Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,88
her brother out, but her sense of propriety stopped her. Basti-girls didn’t go inside such places, not even those girls brave enough to wear short skirts and talk back to their parents. She was doing the responsible thing by trying to stop the boys staggering into the parlor, but they were too distracted to listen to her.
“Please, my brother is there, inside,” she said to yet another boy whose bristly mustache and grown-up smell of cigarette smoke she registered now, in alarm. “His name is Kabir, he’s small, just nine. Ask him to come out, please. Tell him his sister is waiting.”
The boy’s expression didn’t change. She moved to the side to let him pass, and touched her hijab, feeling self-conscious. Shame burnt her cheeks even in this chill.
She jammed her knuckles into the crooks of her elbows, a familiar anger surging through her. Ammi had sent Kabir out to buy a packet of milk in the evening, and then Khadifa to bring him back when he didn’t return a couple of hours later. No matter that Khadifa had friends to talk to, and sewing work to complete. Each time Kabir misbehaved, it fell on Khadifa to set things right. How was that fair?
Ammi didn’t care about fairness. All she seemed to think about these days was the new baby growing in her belly. The sweetness with which Ammi spoke to it late at night and early in the morning, cooing in a voice heavy with sleep that she couldn’t wait to meet him—and why wouldn’t this baby too be another boy like her parents wanted?—set Khadifa’s teeth on edge. The new baby brother would probably be a rogue too, just like Kabir. All of Khadifa’s time would go in chasing after these brats; she wouldn’t have a minute to try on a new nail polish or a hairband at a friend’s house.
Ammi and Abbu didn’t know it yet, but Kabir had been missing classes at their school that wasn’t really a school but a center run by an NGO where students aged two and sixteen were packed into the same classroom. He skipped the Friday afternoon sermons and prayers at the mosque, and nicked rupees from Abbu’s wallet, careful to steal only a note or two each time so as not to attract Abbu’s attention. The money Kabir made by running errands for the shopkeepers of Bhoot Bazaar wasn’t enough to buy him the number of hours he needed at the gaming parlor. He would have pinched coins from Khadifa too—she saved more than half of the money she earned by sewing—but she knew to watch out for him; tripped him before he got anywhere near her savings.
Their parents were lenient with Kabir, maybe because he was a boy, but once they found out about his stealing, and his absences at the mosque and the school, they would pack him off to the village where their grandparents lived, and no doubt assign Khadifa the position of his minder. They thought her reliable enough to care for him on her own. Khadifa supposed she could view that as a compliment, but Ya Allah, this wasn’t the kind of praise she needed to hear.
Ammi missed her childhood home, three hours away from the basti by bus. She spoke often of the sweetness of the fruit and the freshness of the air she had given up for this city where she couldn’t even breathe. But for Khadifa, that village was a different world, another country altogether. Evenings there were spent in the quiet-black punctuated only by the sound of buffaloes flicking their tails and mosquitoes humming, because the mullah had banned TV and radio and perhaps even talking. Her grandparents nodded their heads when the mullah said girls should be married off before they turned too old, and his too-old was thirteen or fourteen.
Kabir would lose nothing if they moved to the village, and Khadifa would lose everything.
It made her mad, how he took things for granted. She had friends whose older brothers played in these parlors, and from whom she had first learned about Kabir’s secret thrills; she could plead with these boys, through her friends, to give Kabir a fright. Rough him up even. He deserved it, Allah was her witness.
She kicked up some dust, drawing the wrathful eyes of passersby, then pressed herself against the parlor wall, hoping the smog swirling around her would hide her. The curtain that covered the entrance to the parlor lifted. Kabir