Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,6

make me fizz. I try to wriggle out of his grip. Instead of saving me, Pari and Faiz scoot off.

“You know where my son is, don’t you?” Drunkard Laloo asks.

I guess I could help him find Bahadur because I know loads about detectiving, but his smelly breath is rushing into my face and all I want to do is run away.

“Leave that boy alone,” someone shouts.

I don’t think Drunkard Laloo will listen, but he ruffles my hair and mutters, “Okay, okay.” Then he lets go of me.

* * *

Papa always leaves for work early, when I’m still sleeping, but the next morning I wake up to the smell of turpentine on his shirt, and his rough hands grazing my cheeks.

“Be careful. You walk with Runu to school and back, you hear me?” he says.

I scrunch up my nose. Papa treats me like a small child though I’m nine years old.

“After class, come straight home,” he says. “No wandering around Bhoot Bazaar by yourself.” He kisses me on the forehead, and says again, “You’ll be careful?”

I wonder what he imagines has happened to Bahadur. Does he think a djinn snatched him? But Papa doesn’t believe in djinns.

I go outside to say okay-tata-bye to him, then I brush my teeth. Men who are Papa’s age soap their faces, and cough and spit as if they hope the insides of their throats will jump out of them into the ground. I want to see how far my frothy-white spit can go, so I let my mouth make boom-boom explosions.

“Stop that right now, Jai,” I hear Ma say. She and Runu-Didi are carrying the pots and jerrycans of water they have collected from the one tap in our basti that works, but only between six and eight in the morning and sometimes for an hour in the evening. Didi opens the lids of the two water barrels standing on either side of our door, and Ma empties the pots and jerrycans into them, splashing water all over herself in her hurry.

I finish tooth-brushing. “Why are you still here?” Ma snaps at me. “You want to be late for school again?”

It’s actually Ma who’s late for work, so she runs off while also fixing her hair, which has come loose from the knot at the back of her head. The hi-fi madam whose flat Ma cleans is a mean lady who has already put two strikes against Ma’s name for being late. One night when I was pretending to sleep, Ma told Papa that the madam had threatened to chop her into tiny-tiny pieces and chuck slices of her over the balcony for the kites circling the building to catch.

Runu-Didi and I go to the toilet complex near the rubbish ground, carrying buckets into which we have thrown soaps, towels and mugs. The black smog is still sulking above us. It pricks my eyes and plashes tears onto my cheeks. Didi teases me by saying that I must be missing Bahadur.

“You’re crying for your dost?” she asks, and I would tell her to shut up, but there are long queues for the toilets even though it costs two rupees to go, and I have to focus on shifting my weight from one leg to another so that my backside won’t burst.

The caretaker, who sits behind a desk at the main entrance of the toilets where it divides into Ladies and Gents, is taking ages to collect the money and let people through. He’s supposed to work from five in the morning till eleven in the night, but he locks up the complex whenever he wants and leaves. Then we have to go in the rubbish ground. It’s free, but anyone can see our backsides there, our classmates and pigs and dogs and cows as old as Nana-Nani that will eat our clothes off us if they can.

Runu-Didi stands in the ladies’ queue, I stand in the gents’. Didi says men keep trying to peep into the Ladies. Probably to see if their toilets and bathrooms are cleaner.

The people in my queue are chatting about Bahadur. “That boy must be hiding somewhere,” a chacha says, “waiting for his mother to kick his father out.” Everyone murmurs in agreement. They decide Bahadur will come home once he tires of brawling with stray dogs for an old roti in a pile of rubbish.

The men talk about how loudly Bahadur’s ma screamed last night, loud enough to scare the ghosts that live in Bhoot Bazaar, and