Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,82
sister flee the toilet complex, Pari holding Faiz’s hand, and Pari’s ma shouting Pari, wait, wait.
“If this is how the new year starts, imagine how it will end,” someone says.
I had even forgotten it was New Year.
* * *
Ma decides she has to go to work after her hi-fi madam’s phone call. “All that TV you watch,” she tells me, “it isn’t free.”
She’s scared of her hi-fi madam; she can’t admit it, so she’s trying to make me feel guilty instead.
After she leaves, Runu-Didi starts washing clothes. I helpfully point out the dirt-smudges she’s missing.
“That’s it, enough,” she says, splish-splashing me with soapy water.
Didi hangs the washed clothes to dry, then she ignores her other chores to gossip with her basti-friends. She doesn’t have training today because it’s New Year, when even her strict coach loosens his iron-hold on his athletes.
I calculate how many more Sundays I have to work to make up the 200 rupees I took from Ma’s Parachute tub:
I slogged at the tea shop for seven Sundays;
Duttaram paid me half of what he promised on five Sundays, and my real salary of forty rupees twice;
how long before I hit my target?
This is tough like a real Maths problem. I add and multiply and subtract and then I have the answer. Next Sunday, even if Duttaram pays me only twenty rupees, I’ll have 200 rupees altogether.
I hear angry noises and look up. In the alley, a Hindu woman with sindoor on her forehead shakes a slotted ladle at a Muslim vendor wearing a skullcap. “What does the front of my house look like to you? A garage?” she screeches. He hurries his pushcart, bright and beautiful with oranges, away from her door.
“Child-killer,” a boy shouts as the orange-seller’s cart squawks through the alley.
Runu-Didi gestures that I should go inside the house. “Something terrible is about to happen, I can feel it,” she says.
She doesn’t look scared; she never does. Even now she speaks coolly, as if she’s just warning me it might rain, and I should carry an umbrella.
I don’t feel like gathering clues about the missing Muslim children. I will learn everything about them and I still won’t find them. I just know it.
I pretend to study, I think about Pari and Faiz, I wonder if Faiz’s ammi is at the police station asking for Tariq-Bhai to be released. Then it’s time for lunch. Didi lets me watch afternoon-TV. I play cricket in our alley with a few neighbor-boys who are older than me. I doze off for a bit and soon it’s evening and Ma and Papa come back home. Papa and I watch a 20/20 game, which Papa likes much better than one-dayers and Tests because they’re short.
Today is how every day used to be before Bahadur and others disappeared, when I wasn’t a detective or a tea-shop boy. It’s a good day, the very best. Being a detective is too-tough. Maybe I don’t want to be one after all. Maybe Jasoos Jai can retire un-hurt, okay-tata-bye. I don’t know what I will be when I grow up. Sometimes when Ma sees the marks I get, she says Pari will be an IAS officer, a district collector or something, and I will be her peon.
* * *
Late that night I wake up hearing knocks on doors and wails and howls. Papa gets out of bed and fumbles in the darkness until he finds the light switch. The yellow bulb is angry we have woken it up, and it hisses and crackles.
“JCBs have come?” I ask.
“Is it an earthquake?” Runu-Didi asks.
“Outside,” Papa shouts.
Ma picks up the Parachute tub. She ties it to the pallu of her sari. She bends down and looks at our precious-things bundle by the door. It’s been waiting for this exact moment for almost two months, but Ma doesn’t cart it out.
We scuttle into the alley. Our neighbors dash out of their houses too, some carrying torches. The lights catch the startled eyes of goats and dogs.
“Wait right here,” Ma says, pushing me close to Runu-Didi.
“Maybe your djinn has snatched again,” Didi says.
I look up and down the alley, imagining a djinn swooshing through the air toward us, and I half-hope, because I’m standing next to Runu-Didi, and because Didi is bigger and taller than me, that it will take her instead of me. Please please please.
PAPA AND SHANTI-CHACHI GO TOWARD THE SCREAMS—
—to find out if we should run away from the basti or hide in our homes. Shanti-Chachi’s husband talks