Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line - Deepa Anappara Page 0,97

Patrol; they are ice-cold metal freezers that maybe smell of Lizol.

The grown-ups look startled as if I have said a word that no one should say aloud because it brings bad luck.

“Why don’t you help your ma look for Runu around the bazaar?” Papa tells me.

Papa and Kabir-Khadifa’s abbu hire an autorickshaw to take them to the hospitals. Ma and Kabir-Khadifa’s ammi and me, we go toward Bhoot Bazaar. Vehicles zoom past us but they don’t sound loud anymore. A glass wall has come up between me and the world.

* * *

Ma and I walk the length of every lane in Bhoot Bazaar, asking about Runu-Didi. We describe her again and again.

“She’s twelve,” Ma says.

“Thirteen in three months,” I say. My birthday is a month after Didi’s.

“Hair tied in a ponytail, with a white band,” Ma says.

“Grey and brown salwar-kameez,” I say. “The government school uniform.”

“This height,” Ma says, pointing at her shoulders.

“She was wearing black-and-white shoes,” I say.

“She was carrying a school bag, brown color.”

We have no luck, but this is better than sitting at home. Ma keeps calling Papa, and she lets out a big sigh of relief each time he tells her nothing, nothing. I pray to God, to Mental, to the ghosts who hover above Bhoot Bazaar and whose names I don’t know. I don’t want Runu-Didi to be in a morgue. Please please please.

We go into the theka lane. The anda-wallah is taking a delivery of eggs stacked in plastic trays and tied to the pillion of a bike, from a man who hasn’t removed his helmet. Quarter and his gang-members are making fun of a drunkard half-asleep on the ground. Their feet prod the drunk’s ribs. Quarter never sits for his exams, so today is the same as any other day for him.

Ma asks Quarter too about Runu-Didi. I don’t think Ma knows who he is, but Quarter knows who Ma is talking about. His mouth widens, he snaps his fingers at his lackeys, he takes out a mobile from the back pocket of his black jeans-pant and scrolls up and down. If he snatched Runu-Didi, he’s hiding it well; he looks extremely surprised.

“She’s the one who’s always running, yes?” he says, his eyes on his mobile.

Ma nods, maybe shocked that Runu-Didi is famous.

Quarter asks us to wait and walks around making calls on his mobile. He orders his gang to search for Runu, everywhere. He introduces himself to Ma as the pradhan’s son.

“My father is concerned about the goings-on in your basti,” he says. “He’s doing all he can to help.”

“Can’t your father talk to the police?” Ma asks.

“He will,” Quarter says. “You go home now. We’ll bring you news.”

* * *

I tell Ma about Samosa and how he can track scents. Ma hardly listens, just says don’t go near stray dogs, they have rabies. We pass Duttaram’s tea stall, and I explain to him that Runu-Didi is missing.

“What’s happening in this world?” he says. “Who’s doing this to our children?”

His children are at school, and safe, and not even in our basti.

He asks Ma if she would like some tea, no need to pay me, but she says no.

Samosa comes out of his home under the pushcart, shakes off the shreds of blackening coriander that the samosa vendor has chucked on his patchy fur for a laugh, and sniffs around my legs. Samosa can find Runu-Didi by smelling me; we are brother and sister.

“Where is she?” I ask Samosa, pushing him forward.

“Jai, come here,” Ma says.

Samosa runs back to his home. He can’t find Runu-Didi through me. I stink too much.

* * *

We search and search for Runu-Didi, around the bazaar and the rubbish ground where we ask scavenger children and Bottle-Badshah about Didi. I try to think of who could have taken her. It’s not the TV-repair chacha because he’s in jail, not the spotty boy, and not Quarter either because he didn’t know Didi had been snatched. That leaves djinns and criminals I don’t know.

Ma’s tears slash lines into her cheeks and around her lips that seem to be turning blue. She leans on me when we finally walk home, and her weight makes me tilt to one side. Our neighbors stare.

At home, Ma takes out Runu-Didi’s framed certificate from our precious-things bundle by the door, and unwraps the dupattas bound around it. “Remember the day Runu won this?” she asks.

I don’t remember. Ma hardly ever comes to our school, so I don’t think she has seen