autos put their heads out and whistle.
Pari holds my elbow. Trying to make our way out of the crowd is like trying to swim with heavy weights tied to my legs. It’s been ages since I swam. In Nana-Nani’s village there are ponds for us to swim in, but we have to share them with buffaloes.
* * *
At home, I change out of my uniform, sit down on the floor with my Hindi textbook, and underline the words of a poem that I have to learn by heart for tomorrow’s class. The poem wants to know why the moon is sliced in half on some days and why it’s a circle on other days. The worst thing about the poem is that it doesn’t answer its own question.
Runu-Didi pushes the door wide open and steps inside. Her sweater is bundled in her hands, her hair is damp, and yellow sweat stains hoop the armpits of her shirt. She kicks me out so that she can change, then leaves to gossip with her basti-friends. Didi studies even less than I do.
“He can’t stop looking at you,” I hear one of the girls tell Didi. She must be talking about the spotty boy or Quarter whose eyes follow any girl passing by; I have seen him watch Runu-Didi too.
Ma and Papa come home, and our house starts smelling of the leftover bhindi bhaji Ma has brought with her from the hi-fi flat. I can’t wait to eat it. I sniff the plastic packet in which it came. Ma clouts me on the back of my head.
“I’ll grow up stupid if you keep hitting me there,” I say.
“Jai,” Didi calls from outside, “your friend is here.”
I run out, wondering what big lie Pari told her ma to get permission to leave her house at night. But it isn’t Pari. It’s Faiz and his elder brother Tariq-Bhai.
“You finished work early,” I tell Faiz.
“He does what he feels like,” Faiz says of the kirana shop owner. “Closes at nine one night, twelve another night.”
Now that I have a job, I know we servants have to adjust our watches according to our master’s clocks.
Tariq-Bhai grins at me. He has got dimples like Shah Rukh Khan and he’s dressed smart like a