into a ditch, someone would have pulled him out. Look at the number of people here,” Faiz says.
I eye the people walking past us, to establish if they seem like the helpful-type. But their faces are half-hidden by handkerchiefs to keep the smog from getting inside their ears and noses and mouths. Some of the men and women bark into their mobiles through their make-do masks. There’s a chole-bhature vendor on the roadside, and though his face isn’t covered by a scarf, it’s enveloped in a cloud of smoke rising from a vat of sizzling hot oil in which he’s frying bhaturas. His customers are laborers on their way to factories and construction sites, sweepers and carpenters, mechanics and security guards at malls returning home after a night shift. The men scoop up the chole with steel spoons and munch, their kerchiefs pulled down to their chins. Their eyes are fixed on their plates of hot food. If a demon were to stomp toward them right now, they wouldn’t notice.
“Listen,” I say, “why don’t we look for Bahadur? Either he’s lying sick in a hospital—”
“His ma went to all the hospitals near our basti,” Pari says. “The women at the toilet complex were talking about it.”
“If he was snatched, we can solve a case of kidnapping also,” I say. “Police Patrol tells you exactly how to find someone missing. First you—”
“Maybe a djinn took him,” Faiz says, touching the gold-colored taweez that hangs from a frayed black string tied around his neck. The amulet keeps him safe from the evil eye and bad djinns.
“Even babies know better than to believe in djinns,” Pari says.
Faiz furrows his forehead, and the groove of the white scar that runs across his left temple, just missing his eye, deepens as if something is pulling at his skin from the inside.
“Let’s go,” I say. Watching the two of them argue is the most boring thing in the world. “We’ll be late for assembly.”
Faiz fast-walks, even when we get to the lanes of Bhoot Bazaar, which are crammed with too many people and dogs and cycle-rickshaws and autorickshaws and e-rickshaws. To keep pace with him, I can’t do the things I usually do at the bazaar, like count the bloodied goat hooves on sale at Afsal-Chacha’s shop or cadge a slice of melon off a fruit chaat vendor.
No one will believe me but I’m one hundred percent pakka that my nose grows longer when I’m in the bazaar because of its smells, of tea and raw meat and buns and kebabs and rotis. My ears get bigger too, because of the sounds, ladles scraping against pans, butchers’ knives thwacking against chopping boards, rickshaws and scooters honking, and gunfire and bad words boom-booming out of video-game parlors hidden behind grimy curtains. But today my nose and ears stay the same size because Bahadur has vanished, my friends are sulking, and the smog is making everything blurry.
In front of us, sparks fall on the ground from a bird’s nest of electric wires hanging over the bazaar.
“That’s a warning,” Faiz says. “Allah is telling us to be careful.”
Pari looks at me, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead.
I peer into ditches for the rest of our walk to school, just in case Bahadur has fallen into one of them. All I see are empty wrappers and holey plastic bags and eggshells and dead rats and dead cats and chicken and mutton bones sucked clean by hungry mouths. No sign of djinns, no sign of Bahadur.
OUR SCHOOL IS LOCKED UP—
—behind a six-foot wall with barbed wire on top, and an iron gate that has a door painted purple. From the outside, it looks like the jails I have seen in movies. We even have a watchman, though he’s never at the gate because he has to run errands for the headmaster: pick up Mrs. Headmaster’s blouse from her tailor in Bhoot Bazaar or fill a tiffin box with gulab-jamuns for her and the headmaster’s No. 1 and No. 2 sons.
Today too the watchman isn’t around. Instead there’s a queue starting at the gate-door, which is too narrow for all of us to go through at the same time. The headmaster won’t open the main gate fully because he thinks strangers will run into the school along with us. He likes to tell us that 180 children go missing across India every single day. He says Stranger is Danger, which is a line he has stolen from a Hindi film