I ask.
Naina shakes her head. “What is this world coming to that little children think they can talk to me like this,” she says.
I turn to Pari and raise my shoulders. Pari lowers hers. We have to leave now, I guess. But then Naina decides to speak: “Aanchal’s friend isn’t a Muslim. I don’t know where people get such ideas from.”
Faiz stops picking at the lotion that has clumped around the mouth of a bottle. Naina has his full attention now.
“Aanchal has known him for a while. He has a good job at a call center. And the night she disappeared too he was working. Call-center workers, they have to clock in and out with their ID cards, so that’s not something you can lie about.” Naina pats the customer on her shoulder though the customer is sitting still like a dead person with a dead-white face. “He’s worried about Aanchal. He calls me every day to check if she’s back.”
“What’s his name?” Pari asks. “Is he from our basti?”
“Aanchal doesn’t like basti-boys,” Naina says. “They trouble her all the time.”
“Do you think Quarter took Aanchal then?” Pari asks. “The pradhan’s son? He troubles her, we heard.”
“Why would he snatch her? He hasn’t tried anything like that until now.”
“Is Aanchal’s call-center friend old?” I ask. “In the basti they were saying she has an old-man-boyfriend.”
“Where do people find the time to make up so many lies?” Naina asks. “Of course her friend isn’t an old man.”
“Naina-Naina, now it’s burning,” the customer-lady says.
“We’ll wash your face, and everything will look better than before,” Naina says, helping the customer-lady up by holding her elbow. “Time for you to leave,” Naina tells us.
“See, the TV-repair chacha is just that, a chacha,” Faiz says when we are outside. “He’s nobody’s boyfriend.”
“Even if he didn’t know Aanchal, the chacha is still a suspect because of Bahadur,” Pari says.
Faiz doesn’t have the time to argue with us. He has to be at the kirana store and also the mosque. I shout “okay-tata-bye, loafer” as he leaves.
“Faiz found out about Bahadur’s elephant and money,” Pari says when Faiz is too far to hear her. “Not you.”
* * *
Ajay and his brother are hanging freshly washed shirts on a clothesline nailed to the outside wall of their house when Pari and I get there.
“Your didi used to do this before?” Pari asks. She’s barely hiding a smirk; she thinks the boys in our basti have an easy time because their parents force girls to do all the tough jobs. But her ma and papa don’t even ask her to peel an onion.
“Heard anything about your friends?” Ajay asks.
Pari says no. Then she tells Ajay about IMEI numbers.
“Papa has already asked the police to track Didi’s phone,” Ajay says. “But they haven’t done it.”
“Your sister’s mobile, you have a receipt from when she bought it?” Pari asks.
“She got it second-hand, I don’t know from where. There’s no receipt. Papa looked for its warranty papers to show the police, but he didn’t find anything.” Ajay wrings the water out of a shirt, badly, and gets his feet wet.
I wonder if Aanchal’s boyfriend gave her the mobile. This part of our detectiving has turned out to be a failure like all parts of our detectiving.
“It’s ekdum-stupid the police haven’t already tracked Aanchal’s mobile,” Pari says as we haul our feet and our heavy bags home.
“I wish we had their technology,” I say, but I don’t even know how to use a computer.
“You think Byomkesh Bakshi was hi-tech?” Pari asks. “All he had was his brain.”
Sadly, my brain isn’t intelligent enough to tell me where Aanchal is. I try to make my ears catch signals as I walk home, but I don’t pick up anything more than the usual bazaar and basti sounds of arguing mouths and hissing cats and jibber-jabbering TVs.
DAYS PASS FAST AS HOURS AND—
—Aanchal doesn’t come back and Bahadur and Omvir don’t come back either, but on the TV news I spot a headline that says: Dilli: Police Commissioner Reunited with His Cat!
Papa sees it too. His face curdles like milk left out in summer, and his fingers harass the buttons on the remote. The volume goes up and down, the newspeople are replaced by singers and dancers and then cooks in other channels.
Even if our basti goes up in flames, we won’t be on TV. Papa himself says so all the time, and he still gets mad about it.
I ask him if I can watch Police